Cahiers de Corey: Information

Thursday, December 22, 2005

Information

Fallen into holiday silence. But a few things worth noting:

- Cathy Park Hong, author of Translating Mo'um, a strange, sly book of poems, some of which I got to hear at the PSA reading last spring (check out this terribly sad fable of otherness, Ontology of Chang and Eng, the Original Siamese Twins), has written a manifesto announcing, "I think poetry could be a bit more fabulous" and urging poets to return to the ear in the new American Letters & Commentary (I'm providing a link but it's the old issue), "Fabula Poetics." Finding Language poetry and the MFA-version of it that's becoming more prevalent to be exhausted, Hong holds up Christian Bok, Harryette Mullen, and Eugene Ostashevsky (aka MC Squared, aka DJ Spinoza) as models for poets who "are more aligned with the world." It's an invigorating essay and I'm frustrated it's not available on the Web; when it comes to manifestoes, I no longer believe print is where it's at. But the issue is well worth reading (Hong's piece is part of a feature called "Wedding the World & the Word" that includes work and thinking-out-loud by Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff (finally coming clean about politics in poetry! and in a word, she too dislikes it), Mary Jo Bang, Linh Dinh, Kamau Brathwaite's desperate Cowpastor letter, plus there's plenty of terrific poetry), so go ahead and subscribe already.

- Avid poetry reader and writer/teacher of creative nonfiction Catherine Taylor stopped by, bought some excellent books, and chatted. If she reads this... hi, Catherine!

- It looks like the post-avants have almost completely assimilated Poets & Writers. Not only has Daniel Nester established a firm beachhead there, but this issue includes an article on poets' theater that mentions the names of Kevin Killian, Camille Roy, Leslie Scalpino, Gary Sullivan, and K. Silem Mohammed; a small press feature on Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Goransson's new press, Action Books; a piece by David Hollander with the mild-mannered title "Imperative: Finding Community Outside of Academia" that is actually both a savage attack on conformism and consensus-thinking in MFA programs and a litany of praise for postmodernist prose (I like this indie band-style note he imagines: "Fiction writer seeks to form small workshop with like-minded individuals. Influences include Italo Calvino, Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus..."); a piece by Arnold Weinstein called "A Novel Lesson: The Value of the Modernist Gambit" that's considerably more turgid than Hollander's but ends up, after what seems to be a more genteel Dale Peck/Jonathan Franzen style lament for the breach of faith between fiction writer and audience, praising modernism as fervently as Hollander praises postmodernism; a medium-clever non-interview with David Foster Wallace; and a profile of a Scottish fiction writer named Ali Smith who looks more than a little like the actress Cherry Jones whose prose appears to be more than a little influenced by Gertrude Stein. Okay, there's a fair amount of the usual boring stuff too, but it looks like Hong is basically correct to see that the most popular veins of experimental writing have become perfectly mainstream. Not necessarily a cause for lamentation, but not something to ignore, either.

- Check out the new issue of Tarpaulin Sky. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered.

Okay, back to bed.

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“Joshua Corey has reinvented the good old-fashioned American avant-garde epic poem (Whitman, Stein, Crane, O’Hara) and thrust it, kicking if not screaming, into the early 21st century, ‘rescued / by what survives the will to survive.’ The result is thrilling, and unlike any poetry I know.”

—John Ashbery

"Joshua Corey’s The Barons is a sprawling collection of poems intent on toeing the line between the profound and the glib, brainy deconstruction and guttural implosion. These poems are like toys cranked up to the point of breaking or like hurricanes whipped into speed and spinning furiously in place."

—Joe Hall, Colorado Review

Available from Omnidawn Publishing and wherever books are sold.

Beautiful Soul: An American Elegy is a darkly glamorous existential noir in the late modernist tradition of José Saramago, W.G. Sebald, Italo Calvino, and Roberto Bolaño. Written in gorgeous and elliptical prose, this electric first novel is a love story, a ghost story, and a psychological thriller about the enigma of American innocence, the fatality of storytelling, and the precarious destiny of reading itself.

"Corey’s prose registers the sensations, perceptions, and experiences of the novel’s characters — primarily the protagonist — in truly the only way such characters actually come to life: they live in language, and to that end the writing in Beautiful Soul, in its scrupulous attention to phrase and image in almost every sentence, could be called an attempt to bring the characters and their milieu to life through the vigor of the words on the page."

--Daniel Green, Full Stop

"We hold a letter, its creases worn nearly through from years of opening and folding shut again. Yet each reading is a revelation, a shock, a mystery, a challenge. Corey gives this a new jolt, a new charge, in this rich and intensely self-reflective novel."

--Spencer Dew, decomP

Available from Amazon in print or Kindle editions, from Small Press Distribution, and from the publisher, Spuyten Duyvil Press.

One of the Academy of American Poets' Notable Books for 2011.

"Joshua Corey's book of sonnets is formally playful and emotionally raw, with an intensity of expression that is at times harrowing. . . . [A]n extraordinary volume." —Paul Hoover

"These songs shuttle between a past and a future, cast adrift or severed from a violent, ashen present into a necessary untimeliness. . . . What then of the sonnet, repository of desire and enemy of time? It is, as ever, that form by which we re-imagine subjectivity to confront altered circumstances, and to assess 'the shipwreck of the singular' in the maelstrom of the many. . . ." —Michael Palmer

"In Severance Songs, Joshua Corey tends to the always-mysterious border that connects the interior and the exterior. Is one inside the tale if one alludes to it? Is the eye tethered as witness to what it sees? And who can avoid singing these 'culpability cantos'? Yet if the lush Eden of intimacy foresees our later expulsion, this poet shows us how to stand at the garden's threshold where 'reaching builds on reaching.' Corey risks the possible emptiness inherent in rupture to seek out the ways we are 'knotted to one another's possibilities.' The architecture of the poem, he reveals, is replete with doors and windows and it is for us to discover whether we are looking in or looking out." —Elizabeth Robinson

Now available from Small Press Distribution, Amazon, or your local bookstore.

Read reviews at Publishers Weekly, Wave Composition, The Critical Flame, TrainBust, Poetry Northwest, and in Spoon River Poetry Review.

Goodreads

Joshua's bookshelf: currently-reading

Swann's Way

by Marcel Proust

Slowly, slowly sinking into the astonishingly sensual memory-world of Proust. At forty, I think I'm finally old enough to appreciate it. Reading the Moncrief but I'd like to check out the Lydia Davis translation as well.

tagged: currently-reading