Cahiers de Corey

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

A few new links at right, including an experimental webzine new to me: zafusy. In honor of Zukofsky's birthday(s), I'm pleased to point to "Zukofsky's A - 23/ a start at an antonymical transliteration" by Stephen Vincent: a brilliant topsy-turvy sort of close reading. Here's the original for comparison purposes:

An unforeseen delight a round
beginning ardent; to end blest
presence less than nothing thrives:
a world worn in whose
happiest reins preempt their histories

which cannot help or hurt
a foreseen curve where many
loci would dispose and and's
compound creature and creature together.
Each lamp casts its shadow

after its lampshade—concentric—flared-
flower—hurricane chimney—midnight blue
hair of intermittent allayed water
most of such gossamer scarcely
moved in spirit to word

what hurries? why hurry? wit's
but the fog, the literal
senses move in light's song
modesty cannot force, blind call
its own, nor self-effaced fled

to woods perpend without pride
stone into lotus. The least love
lasts, the troubled heart foregoes
its sigh .. upon a time ..
going a way is here

as if a child sings
a li'l bit of doggy
heaven, teased by nestling eyes
of white little furry cat
their toy fascination of lazulite

crystal, sunlight of sunlight, older
desire chances naming, thought smiling
no more than hungerpang aged
eating cures: it persists, acts
whiteness with—without—sweetness or

invoked equisetum—horse + bristle
(field horsetail) research won't guarantee;
tongues commonly inaccurate talk viable
one to one, ear to
eye loving song greater than

anything—unhappiness happiness moves too
susceptible, and in extended world
where does the right thumb
throb—how far from a
room's wall, from its floor—

Vincent's antonyms discover a more fleshly Zukofsky in "A-23"—not that Zuk isn't always concerned with the senses, but it's astounding to see "moved in spirit to word" become "The slow deprived mute tongue" or "happiest reins preempt their histories // which cannot help or hurt" become "Walloped, unloosed, flesh one's future: // The bluff, ridges red, rib boned." (And Zukofsky's horses become John Ford's horses on that red ridged bluff.) Vary intestining, as Pound might say.

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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

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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

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

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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