Cahiers de Corey: More Short Takes

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

More Short Takes

- Ladies and gentlemen, I'm pleased to present an exciting new press to you, Apostrophe Books, edited by Richard Greenfield and Mark Tursi. Please send them your brilliant manuscripts.

- Kasey is back and in excellent form, thinking with considerable nuance about lyric vs. narrative (I take his point to be that this is not only a false opposition, but acts as a de facto false hegemony) and Moxley vs. Collins. Provocative, clarifying stuff: "The real reason mainstream poetry is bad is because any art produced by a complacently 'established' class of artists will inevitably reflect the vicious, chauvinistic, and insipid values of the interests that underwrite that class's position of 'job security.'"

- Reading, mouth agape, Aaron Kunin's Folding Ruler Star, a Miltonic meditation on the erotics of shame. A remarkable book. (Has anyone written anything, a book or essay, about Jewish readers of Milton? Why do I feel such an affinity with this blind polymathic Puritan? Perhaps it has something to do with Milton's uncanny ability (I speak of the textual "Milton") to be both canonical and an outsider, theologically grandiloquent and syntactically odd.)

- Johannes Göransson proposes a School of Elegance as a kind of accessory or corollary to the School of Quietude. I'm not sure I believe in the odd beta-male patriarchy he attributes to it (if you're going to name Michael Palmer as a member of this school, why not Ann Lauterbach?), but it's interesting to compare this to Kasey's Moxley-Collins post: the combined implication is that the School o' Elegance is close neighbors with Quietude because its innovations are strictly formal, and therefore they have a toehold in the academy. As for my own implied membership in this school, it's not quite for me to say. It's true that Eliot was a formative influence, I've never disputed that; it's also true that my attitude toward my inner Eliot is a highly ambivalent one. Once you understand something of your own grain, it's natural to want to see what happens when you go against it.

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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