Cahiers de Corey

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Homeward bound today after a couple of days with the family here in the Chicago suburbs, where we celebrated my aunt Susan's 60th, my sister's 33rd, and my grandparents' 85th and 84th birthdays (all more or less at the same time).

AWP this year was more a Montana reunion than anything, but I also got to meet and hang out with such illustrious bloggers as Anne, Jonathan, and Jane for the first time, as well as the usual suspects. Too many books, not very many panels (but ours was great.)

Roller-derby girls.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...: Josh,

I hope it's OK to post this, but since you mention him, I thought I'd ask:

I've heard that Jonathan Mayhew, who heretofore I'd thought a strong fan of mine, was the "blogger" at the AWP (see Tony Robinson's blog) who took a copy of my epigrams book, violently threw it on the pulsing-colors dance floor, and then proceeded to earnestly stomp upon it, as poets and critics, in bobbing disco-circle around him, cheered on.

Is this really true?

I hope so! As Juvenal wrote at Martial's tomb (or vice versa): "Old man, the small maggots never fail to offer the final review you live for."

Kent; 6:41 PM
Unknown said...: Wouldn't it be thrilling for you, Kent, if he had? But I can neither confirm nor deny this; I was not present at the dance party. I can say that such behavior seems very uncharacteristic of the Jonathan I hung out with.; 9:32 PM
Anonymous said...: Josh,

Uncharacteristic? He's certainly thrown such tantrums online... I shouldn't be shocked to have him do a little disco-duende stomping on my booke "in person"!

But you are right that it would thrilling for me, if so.

I wonder if HE will "confirm or deny"?

Hmm.

Kent; 9:28 AM
Anonymous said...: POEM

And all these AWP photos spread all through post-avant blogland!

What's wrong with this picture?

Nothing, really, I suppose, if you've been following the trends.

Sometimes, though, things come into sharp focus with a click.

I love the one of Mohammad, Gizzi, Davis, and Mayhew.

Yes, a picture is worth a thousand epigrams.

Kent; 10:03 AM

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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.

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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