Cahiers de Corey

Thursday, May 04, 2006

End of classes + finishing off the Zuk chapter + getting ready for a weekend in New York = no time to blog, much less to ponder Johannes' response to my major/minor musings (again with the T.S. Eliot comparisons!) or Jessica's Deleuze et Guattari thesis, much less the new-to-me phenomenon of lensing.

May or may not make it to any NYC readings but I am looking forward to this.

2 comments:

Zeke Hunkaburning said...: I would like to register as a "hostile witness" to your blog, because I wish to learn more about the type of poetry you write and about your explicaton for the what and why of it.

I came acrooss you blog in surfing poetry blogs.

I hope you don't mind if I ask you pointed questions about the things you write in your blog.

You are quite a scholar, and I suppose that your poetry is targeted at other scholars, thus it is very diffucult for the average person (is there such a thing?) to interpret, without an explanation from the poet and his multiple references and without a smattering of literary theory.

Yet I would hope that you believe that your poetry is for the ages and universal in its ability to stand the test of time and to be relevant to the times and to the poeple of those times in which it was written.

Your approach, though, scholary, is not in any way spontaneous or wild, it would not be confused with Bukowski, say, nor Bernstein or Hejianen (sp).

You seem to seek topics rather than let topics come from within.

You are ambitious, though, are you not?

Some questions.

Your supoort of illegal immigrants, Is it a well thought out stance?

Dan Beachy Quick? Is he one of the annointed ones, destined to succed by pedigree or by diploma?

Do you think a prestigious degree
is important to success in poetry, and do you think that to some degree that is sad, because it is so, let's say, uninclusive?

How important do you think education is in writing poetry?

What do you think of the Foetry website?

Are you a Jim Bherle fan?

Do you read Silliman's blog?

What poetry blogs do you read?

Do you like sports?

Are you a Yankee or a RedSox fan?

Whose poetry do you admire, of those who are currently writing poetry?

What poets piss you off, for whatever reason, or lead you to belive that they are phony and insincere or undeserving of their success, of the poets currently writing poetry?

Thanks.; 3:59 AM
Unknown said...: I'm not particularly comfortable responding to the questions of a "hostile witness" who also uses a fake name. One or the other, maybe, but not both. But I'll think about these when I've got time—right now I'm on the go in New York.; 11:23 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

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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

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"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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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