Cahiers de Corey

Monday, March 12, 2007

Outstanding SOON reading this past Saturday with University of Denver alums Robert Strong (Robert was supposed to come last month, but there were seven feet of snow in his way), Karla Kelsey, and Karla's husband Peter Yumi, who for the last part of the reading collaborated with her by performing electronic music (which included in its many voices a riff from Celia Zukofsky's music for "A"-24) to accompany an excerpt from her remarkable new manuscript Iteration Nets, a sequence of sonnets that expand into prose poems in the second section which are then put under erasure in the third. Robert began the reading with his prose poem Brethren: Order of the Seasons, which had for the occasion taken the form of a sensuously beautiful chapbook published by Karla and Peter's Imprint Press. The poem follows the laboring lives of members of an intentional religious community; that plus Robert's having edited an anthology of spiritual poetry (from which he read selections by Emily Dickinson, Alan Dugan, and others) and having written a book of poems titled Puritan Spectacle has caused him to be asked in interviews, "What it's like, what are the challenges, in being a writer of faith?" Which as he wryly remarked, made him wonder what sorts of questions were asked of scholars and poets whose subject matter was drawn from study of the Third Reich. He and Karla complement each other wonderfully as readers: their charisma, which is considerable, comes from opposite valences—Robert comes out to meet you, Karla draws you in. Karla read some new work as well as the selection from Iteration Nets and from her mysterious and luminous meditation on Platonic epistemology, Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary. Hers is a fierce, flickery talent. It was a pleasure to hear them and to host them and to have breakfast with them.

If by chance you'll be in NYC next week on March 22 (my sister's birthday!), you should check out the reading that's being put on in honor of Robert's anthology, Joyful Noise, at the Housing Works Bookstore Cafe at 7 PM. Sadly, I will not be there (I'll be spending spring break with family), but it's your chance to hear some of the book's most kick-ass living contributors (Kazim Ali, Frances Richard, Timothy Donnelly, Catherine Barnett, Karla Kelsey, Richard Greenfield, Jennifer Murphy, Joshua Moses, Leonard Gontareck, Danielle Dutton, Tara Moyle, and Nicole Collen) read their work.

And as long as I'm announcing things, Susan Tichy has asked me to spread the word about a course she's teaching through George Mason University, PoetryScotland, which entails writing and studying poetry all over Scotland. I'm tempted to do it myself, especially since a visit to Little Sparta is part of it.

ADDENDUM (3/14): Betsy Wheeler, the editor of Pilot, has alerted me to a Kelsey-Yumi collaboration that can be seen and heard on her site by clicking here.

“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