Cahiers de Corey: Europa

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Europa

Thanks to everyone who's written over the past week with best wishes and book suggestions—it's more and better advice than I could possibly follow. I may cheat with three books—at the library sale I picked up my old teacher Eamon Grennan's translation of Leopardi, which is slender enough not to notice and may help me with my Italian. Plus, depressing old Leopardi might make an interesting tonic to contrast with the sun-drenched Italy we're expecting to find. Other leading candidates at this time include the portable Thoreau, Cortazar's Hopscotch, Hawthorne's Marble Faun (both because Nada suggested it and because I'm teaching a 19th-century lit class this fall), and Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (far too big at 1,000+ pages, but the James Joyce-reading Serbian cabdriver we met in Chicago strongly recommended it).

Back from a fast and frenetic trip to Chicago, where we put a deposit down on an apartment in Evanston in a sweet spot between Lake Michigan and the commuter train. Now we barely have time to turn around before flying across the Atlantic on Thursday. I thought I'd post our itinerary here on the off chance that we might intersect with one of you Gentle Readers:

May 24 - 26 London
May 26 - 31 Rome
June 1 Calcata
June 2 - 4 Gubbio
June 4 - 7 Siena
June 7 - 10 Florence
June 10 - 14 Cinque Terre
June 14 - 17 Venice

That's the honeymoon segment. After this Emily's off to Crete and I'm on my own. So what follows is less an itinerary than my hazy idea of what cities I'll visit in the order in which I'll visit them:

June 17 - 20 Trieste and/or Ljubljana
June 21 - 25 Budapest
June 26 - 29 Vienna

Most of the above is subject to change without notice.

This blog will likely be dark while I'm traveling, but it's possible I'll find time for an update here or there. Also, Emily and I have talked about creating a travel blog together—if that happens, I'll let you know where to find it.

Unfinished business: a week ago Jen Scappettone and Will Cordeiro rocked the SOON house. Jen's poetry is a force; Will refused the mediation of the podium in theatrically delightful ways. Looking forward to having Jen as a neighbor in Chicago.

Farewell, addio, slovo, viszontlatasra, abschied!

“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