Cahiers de Corey: September Songs

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

September Songs

Today in my Intro to Creative Writing class I asked my students to freewrite to the prompt "I remember..." (I'll be introducing them to Joe Brainard a little later on). Mostly the prompt sent them in very personal directions, but one student raised her hand and pointed out that today was September 11th, so she'd tried to remember that, but couldn't quite muster what she felt to be the proper emotion. I think many of us feel that way now. The College Republicans, I'm told, put flags out on the quad today, one for each victim of the attacks. Of course those flags would now be well outnumbered by the boots of the American soldiers who've died. And if you wanted to somehow represent the Iraqi dead, you'd need fields and fields of flags.

Still, it's odd I'd forgotten what day it was when I assigned that prompt.

Keeping one step ahead of my students is about all I can manage these days. But I do have some dates of interest to announce for the month of September:

* On Monday the 17th, Emily and I will celebrate our first wedding anniversary. New city, new jobs, new people, new baby. We don't do things by halves!

* On Tuesday the 18th at 7 PM, I will be sharing the stage with Evan Willner at the Hyde Park Art Center, as part of Bill Allegrezza's series A.

* On Wednesday the 19th at 7:30 PM I'll be at Danny's to hear Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Göransson, and Greg Purcell read in a smokey and atmospheric fashion. Hoping Joyelle and Johannes can offer me some tips on combining parenting with poetry.

* On Tuesday the 25th at 7 PM, John Kinsella will be reading his poetry in Meyer Auditorium at Lake Forest College. Could be worth taking the Metra up from the city.

* Finally, on Saturday the 29th I'm scheduled to read for the Guild Literary Complex—I believe the link has the right time and date, but if necessary I'll provide an update as the time comes closer.

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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

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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