Cahiers de Corey: Tonight

Monday, December 17, 2007

Tonight

In answer to your question: in spite of my willingness, I did not actually learn how to breastfeed. But I learned that breastfeeding is important and that my support for breastfeeding is important. A father lives his life in proximity to the real work.

Anne Boyer read a poem with the title being something like, "Who Is Now Abject Full of Love and History." This is the name of the movement I would like to join, though it's too long.

Why has it taken me this long in life to be riding home late at night in my car on the snow-blown freeway listening to the radio to discover Joe Frank?

Michael Cross is a human dynamo. Where he lives magazines readings and small presses arise from the ground like Myrmidons. Seattle is next.

Kasey Mohammad has his own Wikipedia entry: should I be jealous? No, for his poetry is brilliant and funny and mad in the best way. The last strophe of "ABABA" from his new book Breathalyzer:

Melt away, dissolve, leave not a rack behind; go, be no more; die &c. The section of this poem describes blonde bubble butts, Russian peasant daily life, lords of doom, sauce for pasta recipe, girls who grunt loudly when accounting. I keep wondering if there's a term for this. A&P. A's. AA. AAA. AB. ABA. ABABA. These words are meant to bring to midn the poem "To a Mouse, on Turning Her up in Her Nest with a Plough," by Scotland's favorite poet, Robert Burns.

Everything I read lately including that sounds like Ashbery, which is not a criticism but a fact of parataxis, which rules my world: and and and and and. Read as: and and and, and and and.

Also acquired: Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse by Anne Boyer; cede by Michael Cross; Imitation Poems by Patrick Durgin; Snow Sensitive Skin by Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern. The last two are particularly gorgeous physical objects.

Seriously, why this long to discover Joe Frank? A late-night ruminator on how Helen's beauty implies a continuum, so that it is possible to imagine a face that launches 427 ships.

Good night.

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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