Cahiers de Corey: The Widow Party

Saturday, May 10, 2008

The Widow Party

If you're in the Chicago area it's not too late to catch a performance of The Widow Party, a "collaboratively written and performed melodrama, Wild West show, political thriller, pageant, and farce" and the second of four poets' theater shows being put on by Links Hall and curated by John Beer. The collaborators this time include Joyelle McSweeney, Johannes Göransson (the author more equal than others), Jennifer Karmin, Patrick Durgin, Jacob Knabb (who also had a small part in the final performance of "Humana Ante Oculos" last week), James Shea, and Lisa Janssen. As that description implies, it's a true phantasmagoria, incorporating sound effects; hilarious/disturbing videos; a showstopping conflation of Annie Oakley and Hannah Weiner into Hannie Oakley and Annie Weiner (with go-go dancing!); convincing imitations of Walter Cronkite, Louis Armstrong, and Jimmy Stewart; mind-reading; odd props (including a pistol that resembles nothing so much as the newborn Alien or the Eraserhead baby; Patrick's faultless impersonation of Britney Spears; and divers other wonders.

If the Rodrigo Toscano pieces I took part in last weekend were Beckettian in their spareness and painful humor, The Widow Party is like a rock musical co-written by Brecht and Joyce. Filled with disturbing images of violence (mostly sound images), it obviously wishes to challenge the audience and implicate us in the piece's mashed-up war-discourse (there's a character-persona called "You," an aspiring film director). Yet I didn't feel much in the way of an alienation effect; I was instead supremely entertained by the sheer verve of the language and the nutty energy of the poets. We even get to dance at the end! I went home from Friday's performance wondering about the place of pleasure in this sort of theater. Certainly Johannes and Joyelle didn't seem disappointed when I told them how much I'd enjoyed it, but I wonder if the information the play seems to want to transmit about the violence of our spectatorhood doesn't require a more didactic hand. On the other hand, no preacher is more likely to find him or herself addressing the choir than a poet, much less a troupe of poets putting on a show--and punishing the audience doesn't strike me as viable or even particularly ethical nowadays. What does it say, though, that I found the mad world of The Widow Party so familiar, even homey? Maybe that's the poison in the pill.

Today I and assorted other profs froze our tuches off while decorating Lake Forest College's 130th commencement. Tomorrow Emily, Sadie, and I set off for Ithaca; and Tuesday, I fly to Brussels for the Poetic Ecologies conference. Blogging may be even more sporadic than usual for a while.

Am I a sap for anything that's been, a sieve for anyone, for feeling tremendously excited about Obama's having cinched the Democratic nomination? Then a sap, a sieve I must be.

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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."

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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."

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"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