Cahiers de Corey: "The boiling point of things"

Thursday, September 17, 2009

"The boiling point of things"

Today, three years of marriage. May all who desire it find wedded bliss soon.

Six years of blogging, slowing never stopping. In difficult transition from writing to writing.

Two years in Chicago, only beginning to discover its wonders. Last weekend: the Red Moon Theater's thrilling and funny outdoor performance, "Last of My Species: The Fearless Songs of Laarna Cortaan." Playing again this weekend; if you can go, do.

Turning the page of my thirty-ninth birthday in a couple of weeks. Forty years on the planet. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita....

Nearly twenty months of Sadie Gray Corey, but it feels so much longer, an epoch. It is longer: nine months of anticipating her arrival must be incorporated into my experience of new life. Twenty-nine months. She speaks in full sentences already, her face is different every day, she's not sleeping too consistently, she delights and astonishes for her living, by her living. Thank you.

Eight months of a Democratic administration that never ceases to disappoint. "The art of the possible," "the perfect is the enemy of the good," "bipartisanship," "pragmatism." I'm sick of these words and terrified of the tea-baggers, the birthers, the truthers, the gun-toters. If they don't accept the legitimacy of the system why should we? Abolish the Senate. Abolish the Electoral College. Abolish state governments. Enhance the power of municipalities and localities. Let it change. Let it go.

Some six months since my tirade against fiction, some six months of writing it myself, wearing the itchy skin of an untested novelist, finding just minutes a day to write an ever-ramifying and baroque story incorporating elements of detective fiction, Jim
Jarmusch movies, grad school bull sessions, Holocaust drama, unrequited love, tourism, soap opera, romance, Romance. How long can this go on? It goes on.

An eternity of waiting for things to settle down, moments realizing they never will, gratitude for this.

Books finished and unfinished over weeks and months: Badiou, Laird Hunt, Adam Sisman on Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lance Olsen, Lynne Tillman, Jacques Roubaud (poetry and fiction), Claire Messud's deadpan 9/11 novel The Emperor's Children, Richard's terrifying Tracer, The Book of Disquietude and Pessoa & Co.. Poems encountered and re-encountered via teaching, so far: Whitman's Song of Myself and "This Compost," Dickinson's "Tell all the truth" and "A narrow Fellow," Mallarmé's "Coup de des," Hopkins' "God's Grandeur," Stein's "Picasso" and Ponge's "L'orange," Gary Snyder's "Smokey the Bear Sutra" and Archy the cockroach's "what the ants are saying." Roubaud, from Exchanges on Light: "Light is the boiling point of things."

Redmoon's lesson: every mask has at least two faces, and the dance of death is still a dance.

So hello, autumn.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

“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