Cahiers de Corey

Tuesday, March 18, 2003

The talented and gentle Sandra Simonds will be posting a little e-mail interview with me at some point, so check that out if you want to know which dead poet I'd most like to kiss. In her latest posting she expresses her ambivalence, or former ambivalence, about the anti-war movement among poets, and wonders if that has something to do with her being an American Jew. For what it's worth, Sandra, I'm an American Jew and I'm against the war—I'm also against Sharon and his government, which many good Israelis are. For a little while I wavered on the subject--Saddam is a brutal dictator and I didn't and don't want my antiwar sentiments to be construed as support for him. What it boils down to is that I wouldn't trust George Bush to take out the trash, much less take out a dictator. He has squandered all that post 9/11 goodwill abroad and almost completely foreclosed any possibility of this nation's coming to reflect on how it might wield its power more justly (I'm not much for slogans but "No Justice, No Peace" makes total sense to me). He is obsessed, simply obsessed, with Saddam, whose power to threaten us or his neighbors is miniscule compared with that of, say, Kim Jong Il. What frightens me most about our president, and what makes me mistrust him, is that I believe he believes what he's saying. It's not about oil for him, at least not at the gut level. He truly is on a Christian crusade. And we are going along with him out of fear, because we don't believe in our own strength and cling automatically to someone so self-assured. The headline in the local paper today is BUSH DRAWS THE LINE. The relief in those big black letters is palpable, as it is in the jump upwards of the stock market. Meanwhile ordinary Iraqis are frantically buying up all the bottled water they can, looking nothing so much like we did a few weeks ago when duct tape and plastic sheeting became the order of the day. Fear plus lies equals complicity in terror. It's a black day for democracy.

Still life goes forward, as it were automatically. I'm flying to California tomorrow to celebrate my sister's 30th birthday and to meet up with some old friends from Montana, the talented and charming poets Catherine Meng and Caeli Wolfson. There's also a good chance I'll get to meet their friend and mine Stephanie Young. And it's spring. I am going to celebrate life in this time of death because really what choice do I have?

One thing that makes me feel like celebrating life is Armand Schwermer's Tablets, which I just read an old chapbook of (Tablets I-XV) at the Cornell library. Thrilling, funny stuff—the rare book of poems I have a physical, Dickinsonian reaction to (less the top of my head coming off than a rush of warmth in my chest). I wonder if the poems' hyperbolically "primitive" sexuality is meant as a send-up of the fuzzy picture most of us have of Sumeria and ancient civilizations generally—the Willendorf Venus, etc. Sumeria, of course, is one of the places we'll be bombing in the next 72 hours. Wow. That buzz didn't last too long.

Gotta pack. Will post from San Fran if I can.

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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.

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