Cahiers de Corey

Friday, July 30, 2004

Oh hey, for what it's worth, good speech by Kerry last night. I think he achieved the goal of humanizing himself that all the pundits were going on about. The question is, who was watching? The "bump" upward has yet to appear in the latest polls.

For those looking for the kind of Bush-bashing the convention was a little short on (probably a good thing), check out this article from a new magazine of politics and culture, n+1. I like the cut of its jib.

Disappointed, to say the least, that Steve Evans, in his new "Field Notes" feature in the latest issue of The Poker (the first issue I've seen—thanks to Dan Bouchard for sending it to me) saw fit to dis Selah; this took place as part of a brief discussion of what he refers to as the dominant Stevens-Ashbery post-avant aesthetic represented by poets as diverse as Marjorie Welish (in her excellent book Word Group), Geoffrey G. O'Brian (The Guns and Flags Project, which I don't find as interesting), and Beth Anderson (Overboard, a book I haven't read). Selah is judged to be "a less successful project" than theirs; the book is at least in reasonably good company insofar as he lumped it in with the work published by Jubilat. Steve has to be the most uncompromising critic of his generation, as well as one of the most knowledgable; I have huge respect for him, which makes a judgment like this sting all the more. On the other hand, it was delivered casually, unargued, exactly as if it were a blog entry, so that I can't help but take it less seriously than I would a bad or mixed review. (And then there's the question as to whether I accept the Stevens-Ashbery affiliation. Stevens, certainly, but I don't see Selah as particularly Ashberian; there's more Ashbery in my unpublished manuscript The Nature Theater of Oklahoma. I wonder what position Fourier Series will be seen as occupying?) Cold print does make a difference to the ego, though, so... ouch.

In spite of my bruised feelings I'll be subscribing to The Poker, which I immediately recognize as one of the crucial magazines of our moment—and Steve Evans' "Field Notes" are a large part of the reason why.

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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