Cahiers de Corey

Monday, July 25, 2005

Said goodbye to Jasper Bernes on Friday: he's bound to Berkeley this week where he'll be joining his partner and child and starting as a PhD student this fall. Ithaca wishes you well, Jasper, and we'll miss you.

Might have guessed I'd get into trouble tossing the word "duende" around like that. For the record, I recognize that it's a term specific to Lorca and his essay on cante jondo or "deep song." I was just trying to get across an admittedly superficial reaction to much of the Spanish-language poetry I've encountered in translation, which I'm positive is the merest sliver of what's actually out there. What I was trying to convey was my sense of what the people who I see gravitating to Neruda again and again when I'm manning my post at the register near the poetry section are looking for: a poetry of authentic "deepness," a key to unlock some ill-understood notion of soul. The Neruda of Twenty Loves Poems and a Song of Despair, most usually; that book seems to stand in many people's imaginations for poetry itself and its (minor) role as gateway to an inner, private life. Though to be fair some of them probably want to use the book to get laid—to my mind a nobler or at least more traditional role for poetry. Damn few folks ever come in looking for The Heights of Macchu Picchu or Canto Generale, that's for sure. Anyway, my point wasn't really to talk about Spanish-language poetry; it was to demonstrate how difficult it is to read poems that don't come embedded in some sort of legible context, whether that be provided by a scholarly/editorial apparatus or by the reader's own knowledge. But I will take the advice offered by both Guillermo and Tony and seek out Clayton Eshleman's translation of Vallejo's Trilce. Eshleman has some translations from The Black Heralds in the latest New American Writing and I could see at a glance that they were superior to the Seiferle translation that have. There's a sample here, "Fresco," that builds to one hell of a last line.

Ordering some new books for the shelves from the SPD catalog, including many titles bound to pop up in Steve Evans' "Attention Span 2005" project: new books by Aaron Kunin, Stephanie Young, Bernadette Mayer, etc. It's hard to get excited about contributing my own constellation of eleven books because I feel like I've already discussed most of my enthusiasms here on the blog; do people need to hear me going on again about This Connection of Everyone with Lungs or The Joyous Age? Making lists of any sort has never been my favorite activity: it's an anxious-making exercise in limitation generation. Though I will read others' lists with enthusiasm, this year, at least, I decline to make one of my own.

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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