Cahiers de Corey: Warm Welcome

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Warm Welcome

Went to my first Chicago reading last night on, weirdly enough, Cornell Avenue—the series A reading curated by Bill Allegrezza, one of the nicest poets I've ever met. Not realizing exactly how damn far Hyde Park is from Evanston I was too late for Simone and Lina's readings, but I did hear from them in the sense that it was a reading of exquisite corpse-style collaborations the group had done together—overall an assemblage of the raunchy and poignant. Memorable figures and phrases: Ray Bianchi and his "hot sausage" (don't ask), to which Kristy Odelius added "mashed potatoes" as well as a presentation of "the Latin for birdshit"; Tim Yu's preceding his reading with "apologies to fans of Lorine Niedecker" (again, don't ask); and Bill's "bumped out donuts for coffee" (what does that mean?). The crowd was quite appreciative. Afterwards I went out to Bar Louies (a popular local chain I'll probably be seeing more of) to hang with the poets, who impressed me with their friendliness and high spirits: at first blush, it's the least neurotic poetry scene I've ever been exposed to. Everyone made me feel very welcome, told me how much I'd like Chicago, invited me to readings, etc. Nice!

Today I've set myself the task of finishing at least two of my syllabi. Tonight I'm going to another reading, because why not? I might as well get out to as many of these things as I can before I'm buried beneath my new responsibilities professorial and parental. (Speaking of the latter, we had our first midwife appointment yesterday, and I got to hear the baby's heartbeat for the first time. That kid is FAST!)

Hoping to resume thoughts about poetry here sometime soon.

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