Joshua Corey is the author of SELAH (Barrow Street Press, 2003) and FOURIER SERIES (forthcoming from Spineless Books), which was the winner of the Fitzpatrick-O'Dinn Award judge by Christian Bok. He is a doctoral candidate in English at Cornell University and is writing a dissertation on modernist pastoral. He lives in Ithaca, New York with his girlfriend Emily Grayson and a Boston Terrier named Bogie. Buy his book here. A couple of reviews: here and here. See some links to some work here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? My instinct is to give a bifurcated answer (this may bode ill for the remaining questions). The first poem I ever loved that struck my consciousness as a poem was “The Mouse’s Tale” from Alice in Wonderland. There’s plenty of verse in Alice, of course, and I loved that too—but this was probably the first concrete poem I had ever encountered and was the first hint I received that it was even possible to do such strange things to language. I was probably ten or so and reading my mother’s (in my memory quite enormous) copy of The Annotated Alice. The annotations were at least as fascinating as Carroll’s text, the more so for being only partially comprehensible. Who on earth were Gladstone and Disraeli? What’s with all the mathematics? Why is a raven like a writing desk? The second answer is “The Emperor of Ice Cream.” When I was fifteen I took a poetry class at a summer workshop for overeducated, undersocialized kids at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. We were each issued a copy of The Norton Anthology of Poetry, 3rd edition; I still own mine and can still read the word “Poetics” in green ink that I scrawled on the edges of the pages. By this point I was obviously already interested in poetry, but this poem knocked my socks off. I didn’t understand it at all; I only knew that it was beautiful and sinister and evoked an almost recognizable world that I associated with the images of a supernaturally charged American small town life that I’d received from Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. The dead that all but speak... “If her horny feet protrude, they come / To show how cold she is, and dumb.” The phrase “emperor of ice cream” was so grand, and yet silly, and yet the silliness was undercut somehow by the gnomic, incomprehensible force of “Let be be finale of seem.” It’s a poem that still hasn’t fully yielded up its mysteries; I suppose no real poem does. It got me started. 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? There’s little that I read that I haven’t at least mentioned on my blog, my most public face—so I don’t know if anyone would be much surprised. For example, everyone who cares knows I read Entertainment Weekly because in the past I blogged about how surprised and pleased I was to discover that Timothy Donnelly was their “IT” poet (I was surprised and pleased to discover they had an “IT” poet at all). I’ve also talked about reading Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander mysteries and my obsession with Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin novels—but are literary as all get out, anyway. I used to read lots of comic books, lots of silly fantasy novels (anybody here remember Robert Lynn Asprin?), but that was years ago. Really, it seems to be the hyperliterary that surprises friends and colleagues more than the non-literary. People always do a double-take when I tell them I belong to a Finnegans Wake reading group, even English Department people. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? If Marx was right about philosophy and the point is not to understand the world but to change it, then philosophy is going to be the necessary supplement for a writing, poetry, whose ability to even communicate about the world is constantly being put into question, let alone its ability to change anything (c.f. Auden, c.f. Spicer). Like many poets of my generation, I’ve come at philosophy via French literary theory and later German philosophy and critical theory. Thinkers like Heidegger, Levinas, Adorno, Benjamin, and Jameson have become the superstructure of my intellectual life, the base or long foreground consisting mostly of literatures anthologized by Norton (my education in Anglo-American analytic philosophy is just about zilch). That is, I retain a grounding in the empirical common sense that 19th century English novelists specialize in; they have also saved me from falling completely under the spell of obscurantist prose. Anyway, philosophy as such interests me less than the rigorous habits of mind required to support it: dialectical thinking, skepticism, and a general expansion of one’s negative capability. For me, poetry always investigates states of being both inside and outside the self (or the group, the class, the tribe); evidence discovered in the one place usually indicates an invisible phenomenon in the other. Insofar as both disciplines incorporate imagination and are capable of forcing open a crack in the wall of things-as-they-are, I find poetry and philosophy to be fundamentally similar. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? My ignorance of non-European literatures is profound; I am shamed by my sketchy knowledge of African literatures, Central and South American literatures, and Asian literatures (though I’ve read a few Japanese and Indian poems and novels). Outside of English, I have a smattering of French and German and so am drawn most to writers in those languages. Holderlin, Rilke, and Celan are important to me for their evocations of the sublime, hugely complicated by the imperative of the negative in Celan’s case. Franz Kafka and Edmond Jabès are important to me for the same reasons (plus Kafka’s funny!). The contemporary French poets Emmanuel Hocquard and Jacques Roubaud have rendered speculations about the nature of love and grief in a questioning, self-reflexive language, which I’m a sucker for. And I love it when theorists like Derrida and Barthes get all literary on you in books like The Post Card or A Lover’s Discourse. To get a little farther from Western Europe there’s Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy (I had a wonderful time with The Idiot and Anna Karenina is inexhaustible), the Hungarian poets Attila Joszef and Miklos Radnoti, and Haruki Murakami’s dizzying A Wild Sheep Chase. The systematic frame of mind of the French and Germans, so alien to Anglo-American thought, alternately fascinates and repels me. An exemplary figure in this regard is the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, whose mad plans for the liberation of human desire through the construction of an utterly rigid new society inspired my newest book, Fourier Series. 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? My dissertation research keeps me pretty immersed: right now my (sometimes black, sometimes radiant) horizon consists almost entirely of Ezra Pound. As for contemporaries and peers, I never feel like I’m reading enough because I rarely sit and read an entire book through (see below). But I’m always reading poetry. I work for an independent bookstore and order most of the poetry books, all of which get at least a glance from me as they’re shelved. Books that I’ve read chunks of in the past couple of weeks include Marjorie Welish’s Word Group, Ben Friedlander’s A Knot Is Not a Tangle, Drew Gardner’s Sugar Pill, William Fuller’s Sadly, Rae Armantrout’s Up to Speed, Martha Ronk’s why/why not, Philip Jenks’ On the Cave You Live In, and Laurie Elrick’s sKincerity. Right now I’m being influenced by the work of Jennifer Moxley and Chris Stroffolino, who share a basic sympathy, a restless anxiety, and a formal intensity regarding the line that I find compelling. Like many poets, I suspect, I’m often inspired by reading something great to write something myself. Even more often I’m inspired by misreading; I’ll misread a word and be taken a direction that the original author didn’t choose to go in. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? I’ve read in many, many books. But people might be surprised by how few I’ve actually finished. There must be nearly a thousand books on the wall behind me in my study, and I’ve read in nearly all of them. But except for some of the novels, I’ve read barely any of them cover to cover. When I was a kid reading fiction for escape, I’d bury myself in a book until it was finished (usually a matter of hours), then go on to the next one. Now that I’m trying to get more out of reading than sheer distraction, I read more slowly and haphazardly. It takes a lot of discipline for me to read all the way through something. Right now, for example, I’m reading The Cantos and writing about the experience on my blog. The reading and the writing help sustain each other. But mostly I’ve found that I don’t need to finish a book for it to be useful; I guess you’d have to call me a literary pragmatist. Which doesn’t mean I don’t feel guilty about not finishing what I’ve started. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? It’s like that game where you repeat a word until it makes no sense. Do that with four or five words in a row. Now make a sentence out of them. Repeat until it’s a poem. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? “Poet” is, I think, still evocative of some kind of isolated genius or prophet, in but not of the larger society, shouting his (don’t you picture a “he”?) vision in the wilderness, legislating the hell out of everything in his unacknowledged parliament of one. Whereas “citizen” (really, “personhood”) is relational. So I’d like to fold the poet into the citizen because the poetry I’m most interested in investigates relations and tries to imagine better ones. For me, writing always involves a reaching out to an imaginary community; “the reader” is a synecdoche for that community whose members have achieved the intensity of intelligence and feeling that most of us only get glimpses of in lives hamstrung by ever-increasing professional specialization and commodity fetishism. The poet’s writing (not the poet him- or herself) models the engaged and critical life that makes genuine citizenship possible. And unlike, say, the celebrity (who provides an image of the full personhood denied to most of us most of the time), poetry (again, not the poet, who is fully capable of becoming a celebrity, though a minor one) engages with its readers, addresses them as persons, and helps them to remember themselves as something other than a consumer, if only for a moment. Reading poetry, as I said above, almost always makes me want to write it. I think everybody ought to feel that way. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Cherry Chiseled**absolve I**flagellate Of**sincerity Form**pleasure 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? Who wouldn’t embrace Whitman’s wonderful sentiment, “Who touches this book touches a man?” And the physicality of texts seduces me: I love books, paper, elegant typography. I always wanted to have a book of my own and on some genetic level I’m profoundly satisfied to know that the books I publish have at least the potential to outlive me on someone’s bedside table. But of course “the text” has nothing to do with books or printed matter of any sort; you’re not reading this in a book, are you? Then there’s the question of how I, a man with no discernible sense of rhythm on the dance floor, can nonetheless be said to have an “ear” when he writes. The role of the body—my body—in my writing is nearly as mysterious as its role in my life. The content of my poems constantly returns to the body; you could construct an anatomy from my favorite words (I’m partial to the I sounds: wrist, skin, ribs, lids, lips). Plus I’ve been writing sonnets for three years and to my mind the octave-sestet structure resembles a human body (complete with head, torso, a volta for a waist, and, naturally, feet). It’s curious how the body negotiates that slippery polarity between text and speech: the look of a poem on the page and the shape of words in the mouth. A neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio claims that the mind is a region of the brain evolved by humans that produces our most sophisticated thinking and emotions; mind, brain, and body are on a purely physical continuum. Maybe language is a further refinement of human evolution, as rooted in physical experience as any other organ. And maybe poetry’s a refinement of that.