$8.00
by Jim Cory
For years I’ve admired Jim Cory’s irreverent poems, for their brutal honesty and their brutal humor. And admired Cory for never losing his edge. The poems in this new book seem fresher and more devastating than ever. Cory inspires great compassion for the victims of human frailty that we all are, and utter disdain for insipidness and smallness “& other forms of collective stupidity.” He is a master transmitter of “the soul’s strange radar.”
—David Trinidad
Jim Cory's poems are not only written out of a quickened and skillful musical sense, but they also rise out of a kinetic, humorous, generosity extracted from life's noise — shorings against cacophony, static, and babble. Cracking the code of techno-discourse that scratches our paralyzed, ragged hearts, his wise idioms playfully — yet pointedly — risk everything. Their democratic impulses, their restorative intents — so robust and so resilient as to leave us stripped bare to the human we have forgotten — alchemize into an uncomplicated, polished wisdom. Their satire becomes a gentle, brotherly urge to rightness, to civility, and to an awakening to the absurd poetry of the everyday. I am taken up by their odd beauty. Their music and wit open new vistas. The poet asks, "What is silence but the filtered distillation of remembered noise?" What, indeed? The evidence? No Brainer Variations.
—Jeffery Beam
Jim Cory the poet is true entertainment for those who have immediate use of poetry today. For instance if literature and the Space Program as it was called had their own junkyards his voice would be their ghosts. Contemporary poetry’s forward motion would be like a Harley-Davidson missing a wheel without Cory. Funny, insightful, tough and tender with nature, he shows an iconoclastic streak that is at once truthful and hilarious. Nobody comes close to what Cory covers in Surrealist tension combined with thoughtful camp. He is a welcome voice and carriage in a tight-ass poetry world of supreme vanities. His amusing range never tedious is about like Van Wyck Brooks in its stewardship. In this department of value today I can only place Joel Dailey and Anselm Hollo next to Cory. If you don’t purchase this book—NO BRAINER VARIATIONS, you’re not even alive! Jim Cory is an American treasure.
—Tom Weigel
every day poems bombard us. that is a secret unknown to most. but Jim Cory knows. one day he sits in front of his computer & captures poems. another day he finds one on the sidewalk. & yet another day he climbs a tree & there in a nest is a poem. in this book Jim Cory shares the richness he discovers every day.
—Alex Gildzen
Jim Cory lives in Center City Philadelphia, where he works as a writer and editor in trade publishing. He is the author of 7 previous chapbooks, including Facts in the Case of E.A.P. (Mooncalf Press, Philadelphia, 2003), the redheads (1997, Insight to Riot Press, Philadelphia) and Wife (1994, Insight to Riot Press, Philadelphia). His work has appeared in many leading venues during 35 years of publishing in literary journals, including Chiron Review, Wormwood Review, Exquisite Corpse, Contact II, etc. He has also been a book reviewer (for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Fort Worth Star-Telegram), essayist (most recently in the online journal Jacket), and short story writer.
by Jim Cory
what they say
they said: write in the morning, when the mind is most clear
they said: compose in a barren room like Shaw like Flaubert
they said: write 2 hours a day, 4 hours a day, 8 hours a day, write
constantly, make a job of it
they said: write in the final hours of night, like Proust, when
distraction abates
they said: compose in the afternoon, the early evening, the late evening,
or only in summer, spring, fall or winter
they said: the typewriter most closely approximates the look of print
on the page
they said: compose in long hand, it disciplines the imagination
they said: no one under 20 ever wrote anything remotely important
except perhaps Chatterton or Rimbaud
they said: it takes 5 years, maybe 10, to reach a certain level of
proficiency
they said: learn Latin Greek Italian Chinese & French
they said: Spanish is the language in which all the important writing
is being done
they said; read these, & directed me to the snide screed of
the anti-Muse
they said: go to readings & I walked away deafened by the preachy
screechings of the narcissi
they said: try the Kenyon Review, the Partisan Review, the Hudson
Review, the Massachusetts Review, the New American Writing,
the Old American Writing, Poetry East, Poetry West, Poetry
North, Poetry Northwest, Poetry North by Northwest, or just
plain Poetry
they said: “these poems demonstrate a certain minimal competence but
otherwise lack polish & precision…”
they said: narrative is dead, Romance poison, audience beside the point
& the 1st person singular an old fraud bleeding tears into last
year’s soup
they said: you must have pens for fingers, clocks for eyes
they said:
many things
more
than is possible
to record
some honest
some wise
most
neither
I remember best the words of a poet in San Francisco (since deceased)
who’d published 2 books of fiery brilliance then abandoned poetry
for criticism, saying on the day we met in the Café Floor: You know how it is,
after 30 the poems slow down, then stop coming altogether
they never said: study the masters, being Dante, Neruda, Shakespeare
Lorca & Whitman
they never said: teach yourself to pay attention, that you may pick up
occasional blips on the soul’s strange radar
they never said: it is only the ability to replicate spirit, no more no less
they never said: be more humble than the ant the weed the sparrow
or the one-legged beggar in his wheelchair
they never said: the only true reward comes the moment the poem is
complete, & vanishes instantly, leaving memories of its incense
scattered thru the day
they never said: anger is the most transient Muse, & love the most
diligent, lady of silken voice, she who resides longest, surviving
into new lifetimes
Walden
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, wrote
Thoreau. On target, as per usual. Not that mute
despair is there all the time. It just kind of
hangs around, waiting to deflate whatever love
ly memory recently seeped from the neocortex. To throttle the festive
occasion. In our epoch the desperation
seems anything but quiet. A crime
the way people talk about their uglies on TV & meet at slimy
conventions of the similarly afflicted. Hawking bad luck.
(Commodity or contagion?) Chuck
ing it up to weighted odds. Disappointment
is how things are, were, will be. Car won’t start.
Tooth torn away. A sharp
pain in the colo-rectal that may (& likely will) come back. The burp
that brought up blood. And friends.
Of all them you lended
money to
how many ever paid you
back? Gratitude’s consistently in short supply.
Help some guy
find a job, & watch how fast he comes to believe
he got you yours. So relieved
not to be bothered sometimes. Tolstoy’s Father Sergius took
to a cave when the emperor hit on his fiance. He was only looking
for a place to stick the Band Aid on internal bleeding. Thoreau, too, sought
the blue silence of uninterrupted solitude, & bought
peace of mind by relocating beside a pond w/cattails
frogs & cinnamon-winged teals.
Now there are parking lots
& lots & lots
of tourists.
Outboard motors roaring
by. Some stay home & draw the shades. Taxis fetch
them what they need. Gin, for instance. How wretchedly
necessary. V. Horowitz, quizzed on why he refused to leave his apartment
for several years, gestured around the living room and said: Nice apartment!
Unpleasantness was something the parents never
warned about. Not that they weren’t clever
people but what’s to say? That expectations are by their nature
regularly to be trampled on? No manual came w/this creature
to tell you that after 45 or 50 things not only slow
but fray, leak, snap, thicken, or quit altogether. Oatmeal flows
where blood ran. So it seems
like everything else moves that much quicker. Hon, you want ice cream
w/that? Huh? Who? With what? Dad
had
it right. Toward the end he
sat in an easy chair staring at nothing. We
nt to bed & stayed til the appointment made w/death
‘s secretary came thru. His skin: taxidermy w/o the fur. That last breath
a soundless gasp.
You never heard such satisfaction.
chat
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Sir!”
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with my asshole
B4 you judge someone…STOP & REMEMBER we all see the same sun!
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