To Delight and Surprise: Remembering Jim Cory

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

When Jim Cory passed away in October 2024 at age 71, following a long struggle with cancer, I gathered the postcards he’d sent me over the last decade or so, a hand-drawn red shark with jagged green teeth marking each one, and laid them out on the floor to form a tender shiver of sharks. Most had been sent from Jim’s apartment in Philadelphia’s first cooperatively-owned building—where he sometimes hosted Sunday poetry salons with wine and a vegetarian buffet—to one of my rotating addresses around the city. While I drifted from one shoddy lease to another in an attempt to outmaneuver gentrification pricing, Jim somehow knew—though the when and how are lost to time—to double-check my coordinates.

One 2014 postcard arrived from the MacDowell Colony. Jim’s careful penmanship is jammed into every available space, in praise of what eventually became my first chapbook—a blurb just between us: “Hairpin turns of thought, a sexy fatalism, anxieties powerful enough to bore thru to the core of earth[…] And, I note, highly promising re: future works.” Who pauses at a world-class residency to encourage a young poet? This gesture epitomized Jim's way of being in the world—generous, observant, and full of flair.

At one of several memorials held in the weeks after his death, a large, intergenerational congregation took turns sharing selections from Jim’s work, tributes to his wit, and reflections on how those shark postcards—which swam into many a mailbox—had made us feel seen. Jim’s capacious attention, though shared, felt singular when directed at you.

Jim could be debonair, and it was not uncommon to run into him in a sport coat en route to the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, where he was a loyal subscriber. At the same time, his ribaldry shone through in poems like “Milestones,” published when he was in his 60s, with lines like, “Be up for anything unless it’s gross & gross like most / aesthetic propositions is a relative term.”

Jim’s multifarious fascinations included ornithology, classical piano, jazz, long-distance rail travel, and architecture. He was also an astute documentarian of Philadelphia’s queer culture. All this, and more, is attested to in Why Is That Goddamn Radio On?, an essay and short story collection released by Radiator Press shortly before Jim’s passing.

In “Where’s the Hotboy Going Tonight,” Jim wrote, of a once-infamous cruising spot:

Someone I knew once performed an unauthorized exit from the substance abuse rehab in West Philly where he was then in residence, commandeered a cab on Market Street and directed its driver to 21st and Spruce. He was standing there, in hospital gown and boxer shorts, hoping to cop drugs, get laid or—jackpot!—both. A car door opened and closed. Poof! Gone.

Another acquaintance, known to the demi-monde as Crazy Bill, showed up there one night, wildly ogling drivers of every other vehicle while he propped himself up with a stop sign. Intoxicated by equal parts lust and pills, he staggered up to a blue BMW. The driver leaned out the window, looked Bill over and hissed: ‘Keep walking, sister!’ It became his mantra.

This is the quintessential vibe of Jim’s writing—dishy, with vivid storytelling that doesn’t punch down. He could be cutting, also, in his observations of his younger self, “a pain-in-the-ass drunk, the type who insists on attention without even the possibility of delivering anything in the way of wit or conversation.”

The Jim we knew was, of course, quite the opposite. As Ryan Eckes, Jim’s friend and a founding editor at Radiator Press, put it, "Talking with [Jim] was such a pleasure because he was so widely curious and followed his love for art and poetry and history. And he was just a great storyteller who made you want to read more and know more.”

Erudite as he was, an openness and lack of pretense stood out in Jim’s writing and demeanor. I first encountered both in 2013, when I was poetry editor at Apiary, a local literary magazine. The poem he submitted, “Head,” is a wry ode to that duplicitous part of the body:

    The head pretending not to know what it knows so that secrets are relayed
         or
    feigning to know what it won't or can't so that those in the know
    never know what it doesn't

The accompanying bio stood out, too: “Lately Philadelphia poet Jim Cory has been spending a lot of time in Rittenhouse Square. Some would say too much.” His delightful reading at the issue’s launch party cemented my admiration, and our friendship.

Though he had many literary accomplishments—finalist for the National Poetry Series, Yaddo and MacDowell fellowships, prizes for poetry and journalism—none of that seemed to drive his work. Instead, Jim preferred to publish in more experimental, independent magazines, and he often sent poems to friends without seeking publication at all.

In hindsight, Jim’s playfulness and irreverence helped shape my own attitude toward poetry’s attendant professional dealings. Much as I’ve learned the utility of various prestige signifiers over the years, like Jim, my sense of being a poet is less about a careerist trajectory and way more about spending “too much” time on a park bench, chatting with a friend or spotting new blooms, and letting that guide my writing life.

As evidenced by many stories shared at his memorial, Jim met other poets mostly outside of official institutions—through readings in coffee shops and cramped galleries (or afterward, in dives like Dirty Franks), self-organized collectives (he founded a publishing cooperative, Insight To Riot Press, in the ‘90s), ephemeral literary magazines with nonexistent funding, and queer havens like Giovanni’s Room bookstore. From the late 1970s and into the 90s, Jim frequented a part of the city that developers didn’t yet call a gayborhood, where it was still unsafe to be openly gay; a place whose queer and trans artists rarely received broader acclaim.

Though he veered away from the confessional, Jim’s poems evince a combination of wit and sensitivity that matched his actual voice and essence, as in these excerpts from 25 Short Poems (Moonstone Press, 2016):

11.

When the man says Daboozie
rather than Debussy
it means curiosity’s
propelled him to teach himself
about this music why should I be
the one who despoils his enjoyment
by correcting

    […]

18.

the paintings were splendid but
largely derived & hardly justified our
host’s insistence on being
the room’s only voice
for the evening
fame: a flame
applied to a fart

Jim’s acuity and forthright analysis extended, also, to his insights into aging:

23.

the young who lack
the empathy to imagine
what it’s like to be old
become the old who lack
the sympathy to remember
what it’s like
to be young

When my coeditors and I—then in our early 20s—solicited Jim for a 2014 issue of bedfellows, a literary magazine topically focused on desire, he intuited that our publication lacked the perspective of someone a bit older. The poem he submitted, “5 from 777” (excerpted below), remains one of my favorites for its jocular yet frank reckoning with fading sexual currency:

old & have no need to pursue
young beauties what would I do
w/them anyway? play chess? request
a fresh cup of Ovaltine? chatter about
the Paris Commune? who at 35 would believe
that ass like the map of paradise
frays at every folded crease

With time, Jim found himself becoming “less interested in the poem as a vehicle for ‘my story’ and more interested in the poem as something to delight and surprise the reader, intellectually and emotionally.” If we take the latter as his ars poetica, I consider it indelibly fulfilled—with levity and panache.

Jim didn’t just care about delighting readers with his own work, though. A survivor of the AIDS epidemic, he championed underrecognized queer writers who died young (his would-be contemporaries) and those who were otherwise marginalized or underappreciated in their lifetime. He edited volumes by James Broughton, a poet and filmmaker of the San Francisco Renaissance, and Jonathan Williams, a poet associated with the Black Mountain school.

He also edited Have You Seen This Man? The Castro Poems of Karl Tierney (Sibling Rivalry, 2019), published more than 20 years after Tierney’s death at age 39. Tierney died by suicide less than a year after being diagnosed with HIV; weeks earlier, he’d named Jim, a close friend, as his literary executor.

“The publication of these poems almost a quarter century after [Tierney’s] death is a rarity in the world of letters,” Jim wrote in the foreword. “That this poetry could not just quietly disappear speaks to the spirit and quality it contains.” In an email ahead of the book’s release, Jim remarked: “In the next 20-some years I was able to get a number of his poems published. No one, however, was interested in a book.” That Jim worked so hard to bring attention to Tierney’s work, while barely acknowledging his own efforts, speaks to the quality of his spirit.

Jim was ever-curious, attentive, engaged, open to what else could elicit wonder. Even among poets, who often claim heightened awareness, he set a high bar. Here’s Jim observing swamp life at Philly’s John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge, and speaking to why any of this—poetry, noticing, generosity of attention—is worth arranging one’s life around:

No doubt some people find all this tedious. If you don't know what you're seeing, it all seems the same. Finding your way inside any body of knowledge requires an entry point. Direct the attention and it will happen. It might be action—two big-ass snapping turtles, gripped plastron to plastron and spinning in the water, making testudine whoopee—would throw a ray of light inside even the most calcified consciousness. Or it may be mere beauty taking us by surprise. Say, for instance, the sight, somewhere in the wood at a swamp's edges, of dogwood blooming not white but pink. Who knew?

We would do well to honor Jim’s memory by carrying on his magnanimous spirit in the poems we write and share, in slow and meandering conversations over coffee, and in thoughtfully noticing what surrounds us—perhaps most of all, each other.