This space will host occasional letters from friends, readers, and some responses, interviews and misc. ac

BIBLIODEATH: MY ARCHIVES (WITH LIFE IN FOOTNOTES) Antibookclub

SO RECENTLY RENT A WORLD: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, 1968-2012 (Coffee House)

Advance copies of Bibliodeath have been greeted by friends as follows:

Dear Andrei,

Bibliodeath is a renaissance. It is the exemplary text of our time, one which will be endlessly imitated and wrestled with like the biblical Jacob wrestling with the demon angel at the Jabbok River to gain a name. Bibliodeath has simply reinvented autobiography and historiography. In and of itself, this reinvention would be enough to expand the canon, except for the aesthetic splendor of the writing which elevates it to a category the canon has yet to invent. It is rare to be a witness to genius, and rarer still to encounter a prose more innovatively poetic than the very best of our postmodern and post-digital poetry. Where Derrida and Celan end, you begin and with you, we the enraptured reader are given the opportunity to experience you as “the pollinator.” May we learn to cultivate the literary endorphins you bestow upon us so that we may more effectively expand the narrow field of our insights. Now, with Bibliodeath, we will never again limit the canonic universe of the self you have invented for us. Nothing has died. Nothing is extinct. No entropy poisons the soul. We are not vapid barbarians of self-interest. When a writer like you creates Bibliodeath, we are all one step closer to defeating Thanatos. Thank you!

My best, Daniel

(Daniel Y. Harris)

Andrei,

 I am almost finished with my first reading of Bibliodeath, which for me at least is just what the doctor ordered. It's spectacular. I will be reading it a few more times and making notes. I pledge on my librarian’s gumshoes to generate a reading the book deserves. I’m already processing a boatload of potentials that you’ve packed into this glorious book. The “really hard problem” that you twist back through Brautigan’s brain is a show-stopper.

More personally, I was deeply touched in my memory chambers to read abt. your early life in Romania. A little context in a round-about–way: I was reading Bibliodeath on the anniversary of Bruce Hutchinson’s death. You published some of his drawings in the Exquisite Corpse. In the 70s he introduced me to your poetry, saying you were the best poet writing in America. His claim was on the basis of License to Carry a Gun. He lent me the book. I read it. A month
later I returned to his apartment in Brooklyn to discuss it. We smoked a few joints and talked abt. your characters – how you brought a deep sense of old world Puppenspiel magic to poetry. Leap to Lakewood: A dear old friend in Lakewood, Eva Weisman, who grew up Jewish in Vienna and had to flee there as a girl to Holland, once told me about the time she and her sister were in the temple and the torah box rolled out. She joyfully exclaimed – “Oh here come the puppets.” Anyway, you had something no other poets had. We really didn’t know what, or anything at that time of reading about your personal history. We were just starting out and scanning the scene. And now I am fathoming your
life and formation through this great book, and things are starting to make deeper and more poignant sense. I am thinking about you in Romania – the social forces, the ideological streams –the anti-Semitism and at the same time the personalism of the Orthodox church, the double-cross of realism and idealism, the authoritarian mystics and the radical materialists - your Old World take-aways and their transpositions into such a great book.

Am I off with morphed “personalism” twisting its way silently around you as a Jew in the Orthodox residue and the Commie collective organicity and then opening a way in the New World past the NY School and Personism and its mutations?

There’s the time motif in the book, too. The trace, the passageways, the play with Derrida. But I am wondering abt. another order of passageways. Did you hang much in the Bucegi Mts? Do you know Radu Cinamar? Read any of his books, say, Transylvanian Sunrise? Kook lit, something Jack Clarke taught me to savor. 

Ken Warren

Andrei,

Thanks so much for the beautiful new book. Love the little cameos of Sontag, handled with such aplomb, and the demure Kathy Acker (hilarious). I'm also in awe of your wide-ranging intellect. And the structure is very intriguing: the footnotes like a shadow that suddenly engulfs the book, then recedes. And a metaphor in its way for this transmigration of the word from the page to the (new) screen.

Big Cheers,

Aram Saroyan

Andre,

Just got the advance copy of Bibliodeath! Yay! Thank you! Perfect name for the publisher of your book and I hope Antibookclub is the perfect publisher for it. Glad I didn’t toss the box it came in or I’d have missed “Long Live the Death of Print.” Nice touch. As with Whatever Gets You Through the Night, I especially like the placement of the notes, both as to design and for reading (which includes being able to mull them over in direct relation to the text precisely because they’re contiguous to the relevant passages, so they become re/integrated into the text proper), which, for me, is the most important aspect off their placement; but when artful design and readability of content mesh, the rewards to the reader are squared.

JJ Phillips

Mon Cher -- just a word to say that I received Bibliodeath (the homophone 'bibliotheque' sounds in my ear) and having read only the first few pages am already delighted. Since I am back in the reviewing mode I will elucidate its finer points in under 1K wds. Interestingly, I just picked up Gleick's The Information which might serve as the pad from which to launch (no promises -- it might end up being entirely visceral). Alors et a Bientot,

Pat Nolan

Hi, Andrei,

I dig your book very much.The parts among the commies in Romania took me back to my years among the same in China, and prompt me to play the epistolero for the remainder of this paragraph. Watching and listening to the Maoists-cum-Dengists spout their crap, I had always assumed they were like Japanese imitating American pop music: not getting it quite right, exaggerating themselves into a burlesque bordering on cruel racist stereotype. But, no, Bibliodeath has shown me that even Euro-commies came on like caricatures of themselves. 

As for new technologies storing literature only to destroy it--that's no fear for me, nor even a hope, but an assumption. I knew a cop who told me that you can tell if a guy has killed his wife by his reaction to the news of her death. If he looks at you as though you just informed him that the sky is green, the grass blue--if his face is filled not with disbelief, but just the puzzled assumption that you are talking nonsense--then he didn't kill her. That's my reaction when someone suggests that the internet, or, for that matter, the electrical grid, is here to stay. Preposterous, says this epistolero. 

 Anyway, I like Bibliodeath, and congratulate you on another excellent book.

 Tom

http://tombradley.org

Maintenant #90 - Andrei Codrescu

An interview with Andrei Codrescu by SJ Fowler.

It is hard to think of fitting superlatives that have not already been bestowed upon Andrei Codrescu over the course of his writing career, which spans five decades and two continents in a manner that almost no one else’s has. Since his emigration from Romania in the late 1960s, his work has lodged itself in the poetic consciousness of both America and Europe for its sheer edges - its energy, its voice, its deft wit, and like all great dadaists, at heart, he is the hardest of realists, a man who cannot lie to himself above all others, in his poetry or in his ebullient criticism, journalism and collected writing. A man whose oeuvre reaches back into the depths of Europe from the core of America, who has been peer to some of greatest writers of our century, where he now, as we roll into the 21st century, must take his own place. For the 90th edition of Maintenant, Andrei Codrescu.

Photograph by Marion Ettlinger

 

3:AM: For my own personal ends, the legacy of your work and your thought on Western consumerist culture has been your ability to make clear the axiomatic negative totality at the heart of poetry (perhaps not just poetry – art, commentary, etc…). You’ve made it clear that you believe that a desire for totality – be it in meaning, in happiness, in governance (!) is impossible and so a poet must embrace the poem as always unfinished, and not attempt to use poetry as a medium for for orderliness. Do you think this a fair reading of a notion that has bound your work across your writing career?

Andrei Codrescu: Yes, but the negativity is a plenitude, an excess of sentiment. Dada and her dadaists said a big “no” to Western culture, and made of this paradox a generative art, a fountain of cultural action that calls itself anything but “art.” To put it another way, if you can’t experience the Nothing at the heart of what this Nothing generously spews, you cannot be a conduit for it. (And the Something that came out of it will congeal into a bad sample of statuary violence). The discipline of the overflowing cup is to practice the attention needed to enjoy fully the moment the cup runneth over, and then to dig it. That moment is usually a happy accident, or, as Ted Berrigan put it, “Great art is a great mistake,” So here you have another paradox: you can’t call it “art” because it’s too great for a puny label like that. For better prose on these paradoxes, see “The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess” ({Princeton, 2009), a book I wrote to look closer at the mechanics of the big NO, or YESYES, as Dada (ironically) calls itself in Russian and Romanian. (”Yes, yes,” as in, “sure, OK, yeah”) Poetry, to use another word I’d rather not use, but have used so much I can’t give it up now, is definitely an organ of disruption of all discourses that claim “cogency,” “coherency, “authority,” etc. It has ruined my life. (But I feel pretty great).

3:AM: Perhaps exemplified best in Road Scholar, the power of your critical commentary on the facile nature of much of contemporary Western culture and its place a kissing cousin to the repression of the Soviet style regime, seems to be drawn from a contradictory confluence of assured analysis, commentary and conviction and an equally powerful sense of bewilderment and loss. Do you think this is true?

AC: Yes, but only up to a point. Grownups in the Soviet fiefdoms were poor, afraid, undernourished, and treated like children or serfs who had to say yes, sir, to a bunch of power-drunk morons who watched them as well as they could. Our own (capitalist) indignities are inequality, overeating, financial and social anxiety, and fear of Dada who is watching us every minute. The common horror is Surveillance. The commies did the best they could with social organizations, schools, prisons, and camps, paranoia, censorship, and very bad technology. Compared to that, living in a glass house and running the occasional danger of being busted for drug-use or obscenity is a smaller horror. Now that they’ve added “terrorism,” though, a vaguely scary word like “art,” I fear that we’re in for a long psychological meltdown. Curable only by transfats and drug addiction. The loss is innocence, child wonder, Blake’s garden, nature loved in goofiness, spontaneity and surprise. Assured analysis, certitudes and certainties are obscene grownup protuberances.

3:AM: Your prolificism seems to be a fundamental part of your essence as a writer – the notion of relentless activity, of an endless engagement of writing, commentating, producing. It is exceptionally admirable. How do you conceive of your own energy of output?

AC: Not as an “ism.” In Romanian, my third native language, “ism” is in the middle of the word “cisma,” which means “boot,” or more exactly “army boot.” I associate boots and “isms” with the stink of my mother’s short-lived bofriend, an army captain whose stinking boots I could smell when I came home from school in 3d grade. And so with communism, capitalism, existentialism, prolificism… As for the production, I just make it like bees make honey: I think I’m fairly lazy, actually. If you spend a half-century writing and reading, it piles up. I just wrote a long essay, called “My Archives (with life in footnotes),” which is a sigh of gratitude and relief in praise of the internet for saving my weary back from dragging the hump of my heavy paper bullshit through the world.

3:AM: And having written nigh on forty books in forty years, what is your relationship to the finished book? Is it dead upon delivery, as they say, or do you have a sense of its continued life in that it may never be completely finished in your eyes?

AC: When I finish it I feel like I’ve emptied myself of all kinds of tics and horrors & amused myself in the process. A book’s like a one-year stand, it feels good in the morning, especially when the standee’s gone home. It’s finished and done for for me, but, unfortunately (happily) there come the readers, the glowing reviews, the fat money prizes, the naked fashion models, and the bed-chamber orchestras. Unless it’s the outraged ex-girlfriends, guys with guns, scribblers with overpicked bones, academics grinding axes, and crackheads with crabs.

3:AM: Do you think poetry has developed a notion that an excess of writing is somehow a lack? That there is a traditional, formal and constricting suspicion of writers who are effusive, as opposed to writers who are delicately withdrawn and lonesome in tone and manner? (It certainly seems that way in Britain)

AC: Yes, there is, but it’s easy to refute this notion with a look at our kin the musicians. Nobody blames them for jamming, putting out singles, lots of records, being on TV and radio, playing at birthday parties, etc. Being prolific and having a good time is how real artists do. The curmudgeons reflect their own insuficiencies: you produce too much for them, there is only so much they can absorb. The suspicious are stingy and small, they would like us to believe that their defects are virtues, and that their narrowed eyes make them aristocrats. There is also a suspicion by some so-called critics (who are only reviewers or tormented assistent professors) that if a writer is not voluptously suffering, the writing is not for them. The dying book-reviewer class of the fin-de-20th century, does not approve of writing that does not commit prolonged bouts of self-flagellation. To paraphrase Henry Miller, you can always find someone to share your misery, but it’s nearly impossible to communicate joy. You certainly touched a nerve here, because in the U.S., no less than Britain, the tiny pie of fine lit is sliced extremely thin by a few remaining influential critics and academics. We are waving goodbye to them as they shrink and melt under the waves of the energetic new century . Bye, bye, T.S. Eliot-skin-flakes, happy trails in hell Helen Vendler! You were heavy, we won’t miss you.

3:AM: You have advocated a collaborative energy throughout your writing career too, which is a greatly underappreciated notion in poetry, in my opinion. Did you always actively collaborate with peers or did it begin when you relocated to America in New York and San Francisco?

AC: Yes — the late 1960s were marvelous collaborative years! Ah, to be 21 in love with love, collaborating with lovely young geniuses like yourself, was a great big welcome to America for me. I kept at it, it’s fun, it’s sexy, it’s how you know that someone else knows (and tells you), and then you know what they know and make up new things so they can tell you that they know that but they know something else, too… There is a collaborative universe — unarchived and mostly unknown– of work from the Sixties of the late 20th well into ours. Collaborating is theatre, an activity as social and promiscuous as it gets. In New Orleans at the Gold Mine Saloon at Dauphine and Toulouse streets in the French Quarter we even wrote up our bodies and read each other into the morning. Bodies are fundamentally collaborative. Those stingy critics you mentioned would rather your body suffered confinement and painfully drained itself in slow drops on the page. Who are they kidding? This is a live world, it’s live because it collaborates. Ok, I’m getting worked up, but is there any wonderful thing on earth that isn’t made by fertilisation and embrace?

3:AM: And what affect did those years have upon the rest of your life? Your friendships with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Ted Berrigan – you have gone on to define your generation and those subsequent. Was it a period that left its mark on your writing specifically?

AC: I had the good luck to come on the scene in New York in the middle of a youth revolution. I was nineteen, America was nineteen… There was electricity, trains left for heaven every ten minutes. Allen was a big, generous, loving uncle full of wise advice for the foolish young. Others, like my father-brother figure, Ted Berrigan, were teaching the pop delight of the common objects to idiots like myself who carried the virus of metaphysics from Europe or Yale University. My contemporaries had halos of light and were pierced by Cupid every time they turned the corner at 2nd Avenue and St. Marks’ Place. Poetry was worshipped for its close connection to the gods, who were extremely numerous in those days, and also for its fearlessness. Death was a familiar, the generator of fashion. Photographers from Vogue crawled all over the Lower East Side in those days, looking for death’s latest rags. I had a permanent hard-on. I typed because I didn’t know what to do with my fingers when I didn’t have them around somebody’s waist. (In any case, the typing was generally in the cause of persuading somebody to let me put my arms around her with fingers splayed).That was plenty to keep me going in leaner times, like the Eighties. In the Nineties in New Orleans, love came back and ordered us to make poetry again.

3:AM: You have been a greatly energetic force in supporting and engaging with contemporary Romanian poetry. When one really considers it, the ebullience and intensity of the Romanian poets and poetic writers in the 20th century is almost unbelievable – the likes of Tzara, Celan, Blaga, Eminescu, Janco, Cioran, Cassian, Barbu, Pagis… How much do you see the influence of Romanian poetry emerge in your own concerns and work as the years pass?

AC: I left young, but I absorbed an immense amount of Romanian poetry, both approved and unapproved. I even read reviews of poetry books so I could read the quotes from the poets. In a place as boring, repressed, and culturally vacant as the provincial city I grew up in, poetry was like the Big White Way, it blinked like neon on Broadway. The Romanian poets you mention were geniuses because they couldn’t be anything else. There wasn’t enough of anything else to be, if you had thoughts and maybe loved music. Romanians turned a miserable history of national defeat into songs, a brilliant strategy for survival. Romania’s great poets are great only in the midst of catastrophe. The minute things get better, triumphalists, fascists, racketeers and other varieties of scumbags, turn artists into court jesters. Those guys I can’t read. It’s a bit like that now.

3:AM: And how do you see yourself in this tradition? Does it amuse you to think you might be considered a vital contributor to the Romanian canon perhaps precisely because your left the country so young and have shed so much light upon it from afar?

AC: I gave my condition of “exile” a tragic spin, certainly, in order to connect to whatever it was that made Romanians into poets. But I was a lucky exile. I landed in New York in 1966 in the middle of a revolution that made of “exile” and “alienation” the American esprits-du-jour. When I returned to Romania to “cover” the revolt-cum-coup in 1989 for radio and TV, I was welcomed. I was a link to the West, the world everyone dreamt of in Ceausescu’s dingy barbed-wired camp. I was translated instantly and celebrated. I’m not a very good educational tool, though, so when the first crush was over, people noticed my critical take on the West and my general air of insubordination. At present, I am in the canon because there was nowhere else to put me. Everybody is rushing around to catch the tail of the fading comet of Western lit. It’s too late for writers, I think, but Romanians make great computer engineers. They’ll catch up.

3:AM: You are the catalyst for the event taking place in a few weeks time in London, which is really a remarkable conflagration, perhaps happening only once for my generation to witness, with you and Gunnar Harding and Anselm Hollo and Tom Raworth. What are your perceptions of the event and its significance?

AC: Anselm Hollo is one of my very best friends. He is also one of the greatest, if not THE great contemporary American poet, and certainly the most underappreciated. In addition to his European sophistication and command of languages he translates from (Finnnish, Swedish, German, Russian) he has introduced American readers to a way of writing poetry in English that contains humor, irony, paradox, and other fine and nuanced ingredients. The reason for the inattention the constricted opinion-makers you mentioned before have lavished on Hollo’s poetry, is that humor is viewed by those people as especially suspect. In any case, Anselm Hollo has a cult, the Hollo Cult, a group of mostly poets who have launched a number of artistic movements, Actualism chief among them. As for the great Tom Raworth what can I say? He turned England on to Charles Olson, the New York Poets, the Language poets, and has delighted and pissed off the natives for decades. Gunnar Harding, who is translated into English by Anselm Hollo, should have gotten the Nobel prize instead of Thomas Transtromer. I don’t want to start a quarrel here where there isn’t any, but if you gonna give that prize to a Swede, would you rather give it to someone who was translated by Robert Bly or by Anselm Hollo? Psshhaw! I haven’t seen Raworth in three decades, I never met Harding, but I feel like they are family. The evening should be a trip.

 

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER
SJ Fowler is the author of three poetry collections, Red Museum (Knives Forks and Spoons Press 2011), Fights (Veer books 2011) and Minimum Security Prison Dentistry (AAA 2011). He is the UK poetry editor of Lyrikline and 3:AM. He is a full time employee of the British Museum and a postgraduate student at the Contemporary Centre for Poetic Research, University of London.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Sunday, April 8th, 2012.

 

from SCRISUL ROMANESC,

November28,2012

DESPRE EXIL ?I AMUZAMENTUL MUZELOR*

de Horia Dulvac

* Andrei Codrescu, Instrumentul negru. Poezii 1965-1968, editura Scrisul Românesc, Craiova, 2005

„Ie?eam din Infern fumând mult când/ aerul se umplu de motociclete”

O carte despre care nu am scris la vremea potrivit? – anul 2005 – dar pe care am redescoperit-o ?i recitit-o acum cu o anumit? fervoare a recuper?rii (fascinat ?i de puternica personalitate a scriitorului Andrei Codrescu) este Instrumentul negru. Poezii 1965-1968, ap?rut? la editura Scrisul Românesc din Craiova.

Volumul are o istorie care leag? într-un mod paradoxal (adic? dup? o logic? proprie muzelor ?i destinelor) un fir oarecum întrerupt din biografia literar? a autorului. Aceasta este dezv?luit? (confesiune de natur? s? aminteasc? înc? o dat? savoarea prilejuit? de aproprierile intelective de acest autor) într-un soi de Prefa?? intitulat? „Istoria instrumentului negru”.

Pe scurt, istoria instrumentului negru este urm?toarea: tân?rul poet sibian Andrei Codrescu (debutant la revista Steau din Cluj sub pseudonimul Andrei Steiu) le prezentase deja venerabililor Nicolae Manolescu ?i Nichita St?nescu câteva poezii care constituiau parte a manuscrisului s?u de debut. A?a cum Andrei Codrescu m?rturise?te, „ambii au fost calzi ?i bine dispu?i c?tre versurile mele ?i aveau sfaturi pentru viitor”.

Dezv?luindu-i lui Nichita St?nescu inten?ia de a pleca din România, acesta i-a „f?cut o predic? scurt? pe tema limbii engleze care, credea el, era limba viitorului, mult mai folositoare unui poet decât franceza”. Aveam de-a face, observ? Andrei Codrescu, cu un sfat profetic, de?i „sigur, nu am decis eu desf??urarea viitorului imediat”.

Ce s-a întâmplat dup? aceea, este deja un fapt cunoscut: dup? o reziden?? de ?ase luni în Italia, Andrei Codrescu a emigrat în America, bucurându-se aproape imediat de un impresionant succes literar, pe care îl gestioneaz? ?i acum cu energie. Despre opera sa s-au scris inclusiv teze de doctorat în America, Italia sau România.

Volumul în cauz? reune?te poeziile concepute în limba român? între anii 1965-1968, adic? anii care au urmat imediat emigr?rii. Filonul s?u poetic românesc (noteaz? Andrei Codrescu cu autoironie) „s-a stins abrupt în anul 1968”, când a început s? scrie în englez? – o limb? în care, ?arjeaz? el, primele sale poezii înc? „sunau române?te”.

A?adar, aventura debuteaz? prin transmiterea acestui manuscris lui ?tefan Baciu – o figur? marcant? a emigra?iei române?ti de atunci - care urma s? editeze volumul la editura Mele din Honolulu (la universitatea unde acesta era profesor de literatur? hispano- american?).

Din motive ce ?in de imprevizibilit??ile destinului, cartea nu a mai ap?rut ?i a peregrinat împreun? cu autorul timp de 40 de ani, voiajând în diverse cutii de carton „din California în Fran?a, din Baltimore la New York, din New York la New Orleans”.

Manuscrisul a fost dezgropat „în cursul unei ac?iuni arhivistice organizat? cu inten?ia de a elibera un pic de spa?iu în cas?” ?i a fost trimis dup? aproape jum?tate de secol talentatei poete Carmen Firan (tr?itoare la New York ?i fiica redactorului ?ef al editurii ?i funda?iei Scrisul Românesc din Craiova, cas? editorial? care ?i-a asumat ?i a promovat aceast? necesar? misiune literar? recuperatorie ), pentru a confirma dac? într-adev?r poemele „sunt vii” sau emo?ia provenit? din recitirea lor era „pur nostalgic?”.

Dar versurile s-au dovedit a fi nu numai vii, ci odat? eliberate din cu?ca acestor împrejur?ri (ale c?ror ra?iuni sunt proprii destinului), s-au sim?it în noul mileniu ca la ele acas? (o reîntoarcere ?i la acel „acas?” al limbii cum remarca poeta Carmen Firan), începând s? vorbeasc? ?i s? semnifice imediat cu o energie neobi?nuit? .

A?a s-a n?scut volumul în cauz?, care p?streaz? nu numai Prefa?a lui ?tefan Baciu, dar con?ine ?i Introducerea autorului care devoaleaz? felul în care debutul s?u virtual în române?te face un ocol american de o jum?tate de secol, conchizând: „?tie muza cum s? se amuze!”.

Astfel, cititorul este pus în fa?a unei poezii care pare practic nou?: una perfect adaptat? noilor structuri stilistice, care î?i dezv?luie abia acum necunoscute aptitudini spre un soi de avangard?; o poezie a c?rei expresie nu e câtu?i de pu?in uzat? dup? jum?tate de secol de exil.

Aceast? performan?? î?i extrage resursele dintr-o calitate simpl? ?i s?n?toas? a lui Andrei Codrescu: s? îi spunem o originalitate nativ? (gândind îns? la ceva mai puternic conceptualizat, o tr?s?tur? gra?ie c?reia poetul e un soi de ultim? frontier? în supravie?uirea prin expresie ?i limb? – îi conferim acestei sintagme oarecare universalitate, ba chiar o dimensiune ontologic?: adic? lumile se nasc prin gândire, care e propozi?ional?, ?amd.).

Nimic nu îi este mai str?in acestui scriitor decât redundan?a, manierismul, evolu?ia într-un câmp stilistic deja configurat, ceea ce face din el un explorator al marginilor ?i solu?iilor. De fapt, întreaga sa atitudine ?i ac?iune cultural? degaj? o intoleran?? imediat? pentru concesia contrafacerii, poetul fiind de fapt un soi de rebel ra?ional, un expert (nu doar stilistic) în prezervarea libert??ii proprii, sentiment la care te face deîndat? p?rta? cu entuziasm.

A?adar, primul sentiment pe care îl ai ?inând în mân? fragilul dar totu?i puternicul volum (exist? o for?? neobi?nuit? a frumosului, în jurul c?ruia se structureaz? lumi ?i care formuleaz? ordini nea?teptate) este de recuperare metempsihotic? a „r?d?cinilor limbii” într-un demers stilistic actual, care transgreseaz? formulele plastice ?i biografiile: „ca s? înve?i alt? limb? ?i-a l?sat Dumnezeu/linia str?bunilor/pe care po?i s-o pip?i pân´ la r?d?cin?” ; pe acest traiect scurtcircuitat al str?mo?ilor ?i al limbii „gurile tac”, iar „c?utarea îns??i va începe s? miroas?/a cimitir cu fructe exotice”

Exilul reprezint? o ac?iune nu doar de recuperare a identit??ii (ac?iune care se petrece ?i în geografia limbii), ci ?i o c?l?torie biografic? în propria noastr? vitalitate. Este un excurs periculos în care po?i aluneca „acolo unde se amestec? p?mântul cu sângele” ?i „vocalele devor?”(din poemul Limbi str?ine).

În aceast? c?l?torie recuperatorie, actele arbitrare sunt fatalmente înc?rcate de consecin?e, biografiile individuale sufer? „pierderi inutile” înregistrate inevitabil în „num?r?torile cere?ti”: „Trebuie s? întrerup ?i ora?ele ?i oamenii care fug c?tre mine” ;„Trebuie s? strâng totul ca s? nu se fac? o pierdere inutil?/de curent electric”; „Câteva gre?eli vor fi ?i în num?r?torile cere?ti/chiar dac? poetul va pl?ti pentru ele” (din poemul Trebuie)

P?mântul (o tem? care revine în ecua?ia acestei paradigmatice plec?ri/reîntoarceri) este „f?r? continuare”, prim?verile sunt „improvizate”, au „nume de carcer?” (din poemul de angelus) .

Versurile sunt ac?ionale, manifeste – de?i nota dominant? e tonic? - poetul se las? purtat de vibra?iile grave ale istoriei care contamineaz? biografiile: „De câteva sute de ani ne retragem din step?/l?sând în urm? o cas? umplut? pân? în pod/cu bobinele de film ale viitorului imperiu al propagandei” ; sau „Sârma ghimpat? a devenit atât de familiar?/încât o mânc?m cu pâine” (Cotidiana).

Este limpede (pentru cei care ?tiu care era atmosfera lumilor comuniste din estul Europei – în mod particular a dictaturii cu accente grote?ti din România), c? un asemenea manuscris inocent era cu des?vâr?ire lipsit de ?ans? la examenul cenzurii ideologice a vremii. Trebuie totu?i remarcat c? o eventual? publicare a acestui manuscris în diaspora pân? în anul 1989 ar fi putut însemna un veritabil volum de poezie dizident?: „Ne e fric? s? nu fim la z?pad?.A?a/cum am renun?at la noi în?ine f?r? împotrivire”; „Ce vom face dac? ne vor lua ?i frica?”; „Acum trebuie s? ?inem un sfat” (Un fel de fric?)

Dar spiritul codrescian (animat de un soi de ra?ionalitate autoprotectiv? paradoxal?) este mai degrab? afin exerci?iilor ludice de libertate (imediat?) ?i mai pu?in dispus s? se confrunte cu o istorie de?in?toare înc? a unui bagaj de bestialitate, preocupat? s?-?i digere pân? la exorcizare propriul con?inut. În poemul de disparizione angelorum de pild?, construc?ia stilistic? are o vizualitate puternic expresionist? ?i o tonalitate retoric? aproape profetic?, iar vulnerabilitatea omului e un adjuvant, un truc al libert??ii: „Toate cortinele le-am umplut cu m??ti f?cute din capetele/ noastre”; „Dar eu voiam s? fiu singur/cu necazurile mele// cineva grijuliu m-a pus între gratii ?i mi-au adus un prieten/care vorbea patru limbi/…/ Omul care eram f?cea pipi ?i mânca pu?in/Cu mâna dreapt? la frunte: am fost fericit”.

Vorbind despre Andrei Codrescu ca un rebel lucid ?i ra?ional, trebuie subliniat c?, aproape invariabil, exerci?iul s?u poetic este un mecanism de supravie?uire. Dilemelor ?i exigen?elor istoriei le este opus? un soi de distan?are degajat? - poetul refuzând s? fie victim?, s? devin? captiv. Poezia sa este un soi de ritualitate a c?rei miz? e punerea în acord – iar solu?iile plastice ?in de mecanismele perfectate de omul liber ?i creativ pentru a se adapta ?i concilia cu zeii ?i cu propria biografie.

Libertatea (inclusiv cea stilistic?) este a?adar la Andrei Codrescu un cuvânt magic, un comandament infinitezimal dar imbatabil, continuu ?i operant, aidoma vie?ii care nu înceteaz? s? se legitimeze prin multiplele sale forme ?i trucuri în alteritate: „Cum s? înc?pem în acela?i aer cu trupurile oamenilor/?i cadavrele ideologiilor moarte/ a spus el/domnul Anonim”; „Cadavrele ideologiilor vii/ nici nu se pot c?ra pe spate”; „Au c?utat peste tot, dar n-a fost urm? de Luni sau de Joi” (Inevitabilul mar?). Sau „Pace e numele t?u ?i adânc? prostia celor care te laud?/gras? vestal? pe un foc stins demult/eu ?i-a? aprinde vreo dou? mituri la c?p?tâi/dac? nu mi-ar fi într-adev?r ru?ine/de chilo?ii scur?i ai zei?elor care circul? în aceste eternit??i” (pacea)

Aceste mize ale existen?ei sunt tratate, dup? cum am v?zut, în cheie ludic?, gravitatea fiind ea îns??i un locus periculos pentru libertate, o închidere a ra?ionalit??ii ?i în final o capcan? mortal? a expresiei.

Autoironia tonic? e secondat? de un alt instrument ?i set de unelte profesionale: vizualitatea ?i plasticitatea, imaginea paradoxal? ?i tu?a avangardist?. Iat? de pild?, într-o ascensiune de-o vizualitate frapant? a la Chagall, în poemul Inevitabilul mar?: „Fratele m?celarului de la gar? se urc? în cer/Dup? el zboar? m?celarul cu o costi?? afumat? în mân?/Sora lui care n-a pl?tit niciodat? chirie vine ?i ea”; „Cu un efort imens, fratele planeaz? peste furourile/surorii puse la uscat”. Iar în acest mar? chagallian al biografiilor de familie, „Vântul r?mas singur se bate pe sine însu?i//Cu bro?uri de partid”.

Tehnica aceasta a unei vizualit??i levitante este un mecanism stilistic uzitat cu succes în repetate rânduri: cr?ciunul (miracolul) vine ca o consecin?? ca o z?pad? epistemic? - sacrul este dezmembrat în buc??i ca o juc?rie ?i reasamblat la loc: „A?adar a venit Cr?ciunul:bomboane colorate/speran?e în papuci” . Miracolul are o miz? definitiv? a lucidit??ii care confer? jocului de-a libertatea, tensiune ?i tragism: „mari energii deplasate ca s? opre?ti o lacrim?/energii care fac s? zboare un car cu boi cu tot”(Cr?ciunul)

Construc?iile vizuale sunt cel mai adesea fruste ?i paradoxale, iar tu?a plastic? este avangardist?: c?zând de pe acoperi?, mama „c?ut?torului de comori” a fost „mâncat? cu m?sline/în timp ce fiul î?i obliga profesorul s? taie o mân?/în fa?a poporului mul?umit” (pentru un om).

În fine, mai trebuie observat c? poezia aceasta apeleaz? cu mare u?urin?? la un soi de mize ultime care reu?esc s? str?pung? acel (consistent, chiar dac? u?or camuflat) ?esut liric ?i dens spa?iu emo?ional. Este un soi de ultimativitate care ordoneaz? ?i clarific? ?i care constituie poate secretul acelei extraordinare comunic?ri cu un cititor care (de?i e ?inut la distan?? de acea dimensiune a unei alter ra?ionalit??i poetice) e f?cut deîndat? prieten, complice, confesor.

Dar cel mai bine e s? gu?ti acest poet, care are o oroare declarat? de „cuvintele savante”, apropiindu-l de mizele propriei tale libert??i, ca o imersiune nud? într-un univers plastic, eliberat de lesturile erudite, un fel de lectur? pe care însu?i Andrei Codrescu l-ar prefera:

„special ast? sear?/poeziile se coboar? dintr-un c?rucior de smoal?/?i mi se suie în poal? s? m? înmul?easc? cu colinda”;

„eu sunt plin cu un vapor pe care /l-au l?sat turcii ca s? aduc? pungi cu bani de la ?igani/dar mi s-a înro?it ochiul ?i c?pitanul/s-a spânzurat cu un condei de un burduf cu brânz?” ;

„unii plâng în ?ig?ri ?i ud? tutunul ?i unii plâng în vânt/?i ud? vântul iar unii putrezesc p?mântul//Iar unii plâng în plâns ?i lor/Li se cuvine lumea”;

„Ie?eam din Infern fumând mult când/Aerul se umplu de motociclete” .

5 April 2012

Dear Andrei,

We are well past St. David’s Day and the Ides of March, and even April Fool’s Day has come and gone, so we are left to our own devices – that is, whatever devices or vices we can devise (is English a great language, or wot?). March was more cultural than scholarly chez nous, but that was OK by us. We also had a tropical heat-wave that set everything a-greening like crazy – most strange and unnatural, and of course our Scottish heritage immediately told us “Well pay for it!” No tornadoes, however.

The too-familiar theme of Old Age continues to raise its hoary head. E.g., my youngest son, out in Vancouver, BC, is working on a drama called, tentatively, “Out On a Limb,” and the theme is intergenerational relations. He tells me that he can quiz me on the vast subject of growing old, and record the interview (edited, one presumes, for profanity and indecency), and that my voice (the Voice of Wisdom, if you can believe that crap) will then be electronically projected toward the audience, out of a grove of big Douglas firs on an island near Vancouver. Well, every university teacher is a ham, an actor manqué, or ought to be, so I should be a natural. I think that this is an honor. What is your considered opinion?

As for that Culture: we have taken in several plays, and of these only one was a dog, so we are ahead of the game. The dog was lavishly staged at the Goodman, and was a bad version of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real. In fact we didn’t realize how bad it was until I read John Lahr’s review of the play in The New Yorker (Lahr came to town for this production) and learned that Williams had written a quite different play, which the new director, a Catalan with a reputation as an Innovator, had proceeded to butcher, in the sacred name of Outrage and Innovation For Its Own Sake. This is Bullshit (for its own sake, I suppose). A local theater critic swooned over the production. This man, a Brit, is a moron about half the time (when I disagree with him, that is). But then, anger is the best medicine, short of an apoplectic fit.

Most recently we saw (eight hours of theater on two separate nights) Tony Kushner’s epic Angels in America, which was fascinating, though in describing it to you, for example, I might take a slightly different tack than in describing it to another correspondent, an old friend and coeval who is a retired Episcopalian priest. Court Theater did good work on this one; an actor named Larry Yando was especially pungent playing the role of Roy Cohn, pursued by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg – who ends the liturgical words of the Kaddish (addressed to Cohn’s corpse) with “You son-of-a-bitch”). Effective, that was, especially as witnessed by a Hyde Park and heavily university audience with, one supposes, echt liberal leanings – and probably a knowledge of just what the Kaddish might be.

The local P. G. Wodehouse fan club is moving on with the organization of next year’s Wodehouse Society convention here, and I have learned that a fellow conspirator has taken a copy of my satire “The Curse of the Woosters: A Blasphemy” and is converting it into booklet form, which we will sell under the table to the more depraved members of the Society, and this will earn me either deathless fame or eternal infamy, and frankly I don’t care a flying fuck which it is. That is the very latest from here. All the best, and of course yours aye,

This above is letter 57 from my long-time correspondent and, certainly, friend, Dean Miller, Emeritus Professor of Comparative Religions at the University of Chicago, once a colleague of our common departed friend Ioan P. Coulianou. Dean's letters will one day make a witty and erudite collection, messages from a true scholar and thinker. My own responses have been, I'm afraid, perfunctory and superficial for the most part, but I did held my end of the correspondence now and then.

*

march 15, 2012

Dear Mr. Codrescu

I commend to your attention the 2011 Annual Report of the Globalization and Monetary Policy Institute, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. I know. The name glazes your eyes. But inside, I think you'll find something interesting: The people (or the government) of Zimbabwe have been reading you or listening to your broadcasts on NPR.

A long time ago, I heard your story about the emotional distance between you and your father.

In passing you made a reference to the regimentation of life in Romania of the Warsaw Pact years and the general worthlessness of paper money. Once, as I remember it, you found yourself in a summer youth camp designed ostensibly to develop political and class solidarity for young communists. Your father visited, and having nothing better to do with you, ended the visit prematurely, leaving you with a large wad of cash.

As your story goes, as near as I can remember it, you found yourself in one of the camp outhouses, which had no toilet paper, even of the rudimentary type common to Romania at the time. So with nothing else to use, you took out your father's cash and made it serve a useful purpose.

Well, the lead article in this FRB of Dallas annual report is about hyperinflation in Zimbabwe and the devastation it has wrought on that country. Evidently, the $100 trillion Zimbabwean currency note -- the highest denomination ever issued for any paper currency -- is a hot item on eBay, selling for $5 U.S.
One of the photographs accompanying the articles showed a sign that appeared in a public bathroom. It said, "TOILET PAPER ONLY to be used in this toilet.

NO CARDBOARD
NO CLOTH
NO ZIM DOLLARS
NO NEWSPAPER"

As I said, somebody in Africa must be listening to you. Either that, or your problem in that camp crapper way back when was not unique.

All the best, Charles Saydah

March 16, 2012

Mr. Saydah,

Thank you. I am fond of a trillion dollar note issud during the war in Yugoslavia, featuring an image of Nikola Tesla. I'm not unaware of just how much misery this esthetically pleasing and worthless currencies inflict, but something there is, perversely and retroactively, funny and weird about these notes. Andrei

*

March 18, 2012

Elva Maxine Beach, one my stellar former students, wrote Neurotica (2008), published by New Belleville Press.

*

March 19, 2012

Andrei, dear--With many miles now between us, and many moons since we last sat at a conference room table together, let me assure you: you were right. You were right about the importance of being amusing. You were right about jumping head first into another book project without worrying about where the dust will settle on the previous one. You were right about never taking one's self too seriously. You were right about steering clear of AWP and MLA. You were right about not planning to make any money. You were right about the virtues of reading broadly but speaking specifically. You were right about the capacity of one good anecdote to obliterate everything else. You were right about licking the streets of New Orleans. You were right about the sky being interesting with or without stars. You were right about whiskey. You were right about black t-shirts. You were right about me. Andrei, what a bastard you are! I love you very much, old man. And I miss you. Please be right about immortality. Hugs and kisses, Megan

Megan Volpert, a stellar poet, has done much since the days of my mentoring, most notably her latest book, Sonics in Warholia, 2011, Sibling Rivalry Press. She's being way too nice in the above mush-note, I wonder what's up:)

*

march 21st 2012

the following is from a typewritten letter from Sandy Berrigan, a confirmed luddite, who read The Poetry Lesson, and typed: "What a cool surprise. I love getting books in the mail. Your writing is as perky as a young girl's tits if I may so." Yes, of course, Sandy may: she was married to the great poet Ted Berrigan, who taught me much about poetry and the English language in the Sixties and Seventies. Ted died young on July4th, 1983. Sandy goes on to say, apropos of my book, "There is Ted again. What an influence on some of you and those he didn't influence he still is taught by them." True enough: at least three generations of poets who didn't know Ted Berrigan were magnetized and propelled forth by his work. Sandy is a poet as well, she lives in the country in Northern California, and is a great traveler and corespondent.

*

march 21, 2012

Your book The Dog with the Chip in His Neck

I have just started reading your book and for the most part it is very insightful. There is something that keeps coming up (I rented a movie the other day and they said the same thing). The idea that American Cooking was bland in the 50's or 60's. In this case of the movie it stated that Julia Childs was the one who taught America how to cook. Maybe I am missing something. All of my life I have been surrounded by garlic, spices, incredible foods...I come from Detroit. Grew up with an Italian mother, Italian Grandmother, Scottish Grandmother in a Polish Neighborhood. (Michigan and Central Area). spent a lot of time in East Dearborn, Ann Arbor and many other areas of Metro Detroit. I was entrenched in Middle Eastern Culture, Italian Culture, Catholic Church. And now I live in Jackson, Michigan. Any weekend any of the churches put on dinners that would have you telling everyone about the cooks out here. There is an African American Church out here that cooks on Thanksgiving that people actually give up there family obligations to attend that day.

Andrea Wills This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

THE BACON REVIEW

March 2013

ANDREI CODRESCU INTERVIEW

http://www.thebaconreview.com/featurethree.php?id=34

ANDREI CODRESCU: KING OF THE TALKIES

review by Kenneth Warren

Book Review: So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012 Andrei Codrescu. Coffee House Press, 2012, 408 pages, perfect bound, $22.00.

“There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away.”

—Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto”

“The structure of the sacred in the human consciousness is built on the structure of synchronicity, as opposed to the diachronic structure of radical historicism.”

—Mircea Eliade, “The Sacred in the Secular World”  

“That’s just talk, not Logos,

              a getting down to cases.

I take it as simple particulars that

              we wear our feelings on our faces.”

            —Ted Berrigan, “New Personal Poem”

 “I am a cross and the idea

Is to burn twice at the four tips.”

—Andrei Codrescu, “to my heart”

Andrei Codrescu is today the great American poet of intercultural encounter, absolutely exceptional in his capacity to elucidate with analytical power, emotional sensitivity, and lyric force the most revealing points of tension between ethical and imaginative perceptions in a world under the gun. With sympathy for eruptions against authority, Codrescu has infused child-man rebellion and passionate desire into the many poems of self-recollection that are now presented with incisive comment and context in this 408 page collection entitled So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012 (2012). A Jewish exile from Communist Romania, Codrescu arrived in the United States in 1966 with an otherworldly grip on myth and politics. His imagination was enjoined to reveal not only the double-cross of realism and idealism, which had arisen in his homeland of authoritarian mystics, rabid nationalists, and radical materialists, but also the autonomous reality of poetry as the underground counterforce to police state repression.

 To the question of earliest influences, Codrescu recalls: “Before I knew English, my ideas of poetry were formed by Lucian Blaga, Tudor Arghezi, Geo Bogza, Benjamin Fundoianu, Ilarie Voronca, Eugen Jebeleanu, Villon, Baudelaire, Tristan Tzara, Gherasim Luca, Nazim Hikmet, Nellie Sachs” ("Andrei Codrescu - Poetry & Interview with Mihaela Moscaliuc."  Connotation Press: an Online Artifact (Issue VI, Volume IV: February 2013). Web. 12 Feb. 2013). Here, Codrescu’s sources suggest a complex sensibility steeped not only in lyricism and Dadaism but also in Christian and Jewish mysticism. So far as Codrescu’s Romanian inheritance is concerned, it is clear that Tristan Tzara, the Jewish Romanian Dadaist visionary instigator, is his comrade in the revolt against logic; Mircea Eliade, the Romanian Orthodox historian and philosopher of religion, is his comrade in the sacred primordium. From the beginning, then, Codrescu’s voice has been pledged to a sacramental act by which the de-sacralization of poetry through Tzara might be joined to a re-sacralization through Eliade. A playful techno-messianic subjectivity thereby speaks through Codrescu’s assimilation of Jewish Romanian and Romanian Orthodox sources into English language poetry: 

the translation machine on mount athos
has multiple portals for mortals and one for eternity

it comes and goes on its self-devouring path 
leaving behind critical self-sufficiency to doom posterity 
it won’t be doomed boom boom can you believe

just how much work it is to deconstruct a world 
that was read by everybody in their own language 
though there are many languages and not one for you

ubu dada yahoo bing google wiki

in the kingdom of the one syllable
check the weather it comes from the outside

(“one syllable”, 60)

With a real feel for the Aeolian outgas of religious acts that animates common life and poetic imagination, Codrescu gravitated to the New York scene that had constellated around Paul Blackburn’s commitments to the spoken word and the tribal field of talking poets. In order to learn English, of course, Codrescu had to pick up the vocal gestures of others. From interactions with New York poets, most especially Ted Berrigan, Codrescu would discover the linguistic space for perfecting at the very heart of America’s new oral poetry a dynamic personal art, which could masterfully honor a history of Romanian Jewish trauma twisted around the Patriarchal double-cross.

             “Nothing shocked my Romanian metaphysical sensibilities more than Ted Berrigan’s absolutely insistent attention to the seemingly trivial” (“Introduction,” Alien Candor: Selected Poems 1970-1995, 1996, 13), Codrescu once declared. Although Eliade’s phenomenology of the sacred provided Codrescu with a bullet-proof defense against flat-lining the imagination into “the seemingly trivial,” he generously concluded with respect to Berrigan’s practice: “Of course, this wasn’t the case, as it became apparent on further reading: he was employing ‘non-poetic’ language because, amazingly, few American poets had” (13-14). Nevertheless, Codrescu’s metaphysically charged apprehension of the rules for poetry had already crowned his sense of “‘non-poetic’ language.” Therefore he could modulate “the seemingly trivial” with fidelity to Old World convictions about the verticality of consciousness and the esoteric tip of the imagination. In short, he was equipped to take it higher.

the conscious and the unconscious

are languages in a state of translation

and their respective losses

are the gods (168)

In other words, he was possessed by fantastic, quasi-religious, supernatural chops.

All sound is religion.

Language is merely a choir boy in this religion.

Sometimes a bishop wind rattles the windows,

Still, I must speak the most intelligent language available

While I have this typewriter knowing full well that tomorrow

I might be able to welcome a color Xerox machine into my studio

And with it there will be a revolution in my life.

(“sunday sermon”, 217)

He could see “the translation machine on mount athos” (60); he could imagine “the gods” (168); he could grok “the self must/be full of the English language” (232).

Consequently, the “chatty abstraction”—ascribed to “New York School Poetry” by Eileen Myles, who recognized “the limitations” within a poetics of self-abnegation (“Long and Social,” Narrativity, Issue 2.Web 12 Feb. 2013)—is transmuted through Codrescu’s oracular sacred prism.

                        i kiss his green hand

                        it tastes like my eyes, I see through my kiss

                        a line of prophets, all blind.

                        some blinder than the others in the dark green

                        of his hand, crossing his lifeline

                        to life.

(from: ‘leadership”, 106)

Codrescu presents an essential “lifeline” for gauging the evolution of American poetry. “I tried to find a bridge between the dark metaphorical music of my first poets, and the pop insistence on the actual, physical world that was the passionate poetics of my new friends” (97), Codrescu notes with respect to his early personae poems. Now it is easy, with So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012 in hand, to see how Codrescu’s “bridge” through Berrigan offers a “lifeline” that differs substantially from the abstract and impersonal tendencies which have captured imaginations in the wake of Zukofsky. To be sure, the two opposing currents which propelled the New York School—the impersonal work of Zukofsky and the personal play of O’Hara—become fully illuminated under Codrescu’s captivating advance from Berrigan, whose 1972 Vort interview with Barry Alpert still marks a crucial fork in the road for American poets:

In fact at the time we had a great contempt for Zukofsky. It was impersonal. We had Frank O’Hara and a tradition on back through Apollinaire, and we thought that Zukofsky and all the people that were talking about Zukofsky were rock-heads. We were sort of enlightened later by Aram Saroyan and Clark Coolidge who all came out of Zukofsky in a certain way, and who had a lot to show us when they came out. We were the rock-heads in a way but we didn’t have much to take from Zukofsky. We were a little too flippant for that. No, I think the man is very respectable, a very respectable poet, but I think he’s dull and a sort of nit-picker in a way that Aram Saroyan isn’t, although everybody accuses him of being one. Maybe I’m too close to Zukofsky in one way, and a little young on the other hand to really get him. I get it out of Aram Saroyan and Bob Creeley. 

(quoted by John Latta, “Notebook (Ted Berrigan, Ron Padgett, Pierre Reverdy, &c.)”, Thursday, October 18, 2012. Web. 12 Feb. 2013)

While the impersonal work lineage extended from Zukofsky through Coolidge to the Language Movement, with its Marxist inspired labor theories of poetry, the personal play lineage extended from O’Hara through Berrigan to Codrescu, whose “translation machine on mount athos” (60) could preserve “language” through the “sound” of “religion” (217).

Nothing characterizes the playful Dionysian aspiration in American poetry better than the drive to negate the patriarchy and become the crowned, conquering, always mouthy, and quite often drunk consort of the Great Mother. Codrescu’s poetry unfolds, quite marvelously, in relation to this playful Dionysian aspiration whose style of consciousness clusters around such oralist poets as Kerouac, Olson, O’Hara, and Berrigan—all of whom were groomed through Roman Catholic conditioning to honor masochistic experience. What makes Codrescu’s poetry so interesting is that the collective historical conscience that binds him to Jewish identity does not stop him from submerging himself in the poetry of ecstasy, lunacy, and punishment that Dionysus had visited upon these Catholic precursor poets who so powerfully shaped America’s oralist playbook.

Eventually though, the whole humiliating sweep of masochistic compulsion at the oppositional edge of American poetry becomes evident to Codrescu, whose “blue jew notes” recognizes Sylvia Path’s famous entanglement with the Jew and the Nazi in “Daddy”:  

                        a blue jew

                                   a horny jew

                        a jew with blue balls

                        an old boston jew

                        where the snow is blue

                        the blue-cheese burger

                        overdone by the black-blue

                        short order cook from benares

                        with the blue elephant inked on her ankle

                         the sky is blue in benares

                        the snow is eggplant blue in boston

                        oh blue jew blue jew

                        the books are dusty and blue

                        you read them all when they were new

                                   oh daddy Sylvia outrhymed you (13)

In “tristan tzara the man who said no” Codrescu grasps again the masochistic tension that bears “humiliation and elegance” through poetry:

                        sensibility was not what spelled doom

                        but rather forelocks and insouciance, palabras y cadavros,

                        the toasts made ten years before in a cocteau moment.

                        humiliation and elegance were best of friends for ages.

                        there were rabbis in the crowds entertaining the slaves.

                        no one laughed at anything he couldn’t kill.

                        (unless he laughed so hard he couldn’t and then he was drunk.)

                        what we must do now is to conduct the study

                        of that certain laughter no longer known to us

                        who laugh without suffering as if laughing was funny.

                        we’ll begin in 1899 when public hangings were thinning out,

                        long enough to allow for flounces, wit, and mercy.

                        class, we’ll use recordings from the very first chortle

                        thought worth recording by mr. Edison for mr. chaplin. (395)

For Codrescu the struggle to retain an archaic subjectivity that can hustle-bump ideology is concentrated in “tzara’s laughter” (396). His surface concerns, which include democracy, identity, individuality, language, paternity, pluralism, religion, sociality, and technology, speak to core ethical dilemmas that can be more humanly calibrated through feeling that generates Old World respect for beauty, children, mystery, love, and nature:

                        The shadow in my blood will model for a fee.

                        And yet a lake of absent possibilities has risen

                        To the chin of the folk, and the waters keep rising

                        For what could be a model drowning.

                        I conversed with the drownees. What they said

                        Turned my love for myself into syllables.

                        Will I be a model for my son or only endless buzzing?

                                                            (from “model work,” 234)

Codrescu occupies the vital spot in the ‘I’ matrix—where poets are possessed by dispositions that speak lyrically to a world of common dispossessions and imaginative possessions. By way of the book’s title, he wryly acknowledges the force of zombie capitalism on the great ontological narcissism that drives the poet to do the voices and usurp the surplus of the other. “The urge to invent poets seized me often, whenever I heard a ‘voice’ articulating what I didn’t think was ‘me,’ but it had its own personality” (145), he explains in a note.

With License to Carry a Gun, his first book published in 1971, Codrescu emerged armed-up for America’s counter-cultural revolution. In kinship with battle-scarred sub-sub personalities, Coderscu staked himself to Rimbaud’s claim that “I is an other.” As Codrescu’s Romanian otherworld fell into the American underground during the Sixties, he found his tongue. “My first poems in English were written as if I was taking dictation from three different faces of zeitgeist: a jailed Puerto Rican activist, an angry protofeminist, and a crazed Vietnam war veteran,” writes Codrescu. “The personae were still partly Romanian, speaking with the mystical accents of my early poetry idols” (97).

Codrescu hacked his way past the great hulking Personalism of Whitman and the scrawny Personism of O’Hara with the needy code of the mystical outcast. He took the talking stick from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, too. As Puerto Rican prison poet Julio Hernandez, he blasted away the famous phase taken from Charles Dickens' novel Our Mutual Friend  by Eliot—"He Do the Police in Different Voices.” He sang of brotherly love for the sake of America’s imprisoned English as a second language multitude:

i’m careful with my dreams of death,

they should not slip into my comrades’ nights,

take the place of their erotic dreams

                                      —a real jailer is needed for this—

paolo sleeps with his mouth wide open,

mario’s left hand hands from the bed.

i could be free if I let go for a second,

put death in their dreams.

oh dogs of silence,

i need you, senor (102)

In a New York minute, Codrescu’s ballistic imagination was soon firing with Julio Hernandez into Melville’s universal brotherhood of man. 

                                    melville knew me as rapists know all about virgins

                                    but he wasn’t me, blind.

                                    there is an invisible sphere made of love

                                    that is color. Its roots are in the east,

                                    they’re of black blood

                                    where Africa kills the negro waiter in white shoes,

                                    where fish grow blue in sugar trees.

                                    melville’s place on earth is a furious mouth

                                    where brotherhood is tested by removing light,

                                    removing eyes.

                                    It is a gift to me from human sugar trees. (103)

Shot through the poem is dark matter grasped thematically as imprisonment, masculinity, race, and sexual identity. Audacious claim, compassionate regard, sculpted self-presence, and Surrealistic tinge generate “a gift.” Sweet, sexual syrup drips through the cellblock.   

With Codrescu, self make-over pulls from below.

Codrescu’s songs of brotherly love delineate a fecund cultic tension between the Jew and Gentile, too. The bleeding edge where difference, history, and sensation are liquidated by the totalizing firepower of intuition is evident in Codrescu’s gunplay:

Mystically I live on two planes at once.

Magically I am the two holes of a double-barrel gun

threatening to blow me into space.

This is almost true

The church, the state, the typewriter, the police

Are about to kick me out of the world

                                    (from: “a programme for the double-barrel life when it hits”, 153)

Similarly the magical quest to break from the law is expressed in “the differences”: “I am St. John the Baptist, my work heralds the birth of / Jesus” (188).

With savage medieval fangs and mystical tendrils, Codrescu propels a convergence of “the gods” and poetry. Taking aim at the common structure embedded in the human psyche, Codrescu codes his ouevre in religious terms. This approach to poetry is intended to pressure the residue of magic and prejudice deposited in folk traditions and encoded in “the differences.” Again, impact of Eliade’s identification of spiritual existence with the imagination, along with the Orthodox tradition’s insistence of human universalism and Christological manifestation in the human artistry of the icon is powerfully registered upon Codrescu’s construction of personae.

America’s days of rage are assimilated into a numinous, touch adverse orality spoken by the shell-shocked soldier: “don’t touch me, / I am your holy mouth” (115).  As Peter Boone, “an ex-beatnik who became a mystical fascist in Vietnam” (114), he writes in “gist”:

                         america is healthy. i am healthy

                         in the body of christ

                         the fall of melted metal builds

                         my spheric soul.

                         i go first.

                        my body’s laid flat

                         on the copper table

                         and pounded up thin like a sheet

                         to pick up prophecy. (120)

Codrescu continued the great work of eating his medieval Christian shadow “in a self-published mimeograph collection called (like a later collection), The History of the Growth of Heaven by Calvin Boone, OSD (Order of Saint Dominic)” (145). In “Dear Editors,” Brother Antoninus is called through Calvin Boone to Codrescu’s agape feast:

The Monk is American, he is wheat-treated Bethlehem steel  

                                    out of Brother Anoninus’ unsaid brotherlies,

                                    all the wasted brotherlies…

                                    He is presently a New Hampshire Monk

                                    of the Dominican Order of Monks,

                                    he is fat. May the blessed Willows pray on his lousy

                                    attempts to the writing of his soul.

                                    Find him care of the Lord’s dear

                                    Andrei Codrescu, 3779 25^th Street,

                                    San Francisco 94110.

                                    What those numbers mean is no less

                                    than the World,

                                    may Peace answer your knowledge of me,

                                                                        Calvin Boone

                                                                        New Hampshire (147)

Codrescu’s poetry abounds with magic beans, meta-historical rhythms, and synchronic jolts, which fuse individual and collective experience to the sacred language of the gods. With timing buckled up to the theophanic imperative, Codrescu marks in “new market” the shift in collective attention from metaphysical to virtual domains:

                                                create

                                                twelve facebook gods, name them

                                                after the months

                                                à la revolution francaise

                                                assign each of them to OCD friends

                                                born in them or temperamentally suited

                                                to the choleric Anusis the melancholy Ursina etc.

                                                provide each god with a daily sura

                                                and a lesson for every hour

                                                          meant to replace horoscope and toothbrush

                                                for friends who then go forth to friends

                                                suited to their gods (21)              

Poetry is Codrescu’s creation myth; it charters a universalistic spiritual community that honors singular brothers, unique individuals, and irreducibly socialized mothers for their generous deposit of transpersonal potentials in active language. Not surprisingly, Codrescu’s wide range of perceptive cultural productions—NPR radio commentary, ABC Nightline television reportage, editorship of the literary magazine Exquisite Corpse, screenwriting and starring in documentary film Road Scholar—are registered across nearly all media. In all likelihood, Codrescu’s availability and well-deserved success over profane airwaves and popular platforms have impeded the critical reception of his first-rate poetry. As So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012 proves, there is far more to Codrescu than a sardonic tongue flapping for the NPR gatekeepers of “the smart thing to do.” Among the thinning herd of poets still determined to live by the mouth, Codrescu is indisputably the King of the Talkies.   

THE BACON REVIEW, March 2013

 7 Questions for Andrei Codrescu
The Editors of The Bacon Review

1) Your new book, So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems has just
been published by Coffee House Press [see review by Ken Warren in this issue of
The Bacon Review]. The book collects the best work of your poetic oeuvre,
including several new poems. How did this book come to be, and who did the
selection?

AC: It was Ted Berrigan, I think, who told me that I should publish a Selected Poems
every ten years if I'm still writing . Every decade a new Selected rededicates you, Joe
Cardarelli used to say. They both meant that you should do that when you're alive. Postmortem
collections are editorial fancies. This particular tome selects from half a century of
poetic crimes, and I couldn't have done (given sheer volume) without Allan Kornblum,
dear friend and founder/publisher of Coffee House Press. When I handed Allan the first
selection, he was baffled: it seems that my complicated vision of the book's story and my
idea of my poems was neither comprehensible nor sensical. I had decided to eliminate
chronology (a criterion for my last Selected, "Alien Candor," Black Sparrow Press) and
obvious thematic affinities. The result was a splendid mess I wanted to title, "Please Don't
Wash." Happily, Allan took matters in hand, reread all my books (many of which he had
published), and gave the book solid order and shape. You can now see how alive the
poems are in the company for which they were intended. I'm a lucky dog: an appreciator,
a hard worker, a publisher and a poet himself took pity on me. Allan is pure treasure. I
realized when the book was done, and the double meaning of "rent" in the title threw a
good retrospective light on the poems, that I hate to reread myself. I write to get rid of
the stuff that obsesses me, so why deal with it again, for chrissakes? It's for readers to
delight in my discarded junk.

2) You’ve published hundreds of poems in the last several decades, but you are
also known for your witty, subversive, and sometimes satirical essays. You’ve
published collections of writing on New Orleans, NPR, travel, literary criticism,
and a wide range of other subjects. Are you still actively writing both essays and
poetry? What do you feel inspired to write about?

AC: I had to make a living, so I wrote complete sentences, aka, essays. Those are to
poetry what beer is to whiskey: 8% proof to 80%. Maybe if I (and all poets) had a bigger
stage, and an audience not made dumb and stupid by the media, we could have made
America a place of intelligent citizens who would never use horrid clichés like "the
melting pot" or "the middle class" to describe themselves. Because the audience has been
stupefied, I was lucky to smuggle a bit of poetry into my essays. The reason I could do
that is because I have an accent, and nobody has any idea what I'm REALLY saying. At
NPR they quit listening years ago, lulled to sexy somnolence by my accent. I would say,
"White man, tomorrow you die!," and my producers would hear, "Waking up with a
cry." In my essay books and novels people who read (all five of them) noticed, of course,
that I am a monster. They rejoiced, but it's a secret. As to what inspires me, it's women
and alcohol, combined occasionally with civic indignation and allergy to political rhetoric.

3) You’ve spoken before about your rich collaboration with the poets, artists, and
thinkers of the 1960s, and the significance it had on your ideas. Are you
collaborating with other poets now? How has the internet changed your ideas of
collaboration?

AC: I love collaborating. The New York School of Poetry poets in the late 60s, Allan
Kornblum's Actualist poets in the 70s, and all my friends since, were people I wanted to
hang out with. Since we were all poets we wrote things together. Works of genius, all of
them. I have boxes of unpublished poems, novels, drawings -- "exquisite corpses," as the
Surrealists, our literary predecessors in orgiastic practices, called such artistic collaborations.
I haven't had time to reread any of it, but I do remember the quickening pulses and
stimulated ero-zones that accompanied each of these acts of typing. Now that the internet
is here and communism is dead, I renewed my relations with Romania, my native place,
and the Romanian language: I wrote a book-length poem together with the great
Ruxandra Cesereanu, called "Submarinul Iertat," published in Romania by Editura
Brumar. I translated it into English as "The Forgiven Submarine," it was published in a
bilingual edition by Black Widow Press. If one wants to know how languages work in the
brain, and what wonders they do in the brain, should read this book slowly and wallow in
its multilingual shamelessness. I see now that brain scholars claim that bilinguals don't get
Alzheimer's, and that plurilinguals don't even more. Well, of course. Plurilinguality IS a
kind if Alzheimer's: you speak all the languages, or rather an ur-language, because a
crystal-sharp forgetting blows away your memories of experience like a strong wind,
leaving behind only the bone-clean bedrock of language(s). I say a "a kind of Alzheimer's,"
because, unfortunately, the medical horror that goes by that name is a swamp, fog,
miasma, not a cleansing crystalline event. The internet is not such a great aid to
collaboration, which seems counterintuitive, but it's true: you have to smell the person
you collaborate with. Happily, I was able to smell Ruxandra once before we started
emailing back and forth, and I kept a little flask of her smell by my laptop. Each time it
was my turn, I took a whiff and said a prayer.

4) You are the founder and editor of Exquisite Corpse, a former print journal that
was a real innovator in switching to online only. It was a model publication for
The Bacon Review before we launched the magazine. How are things going at
Exquisite Corpse, and what are you publishing these days? What do you look for
in the work you publish, and are there any up-and-coming authors you are
especially excited about?

AC: Thank you, glad to hear it. I love the name of your magazine: was it Gloria Swanson
who said, "The smell of frying bacon is the most optimistic smell in America"? Exquisite
Corpse is now the Secret Corpse. When you go to corpse.org, our website you'll see a big
NO on the Homepage on a background of rejection letters. If you click on the NO, a
very lively Corpse opens up for you. I did this to stave the flood of unsolicited
submissions, but also because I like the idea of hiding in plain sight. Everyone lives now in
the prison of the internet, so it's the only place to hide. You can't get outside because
there isn't any outside left. Since the Secret Corpse started uploading, we have more
readers than we had when anyone could find us. Weird. People like to be invisible any
way they can, even on full display. I like my friends' writings, for the most part, and work
that is so real it makes your teeth hurt, or so fantastic it causes arousal.

5) Where do you call home now? Are you traveling often, and do you ever go
back to Romania?

AC: I travel way too much, I've been to Romania every year since they shot Ceausescu,
the dictator, but I'm not going now because it's full of fascists, and Germany owns
everything. I live in the wilderness near the Buffalo River National Park. I have two caves
by Little Panther creek, and I make art out of junk and I spray paint roots of downed
trees. Oh yeah, and I type.

6) In New Orleans, Mon Amour you wrote about the sexy, sultry, and altogether
inspiring quality of New Orleans. New Orleans is often considered to be a
different world than the rest of the United States -- more Caribbean or African
than ‘American.’ Do you still feel this way about the city? What cities are best for
young writers and poets now?

AC: New Orleans is the only CITY for poets now. I hate cities, they are moneyextorting
machines, but if you have to be a poet anywhere, go to New Orleans because
there are still poor people there, and you can be drunk and stay up all night. People
actually like artists in the French Quarter there, so you can be a glorified drunk on top of
it.

7) We are often told that poetry has become more academic in the last few
decades, and that poets need to speak more to the important cultural issues and
political realities of our age. What do you think about this contention? What can
poets do to make an impact?

AC: Poets can make a huge impact by eliminating the word "poetry" from their
vocabularies. Leave that word to the businesses they call "colleges," and act and do poetic
things that keep their mystery without a label. You can be a poet who doesn't write, but if
you do, make sure it gets tattooed and sky-written, or melted and vaporized. Read "The
Poetry Lesson," the book I wrote my last year of teaching at LSU, it has the fail-proof
recipe for genius, delight, and freaky alt-life.

Thanks for taking the time, and for giving us the pleasure of publishing your work.

AC: My pleasure.

Andrei Codrescu: The Endless Autobiography

Andrei Codrescu, a “Romanian born poet,” a writer, an essayist, a social and cultural critic who left Romania in 1965 and has lived in the U.S. ever since, is a compulsive autobiographer with three written autobiographies and countless autobiographical essays and poems. His autobiographical project, which encompasses The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius (1978), In America’s Shoes (1983), The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution (1991), two travelogues Road Scholar (1993), and Ay Cuba, A Socio Erotic Journey (1999), and the overtly autobiographical book of philosophical essays occasioned by the fall of communism The Disappearance of the Outside (1990), together with the numerous essays related to his life scattered in his numerous essay collections,[1] poses extremely interesting and challenging questions to the student of the genre.

The present paper focuses on the way in which his physical displacement along East-West divide, i.e. communist Eastern Europe—U.S. informs his autobiographical writings, the significance the genre of autobiography acquired for him at different moments in his life, as well as the implications of Codrescu’s work for the theory of the genre. My paper analyzes the way in which he has explored the genre’s boundless resources, played with its rules and definitions, theorized about it, and put it to various uses. It also demonstrates how Codrescu’s autobiographical project is in constant flux and transformation, how it has changed its initial inherent modernist approach to autobiography and memory to a socially and historically engaged one, via postmodernist practices. I discuss how from a playful postmodern aesthetics, which brings into discussion the constructed nature of memory, identity and history, including his own, Codrescu passes to addressing the historical, political, and bodily repercussions that the reconstruction of events can trigger and their socio-political consequences.

Codrescu’s story of displacement, from communist Romania to the U.S. is to be grasped in its complexity and specificity within the socio-political moments which framed it. Although voluntary, his exile is to be read, until 1989, as a political one, with all the valences of old-style banishment. Thus his exile entailed most associations of banishment: losing citizenship, being considered an enemy of the state and severing ties with the loved ones. The historical and political changes brought about by the Revolution of 1989 recode his sense of modernist exilic identity within a transnational context of multiple returns, possible relocations and constant movement across earlier forbidden borders. Codrescu’s volumes occasioned by his several returns in the early 1990s to Romania (The Disappearance of the Outside 1990, The Hole in the Flag, 1991), as well as his now constant presence in the Romanian literary and cultural life testify for this recoding and illustrate how he transformed the former East-West divide into a Transatlantic bridge and intercultural dialogue.

A “serial” autobiographer (to quote Gilmore “Endless”), spun the story of his life in The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius, In America’s Shoes, The Hole in the Flag as well as in countless essays and interviews. In this sense he seems to be among the several contemporary writers who have taken the project of self-representation to be open-ended, “susceptible to repletion, extendible, even, perhaps, incapable of completion” (Gilmore The Limits, 196).[4]

At first sight within the tradition of Eastern European Jewish immigrants in the U.S. who wrote their autobiographies at the turn of the century (Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, Abraham Cahan), Codrescu departs significantly from them by insistently calling attention and returning to his past, without any attempt of erasure or transformation. Aligning him with contemporary Eastern Europeans autobiographers of Jewish origin like Eva Hoffman does not help much either. Although they both write before the fall of communism about their past and their experience of exile from Poland and Romania respectively, and although their common Jewish origin might be seen as bringing them together, the only common denominator that their autobiographies seem to point to is the ambivalence of the exiled writer as both insider and outsider, which is too general a feature, and which most displaced autobiographers share. While both he and Hoffman wrote and published their initial autobiographies before the fall of Communism, memoir writing, of the most varied typed and persuasions, has become after the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1989 a prominent genre in Eastern and Central Europe, attracting a large readership. Such memoirs also benefited from the historical vantage point of their writing and thus combined depictions of communist and post-communist Eastern European societies. Autobiographies such as Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook (1997) written by Susan Suleiman, Hungarian Rhapsodies: Essays on Ethnicity, Identity and Culture (1997) by Richard Teleky or Chernobyl Strawberries (2005) by the British scholar Vesna Goldsworthy could be considered the most emblematic ones;[5] their authors are all similar to Codrescu, in the sense that all of them are academics and teach in American or British academia.

Codrescu’s work, however, does not align with these authors either, or rather only the Hole in the Flag may be said to share something with the work of his Eastern European exiled contemporaries; I would argue, however, that this is so mostly because of the similarities that post-communist societies across the former Soviet bloc share and not because Codrescu, the autobiographer, belongs to this autobiographical turn of Eastern European exiles. Codrescu’s autobiographies which I argue that parallel and follow his experience of displacement, hold a unique status in the present history of the genre. Codrescu’s total awareness and understanding of the ambiguities and inherent contradictions the genre of autobiography entails, as well the valences the genre acquires in the two cultures to which he simultaneously belongs, are artfully revealed in the metacritical commentary on his own autobiographical work “Adding to My Life.” This essay introduces the critical and scholarly essays in the landmark collection Autobiography and Postmodernism (1994) edited by Leigh Gilmore. His masterful grasp and explicit awareness of the genre’s boundless possibilities but also the inherent traps in which one can find oneself caught, turn him both into an insightful practitioner and a penetrating meta-critic of autobiography.

Appropriating it, playing with its written or unwritten rules, understanding also its complicities with the market, and the luring attractions autobiography writing offers in a culture of voyeurs[6] Codrescu writes and publishes his first autobiography at the age of twenty-three, in English, a language he did not know before arriving to the U.S. The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius is written in the third person and is addressed to his mother because “she had been [his] author until he became one himself” (23). Having already published a couple of volumes of poetry, one of them the award-winning License to Carry a Gun (1970), he is invited by his editor George Brazillier, who glimpsed between his verses various hints of stories, to write his autobiography (“Adding” 23). His “wealth of experience” (23) provided by his displacement frame both his excitement and subsequent autobiographical undertake.

"Here I was, twenty-three years old, the possessor of a wealth of experience that had spawned an equal if not greater quantity of mythicizing anecdotes. I had no ax to grind. I’d changed countries and languages at the age of nineteen, a neat break that could provide a thousand books with rudimentary structure." (23)

If the experience of exile, as both origin and pool of resources to appeal to, is a common feature numerous exiled autobiographers share, the explicitly ironic and self-subversive approach is what singles out Codrescu’s project and makes his writing an extremely enjoyable reading. However, he achieves this singularity not by simply ignoring modernist aesthetics but by reconfiguring them within a self-consciously intertextual dimension. While the view of his life as falling into patterns and resembling the perfect text reminds us of Nabokov, Codrescu’s stance is, however, only a self-parodic mimicry of the modernist autobiographical text that haunts his art as an anterior prototype:

"In addition, I had the numbers: born in 1946, became conscious with the Hungarian revolt in 1956, came in the United States in 1966. Initiatory structures in plain view, natural chapter breaks for the taking." (23)

The first volume falls into neatly differentiated periods, following vaguely the above-mentioned ones. His 1975 autobiography, organized in three books dedicated to his childhood, adolescence and immediate period after his emigration from Romania, takes the reader from very early depictions of his infancy to peregrinations in Europe and life in the U.S. As the reader is made aware from the very beginning, by the title of the book and the motto from Dali,[7] his first autobiography abounds in irony of all possible types, incredible sense of humor, as well as surrealistic rendering of his life.

An attentive reader of Codrescu’s autobiographies, interviews and essays immediately notices that distinctions between fact and fiction are almost irrelevant[8] as far as his real life in Romania and his departure to the U.S. are concerned. Many autobiographical details are more often than not rewritten or totally contradicted in his later books, either by inserting copies of official documents, which in themselves tell a different story,[9] or by narrating the same event but giving other versions of it. Without attempting to sort out any hard facts from the autobiographical rendering or to point to the author’s self contradictions, I would say that his many interviews or NPR interventions offer more exact, reliable and complementary details about his early life in Romania, the conditions of his emigration and life in Europe and U.S. than his autobiographies proper.

The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius familiarizes the reader with life under totalitarian regimes in the Romania of the 1950s or 1960s. The portrait of his homeland has nothing in common with, for instance, Nabokov’s glistening portrayal of Russia, and this is not because, as with Brodsky, Codrescu’s childhood was marred by poverty, oppression, or exclusion. Codrescu does cherish his childhood under communist rule; I dare say that he even takes great delight in retrospectively going back to those times and illustrating, from the perspective of a western journalist and academic, the absurdities and paradoxes (the happy coexistence and living together of former Nazis and Jews in Sibiu, for example) which characterized his childhood. The highly ironic and keen eye he reveals in rendering the complex portrait of the period is what captivates both the Western and Romanian/Eastern European reader. Devoid of nostalgia, or curiously enough, of the typical Romanian dor,[10] he offers no sentimental recreation or retrieval of lost times and places in the first two autobiographies, just a dry, humorous and very ironic revisiting of his country. What a Romanian reader cannot help noticing is that his recreation of Romania is just a chic prop, a mere background, for the translation of his self into America’s shoes. His native country is presented through images and details meant to catch the American eye (otherness, Balkanism, sex, etc.).

It is here that we first find out about the complex paradoxes he enjoys and embodies as far as his various identities and his nom de plume are concerned, and we become first acquainted with the implication of his Jewish identity (which for him means sex) and the implicit discrimination he was faced with. His arrival in America and the first adventures there are vividly portrayed in Book three; such animated depiction clearly bears the mark of the surrealist writers he so much admires as well as of the emblematic literary personalities of the 1960s he had the opportunity to meet. Intertextual references to iconic American poets and writers such as Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg (“how much mangoes”) abound and give the measure of Codrescu’s exquisite literary gameship within the literary tradition of his new country.

In America’s Shoes, his second autobiography, written in 1983, continues Codrescu’s autobiographical project and just like the first one, has its origin in the suggestion and invitation by an editor, this time Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to write his autobiography (“Adding” 24). The acknowledgments to the book tell a slightly different story (as we are already familiar with Codrescu) but an even more interesting one in the sense of demonstrating Codrescu’s full engagement and interest in the genre. According to the acknowledgments to In America’s Shoes, where he thanks a dozen of relatives and friends, the book was supposed to be “an autobiography from the point of view of everybody else”[11] (copyright page AS). The project of “autobiography from the point of view of everybody else” points to the very impossibility of such an endeavor and illustrates how Codrescu actually plays with and deconstructs rules, limits or boundaries of the genre.[12]

Written this time as a first person narrative, the book starts with the act of witnessing his being “born again” (AS 1). It thus begins in the solemn moment of Codrescu’s finally acquiring the American citizenship in 1981. The first autobiography began with his imagined life in the maternal utero, and the autobiographer does feel the need of linking the two; in this second one, we are presented a similar image: he “stood in the windowless womb of the Justice Department’s Immigration and naturalization Bureau, waiting to be born American” (AS 1) (my italics). The book starts in 1981, with the depiction of Codrescu becoming an American, and his totally ironic and mockingly subversive rendering of the event; it goes back in time to the late 1960s (slightly overlapping with the first volume from this perspective) and covers in very large strokes the period up to 1978, when his second son was born.

In America’s Shoes, written from the point of view of the naturalized immigrant who is wearing, at least for a while, as the title suggests, America’s shoes, focuses on the elapsed time since the first volume, and it concentrates mostly on his life in the U.S., or better said, life in the American 1970s. The book abounds in portraits of people and description of places. The spirit and general atmosphere of the decade is admirably rendered. Although the reader does get a glimpse of Codrescu’s odd jobs, fragments of his life and self at that times, Codrescu’s second autobiography looks more like a chronicle of the 1970s, and the decade’s vibrant and in constant flux society and cultural life. In this kaleidoscopic whirlwind of people and places, the autobiographer seems more like a minor actor who just happens to be around. The gallery of portraits, ranging from close friends, literary and cultural personalities, fellow poets, simple acquaintances or even casual neighbors is overwhelming. The titles of the chapters in Book two are relevant from this perspective, “T.P.—A Case for Sanity”, “R.S.—or Boys will be Boy”, “J.R. Williams—Hostage of the Lord.” Five out of nine chapters contain the initials of the people he talks about, and one is generically entitled “Friends I Lost to Gurus.” References to literary journals, poetry readings, title of books he avidly read or discussed, which were published at that moment, names of public personalities and artists he came across, fellow poets he associated with could make a student of the 1970s draw a very detailed genealogy of the times. We are also told about the various cults and obsessions of the era, as well as its cherished food stamps and Johnson’s Great Society social program he benefited from.

The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius offered the image of a very rebellious self, trying desperately to become a poet, and the “otherness” of Romania and mostly Transylvania with his hometown Sibiu as the background for the actual enacting of this wish, both in his native country but especially after the emigration to the U.S. In America’s Shoes continues to explore a rebellious self, with a keen sense of irony and penchant for spoofing and satire, but it also adds a new dimension to Codrescu’s autobiographical project, i.e. the meta-critical and meta-autobiographical commentary. This is a complex and multilayered process that he continues to spin later in The Hole and the Flag, as well as in his reflective essays on autobiography.[13] One finds in In America’s Shoes many references to his first autobiography, as well as references to the writing of it. The reader finds out that in writing The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius he “toiled at inventing [his] life” (AS 125); also the same reader is presented with the performative act that the first volume of Codrescu’s autobiography enacts when used as a substitute for Codrescu’s ID, one night when he was stopped by the police:

"I had a copy of my book The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius. There was a larger photo of myself on the jacket. I handed it to the cop. ‘My ID’ I said, ‘two hundred and fifty pages long. All the vital data. Take your time." (AS 159)

While this episode acquired anecdotic currency, as Codrescu kept telling this story in a variety of ways on numerous occasions, interviews or essays,[14] it also reveals obliquely, and in a humorous way, the symbolic significance that autobiography actually has for him. For Codrescu the exile, autobiography is in fact a highly performative act, one in which he comes into being as a writer (the first volume was supposedly addressed to his mother), but also one in which he enacts his translation from the Romanian self into the American one.[15] The meta-autobiographical commentary which follows the moment when the cop takes his book and browses it sheds light on other important aspects about his autobiographical undertake:

"The book the cop was reading had been written precisely because I had never had any ID. I’d put in it everything I though might be of use to the authorities and now I had found my perfect reader. Of course, I’d fooled them all because I wasn't in that book any more than the sun was in the ocean, which is where I had last seen it go. Books are graves, containing corpses of thoughts, the discard rejecta of identity. The writer is a meticulous self-cleaning object, always scraping the grime of certainty from his perception." (AS 160) (My italics)

One notices here Codrescu, the autobiographer, at work at his best. The fragment reveals in a nutshell the author’s take on autobiography writing. First we see once again how the previous autobiographical details he offered in The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius, i.e. that he wrote and addressed the book to his mother, are contradicted and re-written. Such a new turn regarding his intended audience illustrates that his autobiography is to be read as a multiple performative act of coming into being: as a writer, as an exile (thus a translated self) and consequently an American individual. As an American, he is in need of an ID, i.e. the U.S. citizenship that he had been denied a good number of years. From this perspective, we can read Codrescu producing his own ID in the form of a book, namely his autobiography, in the tradition of the self-made American heroes, a tradition to which he indirectly, but not unaware, ironically points to. Autobiography as a performative act is evident in the above quoted fragment, also in the sense of the author performing in front of us, undoing and undermining the autobiographical enterprise as such: “I’d fooled them all because I wasn’t in that book any more than the sun was in the ocean, which is where I had last seen it go.” Such a move can be seen as a typical postmodernist technique—the author flickering in and out of a text at various ontological levels—and it illustrates the characteristic denial of authority and atomization of self-representation which characterize postmodern writings. I would say, however, that it also bears the mark of and dramatizes his displacement and exile identity as throughout the book one follows the inherent tribulations of an exile:

"I came to America in 1966 ... one of a few times in history when a poet and a foreigner could walk straight into the arms of a whole poetic generation in love with its “strangeness” and find the fulfillment of his expectations there. I pity the poor poet of Romania arriving in the xenophobic, uptight, eco-cultural smog of the 1980s." (AS 84)

As we notice Codrescu does not dwell on existential sorrow or anguish because of his exile. Neither does he predicate his identity or autobiographical endeavor on silences, gaps, erasures, and the implied inherent contradiction, as Nabokov did. He decidedly makes out of his exile condition, displaced identity, and a self caught between cultures and times, the very place to inhabit:

"My knack as a poet and as a human is to be wherever “self” is being called into doubt. Of course, self is always and everywhere called into question. But when it is truly demolished, it happens, in something called “history” and then the act is momentous." (AS 188)

Exile as a place where the self is called into doubt becomes thus the very dwelling he cherishes but also explores to its utmost potentiality. Following this line of thought, the genre of autobiography, through its indirect but implicit connection with history, and also the ideal form to explore the self in doubt, to question, to do and undo the self, becomes the place par excellence in which to reside. From this perspective, his laying bare, interrogating and problematizing in different ways the genre of autobiography is more than a symptom or effect of postmodernist writing. Exploring the potentialities of autobiography, experimenting with its form, is Codrescu’s very act of engaging with his exile, his hardly explored Jewish identity, and the new culture that he both embraces and criticizes. Taking up autobiography may be seen from this perspective as a way of engaging with his new American culture, by complying with the confessing for voyeurs’ practice and appeal. In depicting in these first two volumes, the quintessential “otherness” of communist Romania to a thirsty American audience of Dracula images, or haunted Transylvania, performs the Eastern European “exotic” (Huggan) and its consequent aware complicity with the market and his viability from this point of view. The autobiography as a performative act and a performance with and also within the genre characterize Codrescu’s project.

Codrescu’s performative acts are, however, a life-long enterprise. His making and remaking of his identity starts with his renaming and the ironies of his nom de plume,[16] it goes through the poetic personae he acquires, reminiscent of the modernist heteronyms, and continues in the titles of his books. The very titles of his autobiographies, as well as his collections of essay or poems are emblematic: Raised by Puppets to be Killed by Research (1987), Comrade Past, Mr. Present (1991), Road Scholar (1993), Zombification (1995) or The Devil Never Sleeps (2001). They all illustrate the same penchant for doing and undoing the self, assuming new identities and roles, and undermining and playing with the project of self-representation. In the autobiography proper, he offers in a nutshell this life long enterprise:

"So, I make up people, people who blow up and remake whatever needs it. Schizo-pioneers, speaking several languages. And some of them are barefoot Jews, others are booted fascists. As for “I”, that’s only a character too." (AS 188)

In offering such an insight into the inner workshop of the autobiographer and laying bare the life-writing process, he also voices the difficulties one encounters in writing one’s autobiography:

"I felt then as I do now ... like a rag picker who’d come unexpectedly on a huge basket of neatly folded laundry the size, let's say, a skyscraper. I dropped my hooked stick through a side opening in the basket and pulled out a huge sheet. Written on it in tiny script was the story of one minute in the life of. The sheet was always attached to another by a rough knot and the harder I pulled the more sheets came out, forming a shapeless pile that eventually filled the room. Instead of folding them back up, I twisted them and built the hugest rope a prisoner ever made. I let myself down in the underworld and went to hell where my childhood was. I'd never intended to write an autobiography because I have little or no memory. Years and years of my life were missing and what I remembered was sufficient to overwhelm me. I assumed that I was a planet composed of the Continents Childhood, Escape and Sex. The weather on Childhood was Terror & Sweet Sorrow, the weather on Escape was Joy and Exuberance and the weather of Sex was Pleasure, Pain and Poetry. "(AS 125)

Undermining at every step his own endeavor becomes thus an emblematic feature for Codrescu’s autobiography. The meta-autobiographical commentary with Codrescu could thus be summarized as his way of enacting the conflicts of the exiled self. His meta-autobiographical writing enters an intertextual system of meaning, an expansive and expanding network of associations. Codrescu’s work, as well as his comments in interviews, can be read as this growing network of associations, which expands in multiple directions, and produces and reproduces his displaced identity. We notice with him an obsessive exploration of potentialities and opportunities of the exiled self.

In taking up autobiography writing, Codrescu engages the genre not only within American culture and society, but also with the Romanian one, as the The Hole in the Flag illustrates. He can thus be said to engage with the performative act of autobiography writing on both sides of the Atlantic. In so doing, he also takes a leap in time and in cultural turn, from a noticeable modernist intimation to postmodernist playfulness, to approach in his third autobiography concerns which feature prominently on the postcolonial agenda: i.e. questions of representation and representability of historical events, and complicity of narratives to power or historical moments. Such questions are more topical than ever when applied within a post-communist context, as he does in narrating the Romanian Revolution of 1989. In this sense, his “Adding to My Life” both points to this movement, and illustrates it.

The meta-critical and meta-autobiographical exploration of the genre highlighted in this reflective essay bear the traces of the modernist spirit inherited from his heroes in the pantheon of exile, which Codrescu is so imbued: autobiography as art adds to life. This spirit changes into a postmodernist aesthetic of interrogating and problematizing identity and personal memory in a typical ironical way (making the short essay a terribly entertaining reading), to reach the thorny issues of remembering and representation within a post-communist context. The essay discusses the nature of autobiographical memory and the effects one’s writing, Codrescu’s autobiography in this case, might have on his family, friends, or community at large. More precisely, he discusses the way in which his written autobiography changed the memories his mother had about his childhood. The problematic of autobiographical memory with its consequent results starts from an apparent insignificant detail: did he grow up in his grandmother’s house surrounded by chickens or pigs? In the process of writing The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius, he recalled the presence of many chickens in his grandmother’s yard. He asked his mother for confirmation about his early childhood, only to find out that she would contradict important details, i.e., there were no chickens but piglets. Codrescu the autobiographer, in an already familiar manner, “was not about to change anything so dear [to him], so [he] let it slide” (22) and talks about chickens in his autobiography, as he vividly remembered lots of chickens, not pigs. The moment his mother read his published autobiography and the question of the farm animals he lived among was raised again, his mother referred to chickens and did no longer remember any pigs. Codrescu comments:

"A strange power this, changing your mother’s memory cassette. Her memory just crumbled before the printed page—which may explain in a small way, in places where history has been falsified by the authorities, people are hard put to remember their true experiences. It’s chickens for everybody whether they like it or not." (“Adding” 22) (My italics)

In a casual and matter-of-fact way, his reflective essay offers a framework within which his third autobiography, focusing on the exile’s returns to Romania during the Revolution of 1989 and its aftermath, is to be understood. The above-quoted fragment also enacts the move from the boundary blurring between art and life on the grounds of self-representation and the postmodernist inquiry into categories, to a more socio-political anchoring of the autobiographical endeavor. This is the reading I suggest next, in analyzing The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile's Story of Return and Revolution as Codrescu’s more socially and politically engaged autobiography as performative act.

The Hole in the Flag focuses on a crucial moment in the history of Romania, the Revolution of 1989 and its immediate aftermath.[17] Written in the format of a journey, partly as a memoir and partly as a historical narrative of the fall of communism in Romania, this third autobiography is Codrescu’s cultural and political account of his return.

As the subtitle of the book (“A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution”) makes explicit from the outset, this homecoming is the starting point of his story—his story as an exile and his story of the Romanian revolution. He comes to revisit his country (and himself) during a crucial historical moment, and in this way he witnesses instances of Romanian history in the making, capturing the spirit of the moment with nostalgic commitment, dry irony and sense of humour. The narrative of the revolution, which we follow closely, is mixed within his memoir with personal stories of his past life in Romania.

His personal narrative is anchored this time in the historical discourse of his native country. His exile’s identity is rendered here within the national narrative of Romania and the historical instances he chose to document are vivid examples of how his identity becomes woven into the Romanian narrative history. The brief version of Transylvania’s history that he offers in the chapter dedicated to his hometown of Sibiu is one such emblematic instance:

"My home Transylvania was a disputed territory between Hungary and Romania. Originally it had been the original homeland of all Romanians, but it became part of Romania only after World War I, when another mega empire, the Austro-Hungarian, bit the dust. Later Hitler gave Transylvania to the Hungarians because they were better Nazis, and Stalin gave it back to Romanians to console them for the huge land grab of Bessarabia in Moldavia, an ancient Romanian land that became a Soviet Republic. History had been cruel to this small people situated at the ill-omened crossroads of Europe." (HF 159)

The visit to Sibiu becomes a pretext for informing the reader about the complicated past of his beloved native region, Transylvania. Codrescu writes himself into this past by his birthright to the region, “my home Transylvania,” only to distance himself at the end of the paragraph, probably to reassure the reader that this is an objective account. The Greek muse of memory, Mnemosyne, takes him back to Transylvania, the land of his grandfathers and kin, and he offers the reader in a nutshell a short, simplified, and ironic (but veracious) version of Transylvania’s history.

Codrescu writes retrospectively about voivodes or Romanian history (which has been both ironic and absurd, as in the Transylvania excerpt) and anchors his personal self in the historical discourse of the country. In so doing, he offers a personal insight about the writing and rewriting of history in Romania before 1989:

"We learned history from an old teacher who was so afraid of making a mistake he kept his eyes on his new Marxist textbook translated from the Russian and did not lift them at all … Romania according to him was mostly Slavic territory, which everybody knew was a lie. Romania, with o, was a Latin-speaking country inhabited by the descendants of Roman soldiers who married Dacian women … Assimilated Roman soldiers stayed even after the Roman Empire had withdrawn and they inhabited the land of ‘happy Dacia’ for some two thousand years of bloody history, rarely interrupted by happiness. We knew that much, but Russians in order to justify their claims to Bessarabia … began spelling Romania with u, which was a convoluted grammatical argument for the primacy of Slav claims." (HF 163)

Codrescu thus casually documents how the communist regime systematically decimated historical memory, and how history became subject to a command system run by loyalist historians and party bureaucrats. In his book, the production of history in communist Romania is revealed in a matter-of-fact tone, and the crisis of history is exposed in passing, without the pathos and revenge attitude of some contemporary Romanian historians. A similar fleeting but insightful observation about erasing the past is triggered by the debunking of Lenin’s statue. While watching an “enthusiastic crew working for three days to pull Lenin off his pedestal … but [who] was [yet] more stubborn than originally thought,” Codrescu simply remembers how during his school years “things that Communists didn’t like were always thrown into the ‘dustbin of history’”. “Everything interesting,” he writes, “and everybody fun was there: Henry Ford, Winston Churchill, Leon Trotsky. Now Lenin joined them” (146). This anecdote vividly illustrates Codrescu’s point: how under communist rule the past was read from the present such that, whenever the present—the leaders, plans and lines of thinking—changed, the past also had to change. So, in communist historiography, as he sarcastically notes, politically uncomfortable subjects or personalities became taboo; they “went to the dustbin of history,” leaving huge gaps in the historical narrative.[18]

In his autobiographical narrative, Codrescu both directly and indirectly tells us that in communist Romania official history became suspect, as ‘official reality’ became unreal. In such circumstances, the narrator seems to imply that personal memory becomes more reliable than the official narrative, which is so often contradicted by experience: “Romania according to him was mostly Slavic territory, which everybody knew was a lie.”

By thinking he had been “placed at the very stage of history” (HF 89), Codrescu shares with other exile autobiographers the inevitable sense that he is a witness to history, and we notice his impulse to testify and show the rest of the world what was happening to him and his homeland during those days of December. He records and documents the revolution with a keen sense of detail, only to question later the facts that turned out to be fabrications (HF 92) and admit that the incisive reporting of the Western journalists, just as much as his own, turned out to be “manipulations by master manipulators” (85): “The so called facts changed as often as the … spokesmen who held press conferences everyday in the hotel and whose chief qualification seemed to be a good knowledge of English” (92-3).

His critique is a subtle and gradual one, embryonic, which would grow much more in his later work. Its implications and ramifications are rendered in many ways. With the keen eye of an experienced journalist and subtle irony, Codrescu wittingly and knowingly plays upon the idea of story in the case of the Romanian revolution, both in the book’s subtitle and in the book itself. He constantly emphasizes the idea of story/stories (and not history). Even when perceiving contemporary Romanian reality, he does not give up a certain feeling that the realities described are part of a tale:

"I heard for the first time the story of what happened, from participants. Or at least from natives. As I was going to discover in the next few days, everyone had been a participant […] The Revolution, I soon found, was a collective story belonging to every single Romanian. Whatever was added to it, from whatever source, was immediately incorporated in the larger tale [...] The tale of Timi?oara was spoken at once by several voices—even the children had many details to add—and there was barely any chronology. "(HF 70)

By pointing to the interplay between personal/collective or shared memory[19] and the importance such memories had in creating history and stories, Codrescu subtly starts first his questioning and then his critique of the stories of revolution. Thus, he once again lays bare the mechanism of history-making, but this time with reference to the revolution proper. We notice how he illustrates the transformation of shared memories into personal memories:

"The story was already familiar to me … Bits of their story came out word for word from TV and newspapers and had already become part of whatever they had seen with their own eyes. It was hard to tell what was theirs, the stories were so intimately interwoven. They had already forgotten that they’d read certain things." (74)

"... the young man from Arad, no more than sixteen years old. He, too, had tales of the revolution." (75)

In the conundrums of Romania’s recent past, where the state falsified history and manipulated collective memory and where distortion and forged forgetting were daily practice, the relevance of such autobiographical writing lends itself to multiple interpretations and significances. From this perspective, his autobiographical writing comes to fill in the gaps in the historical narrative, supplements (in the Derridean sense, too) the official one and thus subverts it.[21] Codrescu’s autobiography is particularly significant because of the alternative it offers to the official state version of the past. The Hole in the Flag, as autobiographical writing, has a key role in the attempt to bring the past under (Derridean) erasure (a past, as Codrescu documents, which is neither fully there nor fully absent from people’s memories), or the suppressed past, caused by forced forgetting, back to the surface. Codrescu’s book both documents and enacts this move and reaches a crossroads of times and mentalities by focusing on the year 1989, which brought the triumph of “memory as resistance” (Kundera 3) and the resuscitation of banned works, taboo issues, and blacklisted individuals.

As far as the account of the Revolution proper, Codrescu’s account of Romania’s revolution becomes an “individual version of history,” (Stone The American) , channel to history” or simply a “story”; this is highly ironical, given the many “stories” the revolution had, and Codrescu’s witty choice for a book subtitle: he plays upon the idea of “story,” associating it with “tale,” “fabrication,” “artifice,” “staged play,” “script,” or “manipulation.” Codrescu’s “story,” a story among the multiple entangled and intricate stories about December 1989 of which he is trying to make sense, becomes in the act of translation across the ocean, history—history of the revolution, as the American reviews[22] considered it, and as the Library of Congress catalogued it.

I would suggest that The Hole in the Flag echoes, in its generic status, the ambiguities and paradoxes of the historical event it depicts, and is an emergent new form of literature and culture about December 1989 in Romania.

The Epilogue to the 2001 edition of Codrescu’s first two memoirs in a single volume under the title The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius in America’s Shoes, is an autobiographical mise-en-scene focused on the always complicated position of the autobiographer as subject and object of the book. In “And What Happened Afterwards,” the four-page-long essay that closes the book, Codrescu enacts and dramatizes an autobiographer’s inner tribulations and turmoil. He stages them in his already familiar entertaining and humorous way:

"Huh? Who was that guy? What was he trying to do? Shock and dismay and beg everyone to love him? Why did he think he was so interesting? We are embarrassed. We are fifty-some-odd years old … we find these memoir embarrassing in the extreme." (“And What” 352)

The mature writer revisits his autobiographies and briefly comments upon them and the significance of their dedications. He pokes fun at them, “[the memoirs] are cries for attention,” and refers to the younger memoirist in a funny, derisive way: “if retroactive Prozac were available, we’d fly back and put him on.” He vacillates between a highly postmodernist stance, “The reality of a life is refractory to language” (352), playful and all subversive, and a modernist one, that prevents him from writing “alternating” chapters or “whole other memoirs” and makes him safeguard the “young man who wrote these books” (356). Oscillating between those two allegiances, he also acknowledges the ever present autobiographical detail and on-going process of revealing it throughout his work:

"… the reader may be familiar with Codrescu’s books in which, scattered postmodernly, are all the autobiographical details of those years. There seemed to hardly be a need to write any more memoirs, after I became truly busy and was afforded the opportunity to pay luxurious attention to details of life that might have otherwise ended up squished into another breathless narrative." (355) (My italics)

One notices how Codrescu’s “serial” autobiography “raises the specter of endless autobiography” (Gilmore “Endless” 211), one that exceeds, in his case, the confines of both genres and media. He questions the limit of any single text’s self-sufficiency and reveals the autobiographical in countless texts, numerous genres and various media. In so doing, the details of his life which did not end up “squished into another breathless narrative” offer, to an avid Codrescu’s reader, a deterritorialized and avant-la-lettre blog-like commentary, insight and analysis. Pieced out throughout his poetry, novels, essays, NPR commentaries, ABC productions or magazine columns, the autobiographical detail acquires with him a hard currency that he puts to new purposes and delightful ends.

Codrescu’s story of displacement represents the shift from the modernist understanding of exile to the transnational condition and constant movement that the end of the 20th century enabled. His autobiographical project enacts the passage from autobiography writing as personal translation into a foreign language and possible compliance with the American tradition of writing the self (in The Life and Times, or what he calls his “genesis myth” and In America’s Shoes, Codrescu’s “elaborate identity card”)[23] to a more historically and politically anchored form of life-writing (The Hole in the Flag). Moreover, it gives birth to an ever emerging autobiographical representation which builds up an over expanding intertextual system of meaning.

Works Cited

Atlas, James. “Confessing for Voyeurs: The Age of the Literary Memoir Is Now.” New York Times Magazine. May 12, 1996, 25-27.

Beck, Hamilton, ed. An Anthology of American Literature and Culture. Chi?in?u: Editura Cartier, 1999.

Codrescu, Andrei. “Adding to My Life.” Autobiography and Postmodernism. Eds. Leigh Gilmore, Kathleen Ashley, and Gerald Peters. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994. 21-33.

———. “And What Happened Afterwards.” An Involuntary Genius in America’s Shoes (and what Happened Afterwards). Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 2001. 352-356

———. The Disappearance of the Outside. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1990.

———. The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution. New York: Morrow, 1991.

———. In America’s Shoes. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1983.

———. The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius. New York: George Braziller, 1975.

———. “My Revolution without Me. How One Romanian’s didn’t Become Another Hollywood Movie.” American Film (September 1991, 16, 9): 64.

———. The Muse is Always Half Dressed in New Orleans and Other Essays. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993.

———. “Return to Romania: Notes of a Prodigal Son.” The Washington Quarterly 21:1 (1998): 3-20.

———. Zombification: Stories from the NPR. New York: Picador, 1994.

Collins, Richard. “Andrei Codrescu's Mioritic Space.” Melus Fall (1998): 83-101.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore& London: John Hopkins University Press 1976.

Esbenshade, Richard S. “Remembering to Forget: Memory, History, National Identity in Postwar East-Central Europe.” Representations (Winter 1995): 72-96.

Gilmore, Leigh. “Endless Autobiography? Jamaica Kincaid and Serial Autobiography.” Postcolonialism and Autobiography. Eds. Alfred Hornung and Ernspeter Ruhe 1998. 211-231.

———. The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma, Testimony, Theory. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York, Penguin Books, 1981.

Stone, Albert, ed. The American Autobiography: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1981.

Tism?neanu, Vladimir. “Book Review.” Orbis. Fall 1991, 623.

Watson, Rubie S., ed. Memory, History and Opposition under State Socialism. Santa Fe: SAR Press, 1994.