Too Late for Nightmares

Black Widow Press, September 2022

Too Late for Nightmares: collection of new poems 2020 – 2022. English

One hundred pages of cri-de-coeur poems written while washing vegetables and hands in the dark panic days of 2020-2022 in order to repel the horrors of Covid politics of those stolen years. Intended as spells these works are meant to heal

Too Late for Nightmares published by Black Widow Press September 2022

Pat Nolan on Too Late For Nightmares, The New Black Bart Poetry Society May 20223

The breadth of erudition Codrescu brings to his astute observations is of someone who has seen much of it, if not all of it, and has managed to find the right words for it. The pairing with Max Jacob is not coincidental. Codrescu’s poetry is deeply rooted in the modernist French poets of the early 20th Century, and certainly the prose poetry of Max Jacob, whose poems he has translated and published as a chapbook in 1974 (à Max Jacob, Tree Books), in the legendary The World #35, The Translation Issue, edited by Daniel Krakauer (1981), Paul Auster’s The Random House Book of 20th Century French Poetry (1982), and a literary icon with whom he has expressed a deep kinship.

That little bit and bite of Jacob is present in Codrescu’s poetry in the guise of cosmopolitan critique. The same joy (glee) at surprise or piercing terrifying insight into the daily drudge and flow of ideas and possibilities as a physicist of the psyche can always be found at the chalkboard of multilingual equation. Steeped in the folk tales of his native Romania, he has an understanding of the darker conventions of such fables and their antiquity, as did Max Jacob. In Too Late For Nightmares Codrescu rewrites, in verse and in prose, these allegories by overlaying the pandemic and its quantum effect as the unalterable physics of life worthy of parsing. For Codrescu, it is up to the poet, in his own subtle way, to re-present the cognitive state as a running commentary. In Andrei’s case, he knows what he’s talking about.

Codrescu is the author of over fifty books of poetry, fiction, critical essays, commentary on art, life, and literature. Among them, The Posthuman Dada Guide consolidated his thinking about his modernist foundations, and The Poetry Lesson, his application of those particular revolutionary sensibilities as a feature of a coterie of New York poets, make the transatlantic connection to an historical coincidence. As founder and editor of Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books and Ideas, a long running literary periodical, Codrescu acknowledged an esthetic affiliation to the Surrealists and their parlor games—after all if art isn’t play, why do it at all? As the editor of the notable poetry anthology, Up Late, American Poetry Since 1970 (1987), his selection reflected a range of poets with similar innovative cross cultural intent. This latest selection of his poems has not faltered or dulled a deep quotidian suspicion of authority, anyone’s, even his own.

In “I need a haircut”, Codrescu makes the apt chthonic connection: “a man with a map of poland on his bald head dissolved the soviet union/ a man with an orange wig is starting a civil war under the slogan ‘I need a haircut’” and establishes the underlying significance of the shape and size of one’s head on history. And perhaps what goes on inside them.

Brain Fog

i ask of you my cloud: 
where are the italics that once served irony and emphasis?
is this a copyediting problem or demonic glee
of an a.i. who’s writing books by a dead author
its primal directive to slip unobserved by the reader

For Codrescu some poems act as a kind of “journalism” at its most basic and poetic as either praise or lament, and as observations of observations of time in the passage of days, a record of a critical response, inventive language, and unflinching detail. He references Jacob in the starkly visionary “Any Habit”: “I am wearing a mask. jacob wore a habit./”I love to lift it as I walk up the stairs.” And of our similar fates: “we will always be murdered by nazis.” If you thought your nightmares were bad!

Codrescu’s is a poetry of the proletariat, after all, some part Zola, some part Jacob, among myriad influences and esoteric inclinations. In reflecting on the early days of the pandemic and the undercurrent of seeping horror and pessimism, Codrescu does not look away, attuned to the seismic shifts in the cosmic psyche. His well-honed instincts always find the right words to speak his mind.