Exorcising COVID in Queens near Corona Park : Tropes of discontinuity in Andrei Codrescu's poems of the plague

• A longtime NPR commentator, Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, creative writing professor, and translator. “Our funniest /saddest contemporary bard,” as Marjorie Perloff affectionately called him, has spent more than half a century observing American life and history and faithfully recording his reflections on, and interactions with, his adoptive country with Dadaist humor, wit, sound criticism, and a touch of youthful wonder. The main title of this paper is taken from the contributor information in the May 2020 issue of The Brooklyn Rail, which featured two poems by Andrei Codrescu. Throughout the national and global Covid crisis, he continued to cast spells, play with words, observe, reflect, hope, and sometimes despair, keeping poetic chronicles of “The Plague” with the avowed intention to soothe and heal. Many of them are collected in Too Late for Nightmares, his new volume of poetry released on September 1, 2022. In keeping with the topic of the conference, I am going to explore the tropes of discontinuity in these poems paying special attention to Codrescu’s older quarrels with consumerism, the blind faith in the new technology, the disappearance of the “outside” now complete with the virtual irrelevance of the body, the illusion of singularity, and the habit of stuffing the future with the placebo pill of progress. 

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HUMANIORA  -- Språk och litteratur -- Litteraturstudier (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Languages and Literature -- Specific Literatures (hsv//eng)

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