Black holes in the American space; or nostalgic journeys through the wonders of time in Andrei Codrescu’s recent poetry

• Andrei Codrescu is an American litterateur of many labels: commentator, raconteur, humorist, flâneur, essayist, novelist, film maker, editor, professor, and Jewish-Romanian émigré. He is above all a poet and a memoirist. For a few years now the bard has been revisiting old amours, places, and times from the vantage points of age, Facebook, and bilingualism: New York (and other American cities), Allan Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, Lucian Blaga, the Romanian language, and poetry itself among many others. In this paper, I explore the poetic incursions into the past, present and future in Codrescu’s latest poems in English and Romanian, collected in no time like now, Metroul F [Subway F], and Visul diacritic [The Diacritical Dream]. His nostalgia is neither resigned nor dramatic, but youthfully wonder-struck by the mysteries of then and now. As he put it in an interview from 2010, “Beauty is there when you bring your senses to increase the mystery of what arrests your attention.” The attempt to chase down wastelands seems futile in this poetry of wonder, yet the poet occasionally despairs of things like AI, cellphones, verbal and mental clichés, “the human illusion of singularity,” and the annoyingly persisting habit of stuffing the future with the placebo pills of hope and progress. In keeping with the topic of this conference, I stop by these and other shadows of wasteland that populate Codrescu’s poetic universe at this time of retrospection. Here’s a foretaste from his poem “funny not funny”:“American space bent around the black holes I made in it. / Many people found that funny. I not so much but not not funny.”

Ämnesord

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

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

Nyckelord

Codrescu

poetry

nostalgia

wonder

wasteland

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