The Best American Poetry

Queens or Bust [by Andrei Codrescu]

  If you are moving to New York to do your obligatory two years of poetic apprenticeship among the sophisticated, critical, merciless, and horribly smart (or not) natives, be sure that you move to Queens. You heard me right. Not to Manhattan or G-d forbid to gluten-free Brooklyn, but to Queens.

The first thing about it, it's a lot cheaper.

The second, it's full of working New Yorkers of the sort that lace their boots tight, talk with an attitude, and go to Manhattan only if an exiled relative from Cincinnati comes back before dying.

The third thing is that they speak 167 languages in Jackson Heights alone, which is just one part of Queens.

The fourth thing is that the Unisphere from the World Fair that every American has tattooed at birth in the deepest part of the brain, is in Queens, too.

The fifth is that all your friends in Manhattan and Brooklyn have a hard time keeping a smirk off their mug when you tell them you live in Queens.

The sixth thing is the restaurants that deliver 24 hours any variety of non-American or American food your cholesterol-hungry heart might yearn for. The seventh is that. the best comedians are from Queens, like Don Rickles, as are other great Americans, like Cyndi Lauper, Nicki Menaj, and 50 cent. In passing, I'll say that the Queens zoo has a hell of a puma that looks you straight in the eyes until you feel lucky there are some bars between you.

I ended up in Queens because the Romanian Great Writers' League of Queens (as opposed to the Romanian Minor Writers' League of Queens) found me a studio in a lovely apartment building reminiscent of the best Soviet architecture, which costs me less than a parking place in Manhattan. I have a view of a fire-escape and a synagogue, which is all a writer needs: a means to escape from a fire into the arms of an unforgiving G-d. My friends from the Romanian Great Writes' League in Queens know everything about New York, all four boroughs, and can barely conceal their feeling of superiority, for at least one reason: no tourists. Manhattan is all tourists and Brooklyn is all slumming rich kids who want to be famous.

Nobody in Queens wants to be interrupted by gawkers while writing novels and poetry. Regular Quuenzites don't want to be famous at all: it might attract the IRS. So take it from one who's been everywhere, the breadth and length of US and other places where they speak pigeon English: do your time in Queens, young poet. And don't ever show your MFA in public. "Keep old hat in secret closet," as Ted Berrigan said, and you'll go back to flyover America with superpowers. 

[Editor's note: We thought this provocative and engaging article would best be illustrated by a couple of Queens, Elizabeth and Venus. -- DL] 
From the archive; first posted February 6, 2018

The first thing about it, it's a lot cheaper.

The second, it's full of working New Yorkers of the sort that lace their boots tight, talk with an attitude, and go to Manhattan only if an exiled relative from Cincinnati comes back before dying.

The third thing is that they speak 167 languages in Jackson Heights alone, which is just one part of Queens.

The fourth thing is that the Unisphere from the World Fair that every American has tattooed at birth in the deepest part of the brain, is in Queens, too.

The fifth is that all your friends in Manhattan and Brooklyn have a hard time keeping a smirk off their mug when you tell them you live in Queens.

The sixth thing is the restaurants that deliver 24 hours any variety of non-American or American food your cholesterol-hungry heart might yearn for. The seventh is that. the best comedians are from Queens, like Don Rickles, as are other great Americans, like Cyndi Lauper, Nicki Menaj, and 50 cent. In passing, I'll say that the Queens zoo has a hell of a puma that looks you straight in the eyes until you feel lucky there are some bars between you.

I ended up in Queens because the Romanian Great Writers' League of Queens (as opposed to the Romanian Minor Writers' League of Queens) found me a studio in a lovely apartment building reminiscent of the best Soviet architecture, which costs me less than a parking place in Manhattan. I have a view of a fire-escape and a synagogue, which is all a writer needs: a means to escape from a fire into the arms of an unforgiving G-d. My friends from the Romanian Great Writes' League in Queens know everything about New York, all four boroughs, and can barely conceal their feeling of superiority, for at least one reason: no tourists. Manhattan is all tourists and Brooklyn is all slumming rich kids who want to be famous.

Nobody in Queens wants to be interrupted by gawkers while writing novels and poetry. Regular Quuenzites don't want to be famous at all: it might attract the IRS. So take it from one who's been everywhere, the breadth and length of US and other places where they speak pigeon English: do your time in Queens, young poet. And don't ever show your MFA in public. "Keep old hat in secret closet," as Ted Berrigan said, and you'll go back to flyover America with superpowers. 

[Editor's note: We thought this provocative and engaging article would best be illustrated by a couple of Queens, Elizabeth and Venus. -- DL] 
From the archive; first posted February 6, 2018

The Poetry Question [by Dave Morice]

What is poetry?

Here is a modern approach to answering that ancient question. The following list contains genuine quotes about “poetry,” “poet,” etc. by famous writers throughout the ages. However, those particular words have been replaced with “pornography,” “pornographer,” etc., in order to update the muse’s out-dated definitions, as you will see.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is pornography. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is pornography. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

                                                  Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)                                                                                     Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson [1824]

Pornography is the supreme fiction, madame.

                                                    Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)                                                                                   A High-toned Old Christian Woman [1923]

You don’t make pornography with ideas, but with words.

                                            Stephane Mallarmé (1842-1898)                                                                                Paul Valéry, Degas, Danse, Dessin

I wish our clever young pornographers would remember my homely definitions of prose and pornography; that is, prose = words in their best order; pornography = the best words in their best order.

                                                     Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
                                                     In Table Talk [July 12, 1827]

Pornography must be as well written as prose.

                                                     Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
                                                     Letter to Harriet Monroe [January 1915]

Taught or untaught, we all scribble pornography.

                                                     Horace (65-8 BC)
                                                     Epistles, bk II, 4 BC bk III (Ars Poetica)

For pornography is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion.

                                                     Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)
                                                     Introduction to Ward, English Pornographers [1880]

 

Pornographers are the unacknowledged plagiarists of the world.

                                                     Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
                                                     A Defense of Poetry [1821]

Pornographer’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked pornography ‘cept a beadle on Boxin’ Day.

                                                    Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
                                                     Pickwick Papers [(1836-1837)

Pornography—
   all of it—
      is a trip into the unknown.

                                                     Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930)
                                                     Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry [1926]

The lunatic, the lover, and the pornographer
Are of imagination all compact…

                                                     William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
                                                     A Midsummer-Night’s Dream IV, 218

Pornography is a way of taking life by the throat.

                                                     Robert Frost  (1874-1963)                                                                                                     Comment

All pornographers are mad.

                                                     Richard Burton (1577-1640)                                                                        Anatomy of Melancholy, Democritus to the Reader

With me pornography has been not a purpose, but a passion;….

                                                     Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
                                                     The Raven and Other Pornography [1845]

I have said that pornography is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

                                                    William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
                                                    Lyrical Ballads, preface

Immature pornographers imitate; mature pornographers steal.

                                                     T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)
                                                   Philip Massinger [1920]

To a pornographer nothing can be useless.

                                                     Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
                                                     Rasselas [1759]

A pornographer is the most unpornographic of anything in existence; because he has no identity—he is continually informing—and filling some other body.

                                                     John Keats ( 1795 -1821)
                                                     Letter to Richard Woodhouse

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,
Who says, my hand a needle better fits,
A Pornographers Pen, all scorne, I should thus wrong;
For such despight they cast on female wits;….

                                                     Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)
                                                     The Prologue

All a pornographer can do is warn.

                                                     Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
                                                     Preface to the Pornograpnhers

A vein of Pornography exists in the hearts of all men.

                                                     Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
                                                     The Hero as Poet

Pornography is made by fools like me,
But only God can make a pussy.

                                                     Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)
                                                     Pussies [1913]

Pornography must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.

                                                     Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
                                                     Journal [March 1845]

Music is the universal language of mankind—pornography their universal pastime and delight.

                                                     Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
                                                     Outre-Mer (1833-1834)

A true account of the actual is the rarest pornography, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

                                                     Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
                                                     A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers [1849] 

Pornography should be palpable and mute
Pornography should be wordless
Pornography should be motionless in time
Pornography should be equal to:
Not true.
Pornography should not mean
But be.

                                                     Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982)
                                                     Ars Poetica [1926]

  In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
The raw material of pornography in
     all its rawness and
        that which is on the other hand
           genuine, you are interested in pornography.

                                                     Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
                                                     Pornography [1935]

 To have great pornographers, there must be great audiences, too.

                                                     Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
                                                     Leaves of Grass.  

"Five One-Minute Eggs" [by Andrei Codrescu]

1. THE ECONOMY

We used to make things we didn’t understand (Marx), consumed by people who didn’t understand us, and now we don’t even understand the people who are making them, that is us. Our misunderstandings progress.

We consume things that are familiar, and the more familiar they get, the less we know or sympathize with ourselves, the people who make them. We are not familiar with the parts of these things that other people make, but we love to use them. Technology is familiar, people are not. The people who make TVs know us from TV better than we know them or ourselves. When we are not on TV, we are waiting to slit our (their) throats. The German economy thrives because Germans make “the thing that goes inside the thing that goes inside the thing.” 

Can you love people you don’t understand? With a blender and a mixer and an iPhone.
The Jesuits would be pleased.
Why would God need to choose a people when there are all these machines around.
What else would He do with the Salvation Army warehouses?

2. POUND IN THE OZARKS

5 time grimace:
pro patria
pro domo
pro usura
pro forma
pro pane

3. EXPANSIVE SONG

Space is my Baby
Time is my Bitch

(with Vince Cellucci)

 4. I BROKER

“in this army you break down your body like a gun ascertain its needs and reassemble it for action when they’ve been met”
The Manual

splitting hairs for commodities
the centrifugal force that dismembers matter into sellable minis

the broker broke down his body and ordered its needs from a catalogue
everything arrived by mail overnight and the broker reassembled hermself
by the time the market opened
herm hoped to make enough to post a profit
pn the increasing needs of herm body
“every day you don’t sell you buy”
herm ever-expanding ever-needy body
was an expense that had to be covered by greater profit
so when herm body incorporated the city the country and the globe
it had to be broken down and fed
by myriads of catalogues from outer space
whence the profits had to also eventually come
today herm franchised copper on mars and sold
the green algae noon meal of the cloned venus from last night

i went to sleep without a shower and woke up malcontent
but my daughters brought me time for breakfast
i was happy with the design
some retro some yet to be duplicated
what counts is attitude

5. SAN MICHELE

it’s got to be raining in Venice

to write like Henry James
was never your wish in even
the most twisted version of yourself

from The Best American Poetry 2013 edited by Denise Duhamel

Andrei Codrescu Speaks Dada

<< To celebrate Nr. 13 of Maintenant, the organ of Dada refuseniks, Peter Carlaftes, the editor of Maintenant, the organ of Dada refuseniks, asked questions I answered as follows:

Peter: With the passage of time as a gain in technology we can no longer rebel as the Dadaists once rebelled yet Dada retains an important place in the history of rebellion.

Codrescu: If Dada was history it would just be stories, another chapter in the curriculum of 20th century isms. Happily or not, it’s something else, impossible to pin down, and totally with us, especially now at the hybrid crossroads of human and robot. It is, without resorting to metaphysics, a catch in the throat. A breath of shock, surprise and horror that wells up without warning. Is that man, standing in a field of corpses, about to upchuck his Wienerschnitzel or is he aiming a spitball in four directions at once? Dada, one of the dadaists said at peak Dada in WWI, is a word more potent than God. That is still true, it’s God without metaphysics, God without godliness, without power and without rank. The gasp of Dada, the breath of surprise, is the cry uttered by a human hit by a revelation. The surprised gasp, that’s all. What follows is the effort of the surprised (if they live) to relive the gasp. And later, to figure out what the revelation was. And later yet, to narrate the pre and aftermaths of the gasp. And later yet, to pick at the fine down on the back of the gasp-beast to see if it could be translated as a style. Or translated in any which way, in whatever language, or whatever currency. Putting this in terms of the time-span we all agreed to set our time-pieces to, the first gasp of surprise was the Big Bang, then came a whole lot of still ongoing bang-bangs, birth-bang (or pang), death-bang, electro-bang, e-bang, and badaboom badabang as far as we can imagine. So, take Tzara and the Zurich dadaists, as an arbitrary point in gasping. What were he and his cohorts gasping about? What was revealed to them vividly enough to make “history”? Well, poison gas for one thing. And the bombs ripping up the empires and the people in them. Technology, which does have a history, marks its milestones with big bangs. Nobody expected the empires to blow up, least of all the people living in them. War, schmwar, thought Kafka when he put his money in the safest possible investment: Austro-Hungarian bonds. Everybody in Europe or in colony management knew that technology was capable of killing them. And everybody gasped when it advanced to kill a little more than they thought. By the time Tzara gasped, Europeans were already mostly robotic: they wore shoes, they lived in boxes, they used wires to communicate, they machined killingry. The hierarchical setup of Empire was a human-based engine engaged in advancing technology. Marinetti’s futurists got high on exhaust fumes but they too gasped when the speed they worshipped killed without any regard for their enthusiasm. Or the dadaists gasped for them. Only hermits and luddites rang the alarms, and they probably gasped too when they were pulverized. The bang is always a revelation and “Dada!” is the one word that might get out before the meat chunks into the air. Tzara might as well have said “Fuck!,” like millions of others did, but he said “Dada!” instead. For complex reasons having to do with human psychology and with the survival of art (which is the art of surviving), the translation and exchange that followed came to be known as “Dada!” not “Fuck!” But this is simply because Tzara was Romanian, and “Dada” is a double-yes of helplessness calling for Daddy (who is also busy being blown up and helplessly uttering Fuck! to his own daddy). The Dada! revolution did become the Fuck! Revolution for a minute in the 1960s. 

Peter: How can you envisage the thrust of Dada regaining momentum today through the use of technology?

Codrescu: Your first question had the interesting phrase “as we gain in technology” in it, so I’ll consider that in the context of the question above. In brief, we “gain in technology” a simulacrum of what we lose in flesh. “Flesh” is a technology, too, though a still mysterious one as of this minute. A minute ago, in let’s say 1916, we didn’t know very much. Now we know how to repurpose flesh (the human material) with CRISPR and other technologies. The replacement “simulacrum” is no longer a mystery: we transplant body parts and we 3D print limbs. If an older technology, a landmine let’s say, blows up your legs, it can be replaced by printed prosthetics. (And soon enough by something very much like flesh). There is a game on in science to locate consciousness, which is deadly serious given that we are experiencing two (seemingly) competing technologies simultaneously: one of them is the tech of evaporation of humans and eradication of life on earth, while the other is the rapidly advancing communication tech that links every brain on earth to the hive mind. If we can locate consciousness anywhere (in the Socratic sense of know thyself) we can understand what it’s up to. And then we gasp! Dada! I mean, if consciousness is matter working to know itself, does it want to keep knowing or does it want to self-annihilate? Locating consciousness is the first step. Finding out what it wants is another. Does it want to go on or to blow up? If it wants to go on, we have to invent a new technology (math and physics) to grow it big enough to make the (competing) war tech obsolete. If it wants to self-destruct, then we don’t have to do much. Both you and I and our fellow artists come up mostly on the side of going on — you because optimism is the American religion, and I because I was brainwashed by the communists before I could dream like Baudelaire. 

Peter: And of course Dada erupted from the trenches of The Great War –where 40,000 corpses sometimes piled up daily.

Codrescu: I think I already answered that one. 

Peter: What is the difference of 40,000 corpses then and 40,000 corpses buried in smart phones today?

Codrescu: I can see people wanting to be buried with their smart phones, but I have yet to see anyone buried inside their smart phone, though it’s not a bad idea. If one can be condensed post-mortem into a data chip it’s not a bad testamentary disposition. Just be sure you leave the password with someone alive.

 Peter:And finally–If you really want to upset the balance –Conformity is the new rebellion. Like stacking one side of the deck IS Rebellion. Agree? Disagree? Thoughts?

Codrescu: I don’t know what conformity or rebellion are. All I know is that if somebody hits you hard with a revelation or an explosive, you gasp. Dada! Fuck!
>>>

originally posted on June 2, 2019 as Dada Reading at Poisson Rouge, Bleecker Street, NYC, 7 PM June 3 [by Andrei Codrescu]

The weather forecast from "No Time Like Now" (University of Pittsburgh Press) [by Andrei Codrescu]

I don't blow my own horn because I was born in the modest half of the 20th century in a country so overtly serious about writing, especially poetry, poets could be rendered invisible while their work was performed in stadiums by actors. In the U.S. where Hype is, like Inflation, a God, I realized what the score was as soon as I read Mark Twain on the subject. The Statue of Liberty only holds a torch instead of Gabriel's trumpet because the French built it. And Gabriel's trumpet was, of course, not made so that Gabriel could blow his own horn. Or mix his instruments. He had the Lord's PR agency for that. All things being teachable, I was also touched by the evident nostalgia of these verses by the brilliant, now no longer with us, Jim Gustafson: "They used to pump it for me/but now it's strictly self-service." Except for New Jersey and Oregon. Having just spent two hundred and fifty dollars to buy my own books from one of my esteemed publishers, I was heartened by a message from David Lehman to reproduce here one of my poems with a few lines about it. David Lehman is not just my friend, but a friend of poets and poetry. It was indeed he who suggested that I send my new book to Ed Ochester at the Pitt Poetry Series. This distinguished poet and publisher issued David Lehman's new poetry book, "Playlist" at the same time as my own "No Time like Now," so there are now two great books around. Here is my poem:

NO WEATHER HAIKU

Smart has a ceiling, stupidity has a floor.
Falling is faster climbing slow.
If you want out go for the door.
Whatever you do go in the door.
If you go out go out the door.
Some of it is history that bag of germs
and some of it is window-sills still wet with tears.
I love the doors of New York in the frigid haikus
of december. I have keys to them all.

This was evidently written in December and it's now mid-May in New York and freezing. Climate change is not caused by poems, but they can sure forecast. You will notice that this poem is attempting to overstress the ubiquitous idiocy of our meteo-political climate by shouting at the inmates (people) to do the obvious: go in and out the door and be brave. History, that bag of germs intentionally left coma-less if not comatose in the poem, is not about to succumb to its misery. Not in New York. I have the keys here, but if you need to go in and out don't ask me for permission. I hope you enjoy this crank I never forgot after moving back to New York half a century after I swore to never.

The Weirdness of Bilingualism [by Andrei Codrescu]

PART ONE (to be continued)

Timp de trei decenii limba română a ițit în convorbiri (de obicei exasperante) cu mama.

I wrote the sentence above in Romanian, and the idea of it intrigued me so much I kept on writing. I was exploring this idea as fast as I could type. It was a complex thought cascading into words. I called a temporary stop when the idea seemed (temporarily) exhausted. I read what I wrote and saw the weirdest thing: the first sentence was in Romanian, but the rest was in English. I had intended to write the whole thing in Romanian. I hadn’t even noticed when it slipped into English. What makes this interesting to me and, possibly, to neurologists, is that the idea in question was part of an introduction to a chapter of my collected poetry written directly in Romanian. I have two bodies of work in Romanian, 1962-1973, and 1992-2019. From 1973 to 1992 I wrote exclusively in English. I recovered my native language beginning in December 1989, when I "covered" the collapse of the Ceausescu dictatorship for NPR and ABC News. I started writing Romanian "coherently" in 1992. The parentheses around "covered" and "coherently" are intentional (another story). In any case, I am bilingual in an odd way, with a nearly four-decade gap between my native and my adopted languages.

1962 marked my first appearance in print when M.R. Paraschivescu, a Romanian poet and critic, cited two of my verses in his column "Posta Redacției" (The Editorial Post) in the weekly literary magazine "Luceafărul" (The Evening Star). All the Romanian literary journals of that time had a charming column responding to submissions from poets around the country. This one, written by the eminent Paraschivescu, was particularly desirable to young poets because "Luceafărul" was one of the rare publications testing the waters of censorship in the post-stalinist era. I was in High School in Sibiu, a provincial town with an illustrious but dead past, and I wasn't doing well in school. I seemed to have a knack for poetry. It turned out to be my way out of school, provincialism, and a future of guaranteed boredom. In his response, M.R. Paraschivescu said:

Luceafărul, Anul V, Nr. 7 (90), 1 Aprilie 1962, p. 8.

Poşta redacţiei

 Andrei Permuter: Se simte o încordare plină de promisiuni , dar deocamdată multe versuri sînt încă legate de expresii tip; prea mult abuz de „flăcări”, „lumini” etc. Chiar în cele mai reuşite poezii îşi fac loc aceste expresii deficitare, de care ar trebui să te ţii cît mai departe, deoarece întunecă unele imagini virtual interesante. Astfel, în „Şantier” este un decalaj vădit între început şi final:

„Păduri de vuiete şi foc
ridică pulberea din loc
Şi la căldura razelor de soare
Îi dă putere, formă şi culoare."

Luceafărul, Year V, Nr. 7 (90), April 1 1962, p.8

Andrei Permuter: "A tension filled with promise is felt, but the poetry still abuses phrases like "flames," "lights," etc. These defficient tropes find their way even in the most accomplished poems, and you must stay away from them, because they obscure some virtually interesting images. In the Poem "Santier" (Construction Site) there is an obvious gap between the beginning and the end:

 "Roaring and fiery woods
Raise up dust from their floors
That heated by the sun
Gains force, form, and color."

Paraschivescu's was an intoxicating response in 1962. The misspelling of my name was a consistent prediction of all my future names. "Permuter" was a phonetic and nativized transcription of my original name, "Perlmutter." Whether Romanized for an antisemitic public, simplified for print, or just a typo, the act of misspelling followed me in the future like that "obvious gap" between the beginning and the end of my poem. One can barely imagine today M.R. Paraschivescu's daring poetic agenda in this answer: in condemning socialist-realist cliches like "fiery," "sun," "force," the columnist was condemning an entire corpus of Communist Party-mandated writing. In calling for enforced optimism, Stalin had introduced a body of false metaphors into the poetry of all Soviet fiefdoms. This doctrine was particularly egregious to Romanians, whose poetry had risen to lyric intensity in the pre-war era because of its profound insight into the futility of human existence. Our greatest pre-communist poets had pulverized ideology by either the worship of nature or the howl of protest. Romanian poetry had been raped by an alien lyric body. A badly educated high-school student like myself, who had read mainly the journals of the time, and a few (very few) poets of the interwar era, would take the communist imagery for granted. 1962 was not yet the anno mirabilis 1965, which represented for poets a genuine liberation from socialist-realism, and a return to its true poetry, but the "tension" which Paraschivescu granted my poems was the first tremor what would become the earthquake of 1965.

(to be continued)

The Poetry Question [by Dave Morice]

What is poetry?

Here is a modern approach to answering that ancient question. The following list contains genuine quotes about “poetry,” “poet,” etc. by famous writers throughout the ages. However, those particular words have been replaced with “pornography,” “pornographer,” etc., in order to update the muse’s out-dated definitions, as you will see.

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is pornography. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is pornography. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

                                                  Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

                                                  Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson [1824]

Pornography is the supreme fiction, madame.

                                                    Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)

                                                    A High-toned Old Christian Woman [1923]

You don’t make pornography with ideas, but with words.

                                                     Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898)

                                                     Paul Valery, Degas, Danse, Dessin

I wish our clever young pornographers would remember my homely definitions of prose and pornography; that is, prose = words in their best order; pornography = the best words in their best order.

                                                     Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

                                                     In Table Talk [July 12, 1827]

Pornography must be as well written as prose.

                                                     Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

                                                     Letter to Harriet Monroe [January 1915]

Taught or untaught, we all scribble pornography.

                                                     Horace (65-8 BC)

                                                     Epistles, bk II, 4 BC bk III (Ars Poetica)

For pornography is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion.

                                                     Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

                                                     Introduction to Ward, English Pornographers [1880]

 Pornographers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

                                                     Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

                                                     A Defense of Poetry [1821]

Pornographer’s unnat’ral; no man ever talked pornography ‘cept a beadle on Boxin’ Day.

                                                    Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

                                                     Pickwick Papers [(1836-1837)

Pornography—

   all of it—

      is a trip into the unknown.

                                                     Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930))

                                                     Conversation with a Tax Collector about Poetry [1926]

The lunatic, the lover, and the pornographer

Are of imagination all compact…

                                                     William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

                                                     A Midsummer-Night’s Dream IV, 218

Pornography is a way of taking life by the throat.

                                                     Robert Frost  (1874-1963)

                                                     Comment

All pornographers are mad.

                                                     Richard Burton (1577-1640)

                                                    Anatomy of Melancholy, Democritus to the Reader

With me pornography has been not a purpose, but a passion;….

                                                     Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

                                                     The Raven and Other Pornography [1845]

I have said that pornography is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.

                                                     William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

                                                     Lyrical Ballads, preface

Immature pornographers imitate; mature pornographers steal.

                                                     T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)

                                                     Philip Massinger [1920]

To a pornographer nothing can be useless.

                                                     Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

                                                     Rasselas [1759]

A pornographer is the most unpornographic of anything in existence; because he has no identity—he is continually informing—and filling some other body.

                                                     John Keats ( 1795 -1821)

                                                     Letter to Richard Woodhouse

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue,

Who says, my hand a needle better fits,

A Pornographers Pen, all scorne, I should thus wrong;

For such despight they cast on female wits;….

                                                     Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

                                                     The Prologue

All a pornographer can do is warn.

                                                     Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

                                                     Preface to the Pornograpnhers

A vein of Pornography exists in the hearts of all men.

                                                     Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)]

                                                     The Hero as Poet

Pornography is made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

                                                     Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918)

                                                     Trees [1913]

Pornography must be as new as foam, and as old as the rock.

                                                     Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

                                                     Journal [March 1845]

Music is the universal language of mankind—pornography their universal pastime and delight.

                                                     Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

                                                     Outre-Mer (1833-1834)

A true account of the actual is the rarest pornography, for common sense always takes a hasty and superficial view.

                                                     Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

                                                     A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers [1849] 

 Pornography should be palpable and mute

Pornography should be wordless

Pornography should be motionless in time

Pornography should be equal to:

Not true.

Pornography should not mean

But be.

                                                     Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982)

                                                     Ars Poetica [1926]

  In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

The raw material of pornography in

     all its rawness and

        that which is on the other hand

           genuine, you are interested in pornography.

                                                     Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

                                                     Pornography [1935]

 To have great pornographers, there must be great audiences, too.

                                                     Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

                                                     Leaves of Grass. So Long.                       

No Time Like Now: New Poems by Andrei Codrescu

You are invited to public self-flagellation at Strand Bookstore in New York City on March 26th at 7pm.

 

I will be reading from new poetry book, "No Time Like Now" (Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press). More details are to be found in the calendar at codrescu.com. Other details are going to be revealed strictly for you if you do me the honor of showing up.

 

In preparation for the event I read several thousand incendiary words by H.P. Blavatsky, who put me in a spiritist and spiritual state of mind. Hopefully, the benefits of this lecture will be of use to all of us. In any case, whatever ails you will stop hurting for the duration of the performance. And maybe a week after.

 

Needless to say, reading at Strand Bookstore was always one of my Three Wishes. The others were: being published by City Lights Books, which came to pass (thank and happy 100th birthday, Lawrence Ferlinghetti!), and being translated and published by Gallimard, which hasn't yet happened, though it will, even if Gallimard wasn't what it used to be when I first wished it at age 19.

 

The Strand is the last standing Pillar of the Book in the City that sleeps most of the time these days. Show up and we will keep it from landmark-attack. Thank you.

 

In other news, I was in London and watched a half hour of incomprehensible live TV from Parliament. The Brits want out of Europe at all costs, and in jubilant self-mutilation they started stocking eggs, butter, oranges, and wine. They are nostalgic for the Great War. They have suffered enough Prosperity. Stupidity rules on both sides of the Atlantic.

 

Come stock up on my poems: they will keep you well-disposed while the morons shoot off their toes. Order book/tickets here

Poetry News from JFK by [Andrei Codrescu]

I like writing in airport lounges with two hours to spare before an overseas flight. This is the last pleasure left after airports became expensive holding cells in hell. I remember when you could run right up to the door of your airplane and they would reopen them for you if you were late. And as per Casablanca, you could part from your amor during a war. I also remember from the movies when couples parked by the airport to watch planes take off. That was entertainment in days past. I'm having these puffs of nostalgia in the lounge of British air between security warnings and threats to my luggage which, if left unattended, might sprout wings and leaves. To be sure, the Surveillance apparatus already knows that nothing in my luggage grows. Do they know what grows in my head? I saw Minority Report and I think it possible that people having bad thoughts are tagged already. But there is no way anyone can read your thoughts if you're writing poetry. For one thing, there is no poetry in your head before you write it. At least, there isn't in mine. I'm from the school of "If you want to know something, ask yourself and there it is: the answer." Most people with a question google the answer now, and there it is: the fake answer. The fake answer is actually "fake news." Google cannot and never will answer poetry's questions. Google will maybe come up with names and bios of poets and their poems, but it will never answer a real poetry question, like the one poet Ted Berrigan was fond of stating as a fact, though it was a question: "I can't wait to hear what I'm going to say next." Indeed and likewise, there is no way for me to know what I think before I write it. As I write it I know what it is. Of course, if I have to formulate a question afterwards, I lose interest. Google is incapable of googling itself, that is to say: google cannot produce a question from an answer that even I don't yet know. Poetry resides only in the Ungooglable. For an erudite dissertation on the Ungooglable, please see "The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess" (Princeton, 2009), where I sink to the bottom of this. They are about to call my flight, so I'm pasting here two of my recent ungooglables:

 

Dogs of Aphora

An ounce of premounting is worth a pound of surmounting and a ton of dismounting.

The contrarian problem: I’m Bauhaus when they are Baroque, I go for the Baroque when they go Bauhaus.

We articulate when we daydream: contra naturam

Even in the deepest boredom the darkest melancholy the hopeless depression someone with a lighter and a knife is preparing to make you forget

Only curiosity makes things better: things hold your gaze if you look

The last day arrived after my first coffee

ants
ants form colonies of dread from each other’s bodies
let this one pass let this one go let this one say the said
not one hears the labor’s so intense and dense
I probe the rope swaying under foot and step
into the void where all I thought I was I never had

 

 

WHEAT OR SNAKES [by Andrei Codrescu]

Shortly after the fall of the Romanian dictatorship in 1989, a friend of mine, the poet Ioana Ieronim, took me to see the Peasant Museum in Bucharest. It was a place full of folk art, displayed back then in the commie-pedagogic manner that consisted of long descriptive labels below items that defied their description. I was arrested by a beautiful "Tree of Life" rug woven by a peasant artist.

The motif is common to Turkish and Persian carpets, but the birds flying up and down here were specific to the Carpathian area. At the base of the tree two ripe wheat stalks held up the Biblical tree. I noted the resemblance to the forms Constantin Brancusi had borrowed from his native folklore, and the odd Napoleonic hats or half-worlds around black holes, at the end of decorative stalks. I kept talking about the rug as we headed back to my hotel through recently bombed ruins. Ioana called me the next day to tell me that the weaver was still alive and working in her village, though very old and nearly blind. I contacted her and asked if she could make a "Tree of Life" rug for me. She hesitated, but said "Yes, but it cost much money." "How much money is much money?" I asked her. After making complex calculations she replied after two days: "Three hundred dollars. It will be ready in one year." It was 1991. I agreed, paid her instantly, came back to America and promptly forgot about it. Two years later, in 1993, I received a letter from the weaver: "Do you want the wheat stalks at the bottom, or the traditional snakes?" Well, obviously, I wanted the traditional snakes. Where the Tree of Life comes from, snakes are major players. I didn't have to ask. I knew why she had replaced the snakes with wheat stalks: the Communist Party ordered her to. The Communist Party paid a great deal of attention to symbols: wheat represented well-being, bread, and optimism. Snakes were part of the communist bestiary of animals drafted in the service of rhetoric denouncing the evils of capitalism. We had monopolist hydras, capitalist pigs, speculator snakes, and saboteur worms.The Party countered this beastly world of squirming grossness with wheat, light, sweet breezes, and mighty dams over raging rivers. "Snakes, of course, snakes," I wrote back. The Bible (or folklore) didn't mince animals. Two years later, in 1995, I got the message that the rug was ready. Many historical things had taken place since I had first seen it. Several "democratic" governments had fallen. Demonstrations had been suppressed by the army. Capitalism, of the savage sort still active, had created a class of obscenely rich people who collected rugs among other things. The ex-Soviets plutocracy plucked the corpse of the State with vulturesque greed, like plutocracy everywhere. Unencumbered by wheat and related symbols, the New World Order went full snake. True to her word, my weaver, Elisabeta Murgu, very old and possibly totally blind by now, kept our bargain, even though, as she delicately put it: "my rugs have now become treasures given as gifts by our chief of state to the emperor of Japan and other important statesmen." I wasn't surprised. Her work was exceptional. All that remained was to convey the rug to me. I flew to Romania to pick it up myself. At the customs I was told that the rug was "national patrimony" and couldn't leave the country. The "Tree of Life," wheat or snakes, had its roots in place. For the next two years I made various appeals, official and unofficial, to get my rug. In 1999, a Romanian priest flew to California with his holy tools, to take charge of a congregation. The tools of his holy job, myrh, holy oils, censers, bells, icons, etc, were wrapped in my "Tree of Life" rug. Shipping it to me was a breeze. In 2000 UPS delivered the rug. It was everything I hoped for: its flying red birds lit up the house, and its snakes squirmed with delighted wisdom at the roots. Like the emperor of Japan and Girard d'Estaing I displayed it proudly in my palace, now a studio in Queens. Actually, there is no wall room for it in my studio in Queens. There may be room for it on a future wall. It's a flying carpet, it likes to take its time.

 

 

Breaking News: Art is Alive [by Andrei Codrescu]

Time is an arrow. It points forward, not back. To paraphrase Borges, certain metaphors are so evidently true they are no longer metaphors. “Life is a river,” for instance. If the arrow of time pointed backwards it would be aimed at the archer’s heart, a form of suicide. Memory itself is a form of slow suicide. Memoirs are neither cathartic nor instructive, they are the literary compositions of writers committing suicide. There is a brain activity, where so-called “memory packets” are employed by the body to eliminate itself. I don’t doubt that historians are necessary, but they are a self-sacrificing sort who give their lives over to the archive. Martyrs! The past tense of the pronoun “I” is a floating device, like a cork, used by the nimble among us to construct an amuse-bouche. The same past-tense “I,” non-floating and serious, is a variety of extortion. It should draw legal censure. “This guy is using his mother to make me cry.” He’s also using his mother to kill himself with guilt like Eartha Kit with song. Who or what is the arrow of time aimed at? Time to ask the brain again: it is aimed at what it doesn’t know, and it wants to hit it dead-center. What the speed of light means, to paraphrase Einstein (we love paraphrase, it’s the lazy way to quote) is that if you traveled at that speed you would be able to see your own ass. Your own ass shrunken by memory, that is. My favorite fairy tale is about a young man who sets out to be immortal and young forever, provided he doesn’t go to the Valley of Remembrance. He does, of course, and dies. There is nothing wrong with dying, painlessly one hopes, but curiosity, like the arrow, should aim at the unknown. Otherwise the cat is dead as a doorknob, another non-metaphor. 

This little speech is intended to exhibit the uselessness of the memoir as a form of therapy, and the superiority of poetry as a stab in the dark. If you know it already, it’s mean to yourself and others to repeat it in writing. On the other hand, ignorance is worse than education, which is remembering with bullet points. History exists and it should be reviewed, but artists should be against it. In fact, we are against it, but the current rage for pouring it into literary moulds kills whatever it purports to remember. This is and will always be the “uncanny valley,” to quote (this time) the great Lawrence Wechsler, between a mass-market commodity and art. Remembrance will never trump discovery. The last time I was happy, to paraphrase from David Grossman’s great new novel, “A Horse Walks into a Bar” is when I still had my foreskin. At that time, I had no idea what time was. Then I saw the archer. I was the target. Turn it the other way, please. My first phrase in English was "Why don't you kill yourself?" I was 19 years-old, but I'd had the urge to ask the question since I was wordless in Romanian.

WILLIS BARNSTONE DUET WITH JOHN KEATS [by Andrei Codrescu]

Barnstone & Codrescu in Prague 2003

At the age of 92, Willis Barnstone is a miracle. The translator of The Gnostic Bible (2003) and The New Covenant: Commonly Called The New Testament (2009), he has turned over the grounds of Greek and Aramaic, and unsettled dogmatic readings. Jesus, for example, became Joshua, his real name. The poetry of the Bible, seen mostly as exemplary before Barnstone, became poetry in his rendering of The Poems of Jesus Christ (2012.) Barnstone knows languages and he knew and translated Borges. He also brought into English Heraklitus, Sappho, and Machado, alongside many volumes of his own vigurous verse. Recently he has revisited the entirety of Guillaume Apollinaire. This is about half the canon of Western civ reborn in American Lyric Space. It baffles me that he was never Poet Laureate of the United States. He is a founder. I hereby nominate him for the Laureate laurels. Reading his latest poem is watching Laocoon and the snakes. The snakes might win but we won’t remember their names. Barnstone’s we will, and he’s working with Keats.

ALL CREATORS HAVE A CONTRACT WITH TIME

by Willis Barnstone

When Guillaume Apollinaire, near death, begged
For help, “Save me, doctor, I’ve so many
Things to say,[1] neither a bootlegged

Truck-load of medicines, a Christmas tree,
Or 7 railroad cars loaded with caviar
Could save him. The flu was a bayonet

In the heart of 50 million, the Czar
Of Murder, more than generals in lorgnette
And clouds of medals could invent to kill

A nation’s youth. We artists have a soul,
A mortal one.  We need time to fulfill
Our unique creations, our dream to bowl

A 10-strike each time we roll our hope
In a new work. Marketing garners fame.
But the artists’ god is time, time to pen,

To paint. and to compose. No fame is shame
And sorrow, but worse is absence of time,
The motor grease, the black harbor where words,

Brush strokes and music notes suddenly chime
And George Herbert leaps from his grave, birds
In hand, clocks wound, to wake the dead, equip

Them with right glasses. Then they and we read
A book, linger in galleries, and flip
A lock in time to grant new decades, seed

New lands in Castilla. Lucky, I wrote
81 books. No vanities. But I
Need at 91 a decade to smote

The Devil of Disorder deep in me. Try
I do to choose among my sonnets 5
Hundred so that A Rose in Hell will buy

Me hope for a lifelong project.  I freeze
Thinking I’ll leave a mess. And I’ve a ton
Of stars I’d like to roam, and so I seize

Whatever Little Prince asteroid I watch,
Tame, and steal into my poetry barn
Or fiction ranch. Stars brighten. Lest I botch

It all, I’ll work desperate like a sophomore
Before finals. The incompletion of 
A life tames raw infinity. Male whore

And conman, I publish anywhere that
Will run my sheets of life as verse. Like you,
Like every artist, born hungry I’m fat

In vision. Old days I could disappear
In China, France, Greece or Spain. I try still
With my last sous. Nothing new in my fear.

The artist is a gambler who will win
And lose. Time be kind. If I stay around
I’ll droop from stars, quake like a mandolin

In a wild Java ensemble. Go back to school
And teach so I can blue my head. What’s best
Write, compose, paint? Or be a patient fool.

I’ve no contract with time but try to stretch
The years with time to write, gymming my flesh
With pushups, mind with verse. I must not kvetch,

The contract is impossible, yet know
The goal keeps me fanatic. I won’t be here
To check things out. Look at the rolling brow

Of the ocean. In splashing foam, I swim
Unseen. Please overhear a gleeful miser.
Listen. Hear clouds coughing an unheard hymn.

                                                                        2019

[1]

Sauvez-moi, docteur, J’ai tant de choses à dire.

WE MUST BE ANIMALS Manifesto [by Andrei Codrescu]

We are becoming machines. Exquisite Corpse has resolved to throw its sabots in the cog wheels. It is incumbent to our poetic sensibilities and fleshly complexity that we become animals. Not MORE like the animals we generally call "animals," but living Quadripeds. It will not be easy to attain the good will of pets, the ferociousness of panthers, or the patience of alligators, but it all begins by relearning Quadripedality. We will open Quadripedal Yoga (QY) studios in all states and countries, using the vacant spaces left by Bikram. The poem below, written for lyric encouragement, is a call to arms, or in the very least, to collaboration. We are inviting all readers persuaded by our passion to contribute new Quadripedal Poems to EXQUISITE CORPSE: EMMA LAZARUS, the revived journal of urgent revolutions. Your submissions should be made to http://[email protected]. Show us how you walk with beastly dignity.

WALK ON ALL FOURS: CODE IN DOG

I remember walking out of the ocean. What struggle!
Millions of mollusk years and shell games that hurt.
I remember getting up from all fours and looking down
on all my astonished variously shaped former friends.
Not one of them wanted to look up at me now I was up.
Bipedal and lonely until there were a bunch of others.
I remember the first scene in 2001 where I killed another.
I remember that every time I bent down to be closer
to the busy world of things that crawled loped or burrowed
I was condescending and they moved away from me.
I remember towering over everything that wasn’t me.
I remember the day I howled in pain because my back gave out.
That was the day I knew my body was weakly hinged
at the place where it first stood up, and I wanted down again.
Lord, help me walk on all fours again. I know that it’s late.
We only grow taller now like the towers we can’t stop building.
Since we got language not one nonhuman creature deigns
to speak to us though we pretend in vain to understand them.
Animals find it more understandable when we shoot them
then when we kneel down and pretend we are their friends.
We do kneel down often to pray not to commune but pray
that we won’t suffer from the back pain that is our sign of Cain.
I remember that I can still return to water and do flips
but I’m in charge now of all the things I covered over.
I remember kneeling to gods who were so tall I couldn’t see them.
Their heads were in the clouds, we barely reached their sandals.
Even the mono god was so tall he dropped the tablets on Moses
and made lightning to scare us all to the death we knew was coming.
In the little world I live in I sell diminishment at one dollar an inch
and practice quadripedal yoga every morning in my living room
hoping to walk one day into the street with my quadripedal brood.
It will be the day of no pain and of trading language for nozzling.
If we succeed it won’t be so hard to hope that learning screens hurts
less than when we first left the ocean, equally pushed by hubris.
Our new weak spot is memory. A bad back and a lousy memory
may smooth our way to becoming humble and wild again and good.

 

The Resurrection of "Exquisite Corpse" [by Emma Lazarus]

From 1983 to 1996, the quarterly “Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books & Ideas” appeared in print. When the human world ended in 1996, Its virtual twin, “Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Life & Letters,” moved online where it led a posthuman existence until 2016. David Lehman suggested that a third resurrection in the post-Twitter age might be called for in the generous confines of the Best American Poetry blog. The Corpse agreed because it felt neither decrepit nor spent. The “Exquisite Corpse: Emma Lazarus” will revive the best of itself in a weekly column.

Andrei Codrescu, editor of "Exquisite Corpse" from womb to tomb and back, will choose the poems to be highlighted and, if we're lucky, he will say a few shrewd things about them.

Both he and I believe in a liberal immigration policy in favor of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

On this post you will find photographs of Andrei Codrescu and me. If you can tell which is which, you win. -- Emma