it was today / Edition 1

by Andrei Codrescu

Overview

In praise of his poetry, The New York Times calls Andrei Codrescu "one of our most prodigiously talented and magical writers." Part genius, part tongue-in-cheek provocateur, Codrescu is an audacious and passionate poet. The heart of this first new collection in nearly a decade is a beautiful conceit containing the "recently discovered" correspondence between a warrior and a courtesan in fourteenth-century China. These tender, timeless verses contrast nicely with tough, funny -poems about modern life and millennial malaise.

Andrei Codrescu is a celebrated poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator on National Public -Radio. A World Heavyweight Champion Poet, his many awards include the Literature Prize of the Romanian Cultural Foundation and the Peabody Award for his film Road Scholar. Born in Romania, Andrei Codrescu lives in New Orleans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566891462
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	09/01/2003
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Writer and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu was working on a film exploring life along the Mississippi, when Katrina slammed into his hometown. After hosting scores of refugees in his Baton Rouge home, Codrescu released his essay collection New Orleans Mon Amour, becoming one of the many important voices celebrating New Orleans culture, recording its devastation, and awakening America's conscience.

Table of Contents

1.
	The fire truck comes to your house	1
	We live	2
	Once	3
	A nantucket sleigh ride	4
	Houses, scams, language	5
	Nickelodeon	6
	1968 for leonard cohen	7
	January 3 2001	9
	To poetry	11
	Haiku + one	12
	Birthday poem & bed-frame I.O.U.	13
	The portuguese eat a dish	14
	Laura	15
	After twenty-five years	16
	Old snake ponders	17
	My name is andrei codrescu	18
	My son came over	20
	Greetings they weren't using then	22
	As tears go by	23
	Draft	25
	A geography of poets	26
	My sympathy	28
	Defense of the meek	29
	Poetry, the ancients said	30
	To the museum curators	31
	To a young poet	32
	On drunkenness	34
	Young men write poetry	35
	I hate youth	36
	The masses	37
	Taxes	38
	The dorkery	39
	Morning hike	40
	For lynn luria sukenick	41
	Dream of january 11, 1999 after the first copies of messi@h arrived & laura & i celebrated at molly's and it was gwen albert's birthday too	43
	I need a pony	45
	What am I? art?	46
	New orleans aubade	47
	Another year	48
	When dreams get thick on easy street	49
	Sleeping with an open eye	50
	Opera later	51
	There are a lot of masseuses	52
	Soaking in rich people's tubs	53
	It has been going on a while	54
	Bad girls with glasses	55
	I knew what I wanted	56
	The diners	57
	Sheep (patriotic poetry)	58
	Rory	59
2.	Lu Li & Weng Li
	Preface	63
	Lu li	65
	Weng li	76
	Coda	90
3.
	Often after a public event	93
	Every morning	94
	Brancusi's fish	95
	How I got to america	97
	The revolution and the poet	98
	Eliade: a poem	99
	The failed encounter	103
	The american dream	104
	Babies and the two	106
	In jerusalem on my 48th birthday	107
	The vision & prophecy plaza	110
	The hidden jews	112
	Today	114
	Our gang	115
	Writers	119
	The view from the baby seat	120
	Two desert monks encounter the christ of happiness, christina	125
	What some of them were wearing	128
	My favorite boat has a horn on its side	130
	The party was boring	131
	New orleans art for wall street	132
	Robert has a newton	134
	Last night at the relief	135
	Wartime questions & answers in montreal	137
	9/11	142
	Alternatives	144

Editorial Reviews

Codrescu, certainly not unknown as a poet, and widely recognizable as a cranky cultural commisar on public radio, has written a book that is valuable in the way that, say, Pete Townshend's solo records were, as crafty expressions of a guy whose more radical (druggy, horny, vagrant, political) days are behind him, but whose pop and zing has been mellowed not with age so much as the bodily memory (tobaccoey fingers, shattered tear ducts) of having seen more than most. His "to a young poet" is as myopic as it is aptly ventriloquistic: "& then if you publish a big/ book of poems I'll read/ one or two & give you my/ begrudging approval in the name/ of the new flock even though/ we are lost & nobody cares/ if we live or we die." His light formal touch includes almost exclusive use of lower-case letters and very little punctuation, providing a limpidity that allows the poet to dart from style to style and length to length. Some of these poems seem slight, but none lack the contrapuntal effects and occluded phrases of dialectical thinking; every poem has a beginning statement, a middle where it is countered and worked through, and an end that turns the tables on it all in a winning, often wittily poignant way: "now we are here what should we / do with our accents // do like me I say / keep talking." (Sept.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Poet, radio commentator, essayist, and novelist, the prolific Codrescu never seems to lack for inspiration. His offbeat, often biting sensibility has become a trademark, yet some of his most sensitive poems emerge when he is not his typically acidulous self. The long sequence "Lu Li & Weng Li," written in the dual personae of two royal Chinese lovers in the 14th century, reveals a romantic idealist that will remind readers of the personae whose "poems" appeared in Codrescu's magnificent first collection, License To Carry a Gun. Even the more personal poems in this volume display two clearly different selves: the author of day-to-day poems, which are dawdling, often cute, sometimes easily dismissed, and the Romanian refugee, returning to Eastern Europe in 1990, still in many ways held by the political chains that bound his youth. As he says, playfully, in "how I got to america," "I swam over a barbed wire fence./ There was a hair curtain & I scaled it." No matter which poet is speaking, the effect is arresting. Essential for most libraries.-Rochelle Ratner, formerly with "Soho Weekly News," New York Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

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