Song of My Emerging Self: The Poetry of Andrei Codrescu

This was a feeling or ambition to articulate and faithfully express in literary or poetic form, and uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, moral, intellectual, and aesthetic Personality, in the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit and facts of its immediate days, and of current America. (A Backward Glance o'er Travel'd Roads, 1888) Walt Whitman For almost thirty years, since 1966, Andrei Codrescu has lived in the United States, absorbed a new culture, published more than twenty books, taught American university students, and broadcast weekly essays on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" on the American scene or world events from a peculiar perspective and in accented English. Now that knowledge of what has been happening in Eastern Europe is suddenly available, we might attend more carefully to the words of one who returned from those depths and is in a position to tell how the accumulation of the thousand miniature pictures of the two worlds can impress the memory and shape of the poetic self. Codrescu's poetic universe is a compound of the Romanian experience since World War II, of the cold war climate as felt in an East European country, of his own status within a distinguishable minority, and of his own unique psychological development within this context and the new world experience that followed it, His childhood spent in Romania, in the Transylvanian town of Sibiu, is epitomized in a poem Like "history" in The History of the Growth of Heaven, which typically blends contemporary events and personal experience: in 1946 there was ray mother inside who i was still hiding. in 1953 i was small enough to curl behind a tire while the man with the knife passed. in 1953 also i felt comfortable under the table while everyone cried became Stalin was dead. in 1965 i hid inside my head and the colors were formidable and just now at the end of 1971 i could have hidden inside a comfy hollow in the phone but i couldn't find the entrance. (54) Citizens of Sibiu, however, in one of those unforeseen historical ironies, had nowhere to h/de because the town housed a concentration of the greatly feared Securitate, which, in the last throes of recent upheaval, turned its devastating artillery on the town's people.(1) But the compound of his Romanian past and American present is best illustrated in the volume Comrade Past and Mister Present published in 1986. It chronicles Codrescu's development through the forty years of the poet's life, divided equally between Romania and the United States, often focusing on the poet's emerging self, which becomes both the subject and the implement of artistic expression: History: in 1967, I was experimenting with all sorts of looseness, rifling rhythm. (I had a different accent every day.) Then I tightened up for my masters, the publishers. First Paul Carroll raised my capitals and raped my text with punctuation. Then Mike Braziller with his insistence on the elegiac. Then my surrealist fans with their insistence on recognition (i.e. orthodoxy). All of these insistences, even when strenuously or successfully resisted, left some of their fingerprints, if not the shape of the ir pressure, on my work. Of course, one evolves that way too, nobody's a frozen CB. (Comrade 92) This juif errant who left postwar Eastern Europe in 1966 feels that "being an outsider is not a misfortune, it is a blessing and, what's more, a script for freedom. It's not the suffering that's good for you, but the thinking. Thinking is impossible inside, where everything serious has already been thought for you by others" (Comrade 86). He aims at integration and self-acknowledgment in an adopted culture: I think, I made myself a peculiar niche in American lit. Perimutter used to be my name, fallen angel my vocation. Permutit, pearl mother, wanderer, pearl nipple, Jew tit. …