Andrei Codrescu | My new book, The Poetry Lesson, is out from Princeton University Press. I've sniffed my first copy! It has a deeply satisfying scent. And it's great. I'm modestly adding some others' opinions below, but I must say three things: 1. the bonfire of poetic vanities is ignited, 2. poetry is the currency of the future, and 3. the enemy is at the gates. Friends, the castle is yours. Bring your pets. After a quarter of a century of amusement and terror, here are the maxims of a teaching wretch. Early praise for The Poetry Lesson: "The Poetry Lesson is a gem--a consistently engaging and entertainingly rambling meditation on teaching and poetry that is filled with Andrei Codrescu's quicksilver mental responses. His teacher-narrator keeps vacillating between denouncing the new, text-message order of his students and trying to ally himself with youth against old-fogeyism. This dance, as the teacher is alternately chagrined and amused, gives the book a lively pulse." -Phillip Lopate, author of Notes on Sontag "Andrei Codrescu's new book is a small comic masterpiece. It is so funny that I laughed out loud as I was turning the pages. The account of the first poetry writing class of the semester is as accurate as it is surreal. What makes the writing so delightful is the juxtaposition of student repartee and the professor's jaundiced--but never predictable--response. The Poetry Lesson is a delightful read--but also a disturbing portrait of academe today."-Marjorie Perloff, author of The Vienna Paradox: A Memoir See a video interview about The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, from Princeton University Press. I don't know about you, but I think that the 21st century cannot do without Dada; this book is not another study of Dada! it is a practical guide to the Dada life. This book is also a geyserized exit from the miserabilism and miraculousness of insane geography as per Jealous Witness: New Poems, with a CD by the New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars (Coffee House Press, 2008). (Listen to Ivan Neville sing below!) The misery was human, an anthology of human mistakes that nature elevated into tragedy, and the miracle is that we are still here and young artists are remaking the joint. You can hear my commentaries on NPR's All Things Considered, podcast for easy extraction, and you can find my New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writing from the City, The Blood Countess, Messi@h, Casanova in Bohemia, and Wakefield, useful for building literary furniture in your cornucopic sun-powered house. You can add revolution and sentiment with The Hole in the Flag: An Exile’s Tale of Return and Revolution, a book about the fact that you can go home again, and Ay, Cuba! A Socio-erotic Journey. I also wrote Hail, Babylon: American Cities at the end of The Millenium (the last one), and Road Scholar, which was a Peabody award-winning film. Since 1989, I've also been returning often to Romania and to the language of my birth, and seriously committing bilingvism: the first attempt was a book-length interview called Miracle and Catastrophe: an interview with Andrei Codrescu by Robert Lazu, published in Timisoara, Romania, by Hartmann publishers in 2005. The second, a more perilous and more vertiginous act of philological derring-do is an epic poem co-written in Romanian by e-mail with the poet Ruxandra Cesereanu, called Submarinul Iertat, published in a deluxe edition by Editura Brumar in 2007, and published in English by Black Widow Press under the title Forgiven Submarine, with a baroque and fabulously scary cover by Radiu Chio. The literary journal I founded in 1983, Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Life & Letters (corpse.org) has been updating itself spiritually and technologically, which is more than you can say about the Foreign Legion. In any case, this is the work, and the pleasure.}
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