I have lifted, literally, the below off the substack pages of Andrei Codresu.
Why steal it?
Because it is that good, to share.
[ BA ]
COMING ATTRACTION: SELECTED POEMS: 2026-1970
Black Widow Press is publishing my collection of Selected Poems in May 2017. The following Foreward is for my special Substack readers.
Hell, in case you are wondering, is reading yourself over and over. That is the postmortem fate of all poets who end up there for many reasons, the most egregious of which is having troubled good people’s sleep with verses. What are verses, who are the good people, and what is sleep? These are questions that fifty-six years of word slinging have attempted to answer.
I just thought of that.
You can now add those questions to other urgencies here. Urgencies are mostly questions that need an answer quickly, like a Heimlich maneuver or talking-down a body from the ledge.
Don’t run: this isn’t a dense flat of interventions. There are many quiet groves where nature erases language with the beauty-sponge of flowers and fruit. Pacing Brueghel with Renoir, Baudelaire with Francis Jammes, Barbu with Blaga, Times Square with Strawberry Fields, working in the mines with smooching in the clover, will alpha-wave you just when the angst seems insurmountable.
It isn’t easy doing this without a sense of either time or direction. Organic anarchism helps, in the sense that whatever draws you to the left is probaby at the right or vice-versa. Moving in the world without GPS will lead you to delightful cul-de-sacs or hair-raising situations. In strange cities the buses or trains take you to places that exist only in books or nightmares. Gotta make room for the unpredictable. Human life is the blink of an eye and the unpredictable is eternity long on either side of it.
Even more embarrassing is being in the “avantgarde.” It causes you to get to your appointments hours or days early. You will surprise the hosts just getting out of bed. I, for example, went to Michael Palmer’s wedding a day early. I knocked and was let in by Michael’s mother who asked me to sit down at the table where the parents were still planning next day’s wedding. I was so embarrassed I didn’t go to the wedding next day. The “avantgarde” and “embarrassment” are automatic inner states of poets. One cannot even call oneself a “poet” if not possessed of those handicaps that are his job to turn into qualities.
I have done that, and on top of that I live in America and I don’t drive a car. I starred in “Road Scholar,” a documentary in which I drive a 1968 Cadillac from New York to San Francisco with stops at luddite communes. The car was driven by my body double, who did not talk, write poetry, or wonder at what he saw. I take that back. Maybe he did. He was me in that other aspect of the “poet” job, which is that you must trust others to be you. The shadow will not suffice. My companero in this is Fernando Pessoa, a Portuguese poet, who invented poets to do what he couldn’t. I did that. I invented poets who did things to people, like make them cry, laugh and cure melancholy. This cadre of invented poets gave me the much-needed time to explore the outer space in my brain. Time to do other things too: I direct you to my autobiographies if you care to know what those things are.
I digress, which is something story-tellers do. Poets distill. The one-liner, the couplet, and the haiku are the true poet’s musical instruments. Light and portable, they are immediately available to jam with street musicians now or with Orpheus back then. Other instruments, like sonnets and epics, need roadies.
The book you just bought or are listening to, is an elegant van pimped up to take you to places that were once available in a time when there was no time. Time like that existed only in fairy tales. A true reader does not mind going to a time when there was no time. Magic only happens there. “Reality,” or what the e-gizmo calls it, is a killer of magic, especially its mega-version, “augmented reality” or “artificial intelligence.” On the other hand, if all “facts” are being handled by the machine, it would seem that people will have time for poetry. Dream on. What the machines “really” do is impersonate poets. These machine poets are bodiless, which is why when entering a book like mine, the reader is sure that the poet has a human body. Frisk me. That’s not the title, alas.
You will also notice in this introduction many words in quotes. The truth is that all words should be between quotes. The only poet who has dared to do this is Alice Notley who in her Dantesque epic “The Descent of Alette,” the poet travels to the world beyond death on a subway made from words in quotes. She lets us mercifully escape at the end of her epic from that hellish world. To put all words between quotes is demoting language to a conveyance that carries the poet to a world where there are no words. Alice was my contemporary, but I don’t do that.
I prize the remnants of telepathy but language has infected that gift of archaic cultures. We can no longer hunt or love without words.
I use words to think, but I don’t let them get ahead of what I’m thinking. Writing is just the way I think. There are 538 pages in this book. The book I love the most is the “Anatomy of Melancholy,” a 1,450 page book written in 1621 by Robert Burton, a contemporary of the King James Bible translation and William Shakespeare. That was the English language at its best. The pages lasted as long as the pleasure of writing could hold. Our pleasures are fast spring showers compared to the waterfalls of that age. Sigh.
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ANDREI CODRESCU
