Alien Candor: Selected Poems 1970-1995.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Codrescu, Andrei

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--20th century.

American poetry.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Place of Publication:

Santa Rosa : Black Sparrow Press, 1997.

Summary:

This chronological selection, edited by the poet himself, liberally culls from a body of work that includes more than a dozen hard-to-find small press poetry volumes. It's fronted by an autobiographical reflection, in which Codrescu sets the stage for his poems: walking us through his years of revolution and passion in New York in the Sixties, evoking benign and exalted emanations of a liberated pleasure-dome San Francisco in the Seventies, charting darkening and deepening notes picked up later among North Coast redwood forests, and tracing the "sober rage" of more recent years of argument and reportage. The distance between the two figures of engagement, embattled critic and involved poet, Codrescu reminds us, has for him always been considerable: "My own work has had its own lyric momentum and mysterious drive that has little to do with the quarrels in question". Andrei Codrescu has always been poet first of all.

Contents:

From a Trilogy of Birds

A Thing

"I'm careful with my dreams of death ..."

The License to Carry a Gun

Partiti Sunt Vestimenta Mea

"There is an orange rotting on the table ..."

Epitaph (1)

Food

Winter in Istanbul

Shop

All Wars Are Holy

Gist

Note

Letter to Ezra Pound

Second Letter to Junk Jeannee of NYC

Testing. Testing

Reverse

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz

Imported Days

For Marg / So She Could Fuck Again

1st Avenue Basics

Dream Dogs

Debts

I Visit Brooklyn with a Queen in Mind

Poem for Kyra

Dear Editors:

The History of the Growth of Heaven

To the Virgin as She Now Stands to the Monk After a Beatles Movie

Faith Relearned

My Next Book

The Sin of Wanting a New Refrigerator

More about Poems

The Indecent Assumptions, the Slaughter Songs

Gifts of Percussion

The Status of the Monk

About Photography

A Programme for the Double Barrel Life When It Hits.

Notes:

Preliminaries omitted.