Andrei Codrescu
Nov 2, BU School of Management

Paul Violi is the only poet I know who went to BU (undergrad); he's the only grad I know, period. This is odd, given that the megaplex literally hovers down the street where I live. I taught there for a couple of years before Harvard. At the time, university president John Silbur's iron will in evidence, the place felt spooky. (It still does.) (Echo effect.) Turns out my teaching went all right, and the collegiality there was no more ironic or unsympathetic or vapid than at MIT, Harvard, or the two national universities where I taught in Japan. I just disliked young women wearing mall make-up, cleavage. Too many still-adolescent guys, with no features, who couldn't stand out even if they wanted to; they didn't. It feels like a resort that dad, who owns a dealership or something, ships you off to to get processed so you can compete better. The School of Management intensifies that feeling. Shiny, expensive 595 Commonwealth Avenue could stand tall across from a Goodyear plant. Lobby-wise, pablum-hued marble floors reflect lovey's pantyhose and the social democracy statuary, watered down from models in Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."

I go on about megaplex atmospherics, because they affect Andrei Codrescu deeply, I'm sure. He read, or maybe I should say he showed up, in a fourth floor meeting room of some paneled veneer sort. This is a newer big-bucks building, remember, but the carpet was, yuck, glazed with soda and foodstuffs -- maybe that's why someone chose the Orlando waterway hotel pattern? to hide what buildings and maintenance miss? Let me get to the ugly parts. At least two gum chewers in attendance. Suited audience, late arrivals, with briefcases, walked into the middle of the reading, prancing from the back to the front, scouting out the 'best' seat. (Future management types.) An audio-visual bitch (I'm sure she's a nice person in another life) opened and re-opened a door, up front next to Codrescu's lectern, to adjust knobs as Codrescu was reading. Oh, what? she's holding a conversation with someone invisible on the other side of the door.

Codrescu claimed to like it. "It's nice to be interrupted twice." Then, he was interrupted often by his discursive preludes to and commentary on only a handful of poems. His NPR work notwithstanding, he has not quite filled in the totality of Big Personality, at least not this evening, but he ad-libbed a half-amusing tale of the Romanian American "convert to the old faith of poetry," whose "vocabulary is smaller than my feelings." Based in New Orleans, Codrescu finds that city "the most spiritually interesting," even before Katrina (cheap rents), but now more so: "poetry is doing well there -- no health care, psychological devastation," etc. Certainly his earlier poems deliver on his standard of "poetic terrorism," but Codrescu seems to let time and his academic work turn down his heat. Last night he argued that a poet's only geography is Greyhound, but notably he was rushing to make a flight back to teach in New Orleans. Still, Codrescu stays an acute self-critic and poetic observer, mentioning he heard Alice Notley read last week in New Orleans. "She is America's most interesting poet now," he said.