SOURCE: "Escape into New Languages: The Avant-Gardist Ideals and Constraints of Andrei Codrescu's Poetry," in Sagetrieb, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring, 1987, pp. 21-39.

[In the following review, Cornis-Pop discusses the experimental, proto-surrealistic style of Codrescu's poetry.]

     Having avantbiographed the world
     To make another come right out of it
     I have certain scribbler's rights
     On the next one—endlessly impregnate
     The self about to be designed.
 
     I praise the lava holes
 
     whence issued my first passport.
                     (Comrade Past & Mister Present 34)

A RISKY, EXPERIMENTAL STYLE?

Andrei Codrescu, "the Involuntary Genius of American surrealism," defies easy description. In his case the very label of "surrealism" seems partly inappropriate and confining. As his newest book, The Disappearance of the Outside makes clear. Codrescu has little patience for the watered down, domestic variant of surrealism "adrift/today/in the Mall"; and even less for the international "poetic sludge used by translators and mandarin poets to sculpt the sad shape of the present." His real interest goes with the proto-surrealistic spirit that, before the days of universal collage and "ecriture automatique," imbued everything (including its own procedures) in the acids of deconstructive wit.

Critics, especially upon the publication of Selected Poems 1970–1980, regarded Codrescu's avant-gardist beginnings with a certain melancholic relief: "… It is interesting to see that, yes, Codrescu did have a poetic youth and a risky, experimental style which fits his times. What is more interesting is how he developed certain aspects over the years." There is, undoubtedly, significant poetic development from License to Carry a Gun (1970) to Comrade Past & Mister Present (1986): but not necessarily away from experimentation towards some "consolidation of gains" and closure. Codrescu's aggressive, "schizoactivist" style has grown subtler, its ideological and poetic intents more articulate (consider the "The Juniata Diary"). Codrescu's recent poems still make a somewhat discordant and eccentric figure in contemporary poetry. At a time when American poetry seems content to follow a cautious notion of "risk" (as poetry editor for the Paris Review. Michael Benedikt welcomed "poems that are coherently risky, that take risks that succeed"), Codrescu has consistently walked a jagged edge of risk, pushing the imaginary borderline between poetic freedoms and constraints further out. A most difficult task, to be sure, given the increasing pressures that work on poetry at present: "… In 1967, I was experimenting with all sorts of looseness, riffing, rhythm. (I had a different accent everyday). Then I tightened up a bit for my masters, the publishers. First, Paul Carroll raised my capitals & 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 their pressure, on my work. Of course, one evolves that way too, nobody's a frozen CB" (Comrade Past & Mister Present 92).

Codrescu's biography as a poetic "mutant" is in many ways representative: the story of a Central European expatriate in pursuit of his mythic America, that slowly receding boundary of the imaginative outside. "He arrived in New York (Stephens recounts) not knowing a word of English, and once told me how the taxi driver who drove him from the airport into Manhattan charged him $17 for the trip, leaving him $3, a bundle of Romanian poems, and a good knowledge of Italian his first time in the Village." His next trip was to Ginsberg's apartment in the Lower East Side, to join the great American scene of experiment about which he had read in books; but to his amazement, he found that scene on the wane. In only a few more years poetry entered the "Age of Confusion" at the hands of a "generation of neo-academics who turned out a quasi-surrealistic product culled from the numerous bad translations that mushroomed under the urinary inflationism of Robert Bly." Codrescu still spent a euphoric intermezzo in the wide-open culture of the San Francisco Area before his dream of a free and borderless Idea-State subsided: "Suddenly, all around me, the people fell silent. They put their shoes back on. The chill of mortality was in the air…."

Codrescu also brought with him the secret aspirations and nostalgias of another interrupted avant-garde, the Romanian: "I had natural Surrealistic sympathies and was determined not to let the Balkans down: after all we had originated Dada and gave voice to the absurd. Proto-Surrealisms of various kinds floated about us since the Symbolists. I was temperamentally and genetically suited for New York in the 1960s." The Romanian avant-garde fits better than any other modernistic trend the description of Avantgardismus Interruptus. Emerging on the European scene at a time when Western culture allowed itself to be off-centered and deconstructed with greater ease, the first wave of Romanian avant-gardists (Brancusi, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Iancu, Victor Brauner) contributed their share to the modernist revolution. But this phase ended soon with the transplantation of Tzara, Brauner and Fondane mainly to France; also with the symbolic suicide of Urmuz (in 1923). After 1924, with the absent Urmuz acting as a genuine "semaphore" for literary experimentation, a new wave of Romanian avant-gardists tried to pick up the scattered pieces and participate in a reconstruction of modern art in a post-Dada age. Finally, soon after the war, a third generation of Romanian avant-gardists made one last attempt at revitalizing the experimental scene. In their "Message Addressed to the International Surrealistic Movement" (1945), Gherasim Luca and Trost called for a new "revolution of the spirit" to replace the mere "verbal revolution" of their predecessors. A sense of urgency and bleak foreboding filled their message: only a year later, under the pressures of Stalinization, the Romanian historical avant-garde was forcefully dismantled. It barely had time to relocate some of its representatives (Eugen Ionesco, E. M. Cioran, Gherasim Luca, Isidore Isou, Paul Paun) in the center of the European (post)modernism.

Under "normal" circumstances the avant-garde periodically exhausts itself, or is detoured and absorbed by mainstream culture. If we add to this the fact that the avant-garde's capacity for "cyclic" recovery has been seriously impaired in the last twenty to thirty years, we have an explanation of—in Lyotard's words—the current "period of/artistic/slackening…. From every direction we are being urged to put an end to experimentation, in the arts and elsewhere." Where the "power assumes the name of a party, realism and its neoclassical complement triumph over the experimental avant-garde by slandering and banning it"; where "power is that of capital," "postmodern" eclecticism (a kind of "degree zero of contemporary general culture …") is substituted for the old avant-gardist radicalism.

But the case of the Romanian avant-garde can be called anything but "normal." To this day, the "historical" avant-garde has not been fully assimilated and canonized by Romanian critics. Its violent interruption in the fifties, before it could run a complete course, predictably enhanced its appeal in contemporary literature. Several generations of postwar Romanian writers have used the half-mythical pursuits of the earlier avant-gardists as "a necessary filter" in their own literary exploration. It is not, therefore, surprising to find Codrescu's American poetry connected to this fourth (utopian) cycle of the Romanian avant-garde. The title of his first book (reminiscent of Geo Dumitrescu's 1945 License to Fire Rifles), confessed to a symbolic continuity of intentions: after Tzara and Fondane, Ionesco and Gherasim Luca, here was another expatriate member of an "insomniac generation" (the first born in postwar Romania) trying to carry on that experimental legacy and stir the dormant waters of international postmodernism.

If genealogically Codrescu belongs to Romanian (European) avant-gardism, in language, thematics and overall preoccupations he is indisputably an American poet. As a perceptive reviewer wrote, "Codrescu's influences range from European poets (Tzara, Ponge, Eminescu, Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Villon, Cavafy) to American poets (Ashbery, Berrigan, Creeley, Spicer, etc.). His poetry has an international base, but the uniqueness of his voice is in his uses of the American idiom…. "Codrescu's main effort has been to relocate American surrealism at the intersection of two experimental traditions (European protosurrealism, and the Williams-New York School line of poetry); he has significantly expanded and enriched that intertextual space in American poetry which makes such a poetic dialogue possible.

"I COUNTED SO MANY LANGUAGES IN THE DARK"

As an aspiring Romanian poet in the sixties. Codrescu's secret dreams (shared with other members of his generation) were those of Poetic Subversion and Exile. These two ideas loomed large as myths: "In school we had whispered the names of our great exiles. They had replaced the smaller national heroes. The names of Tristan Tzara, Eugen Ionesco, Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran—sent shivers up our spines. For me, the meaning of their exile overshadowed by far the meaning of their creations…. Exile was the unifying idea and, in my mind, it assumed the proportions of a place." But what he was to find soon after his expatriation is that Exile is not a "vast/outer/territory" with "distinct boundaries," but a shifty, elusive country of the mind.

His predecessor in the mythical limbo "between statelessness and naturalization," Mircea Eliade, defined the exilic province as a decentered, dynamic world with the nostalgia of a center. But he also endowed it with a redeeming feature: "Wherever one is, there is a center of the world. As long as you are in that center, you are at home, you are truly in the real self and at the center of the cosmos. Exile helps you to understand that the world is never foreign to you once you have a central stance in it." What Eliade does not make clear enough is how one accedes to that central stance. Exilic experience endows one with an "extra cognizant," "extra territorial" perspective, but also leaves him in an unsettled tension. By definition the exile is a homo duplex, inhabiting one place and remembering or projecting another. Through the exilic "jump" (ex-salire), the artist comes to know otherness and strangeness, but his arduous task remains that of transforming a figure of rupture into one of connection. According to Eliade he can do this through myth and a unifying language: "In exile the road home lies through language, through dreams…."

But what language? An Ur-language of universally applicable symbols? The mother-tongue in which "one still dreams"? Or the adoptive idiom? These are questions that subtend much of Codrescu's poetry. Language-intercrossing and poetic myth are his keys to the "outland" of imagination. But they also serve to fill the void of his real exilic limbo. Unlike the orthodox avant-gardists, Codrescu has never tried to develop a language beyond languages, a kind of poetic esperanto like Khlebnikov's Zaoum idiom, Marinetti's "degree 4," Virgil Teodorescu's "leopard" language, or Isidor Isou's "lettrisme." Codrescu has sought home in a real poetic language, though one uncertainly balanced between native and foreign, rational and irrational, learned and unlearned. Ronald Sukenick has praised Codrescu's language achievement in the following terms: The History of the Growth of Heaven is another leap from the sinking ship of Newspeak into the life boat of the living word. What's interesting about this book is that it reads as if Codrescu is really beginning to write in a new language as though someone in the middle of a conversation started speaking in multi-colored bubbles instead of words." There remains, however, a tension between the new and old languages, or between the "diurnal" and "nocturnal" aspects of the poet's idiom: "The acquired language is permanently under the watch of my native tongue, like a prisoner in a cage. Lately, this new language has planned an escape to which I fully subscribe. It plans to get away in the middle of the night with most of my mind and never return. This piece of writing in the acquired language is part of the plan: while the native tongue is (right now!) beginning to translate it…." ("Bi-Lingual").

Codrescu's literature explores other language tensions as well. One is the incongruity between an imaginative poetic idiom and the debased "T.V. vernacular" of present-day culture (a theme provocatively addressed in his N. P. R. commentaries—recently collected in A Craving for Swan). Another is the tension inherent in all languages between signifiers and signifieds, those "breches" and "decalages du sens" that interested also the early surrealists. Without overstating the poet's capacity to bridge all these gaps, Codrescu still imagines (pace Derrida) a way back to the redeeming roots of language. Consider this splendid passage from his recent "Dear Masoch" (Comrade Past & Mister Present 7):

     … No chilly languages, no translations
     from chilly texts. No translators catching colds
     from opening windows between languages, no
     crossroads,
     only real stammerings, true hollows where the tongues
     stand in their cases heavy with the awkward honey
     of the first spoken, the as-yet-unsaid….

The most perplexing gap, however, remains that between language and self, mask and identity, voice and silence. In Craving for Swan (39), Codrescu ironizes the exorcism of silence that goes on in this country: people drowning their anxieties in the drone of TVs or the noise of their own "voices that have taken on the eeriness of speaking machines." Yet he is equally suspicious of the postmodern celebration of silence, absence and self-cancellation. Today.

     in psychoanalysis and other therapies, people pay for what
     they are missing, but not in order to recover it, only to be
     confirmed in their lack, to be reassured of the normality of
     absence, of the utter popularity of the abyss, the sanctioned
     nothingness, the triviality of death….
     Well, I prefer the mask to the well-thought
     nothingness … (Comrade Past & Mister Present 52)

The multiplication of masks and assumed identities becomes Codrescu's way of coping with Silence and Exile. He combats the perceptual poverty of contemporary culture with his own (surrealistic) version of imitatio dei: "unleash fantasy machine, populate being with images, populate earth with schizobeings" (Comrade Past & Mister Present 76). His strategy resembles in certain ways Nabokov's: "Whereas so many other language exiles clung desperately to the artifice of their native tongue or fell silent, Nabokov moved into successive languages like a traveling potentate. Banished from Fialta, he has built for himself a house of words. To be specific: the multi-lingual, cross linguistic situation is both the matter and the form of Nabokov's work." Codrescu's poetry seeks a similar cross-linguistic, cross-cultural space, a kind of Derridian in-between; its intercrossing of voices and languages has both aesthetic and ideological implications. As one speaker in Comrade Past & Mister Present (49) announces, his great discovery after thirty is plurality:

             … In other
     words, all other words, not just the tolerance
     of difference, but the joyful welcoming of differences
     into one's heart spread out like the pages
     of a newspaper….

"WRITE DOWN MY LIFE/THAT COULD BE MY LIFE IF/I INSISTED"

The "pursuit of a/plural/dialectic" is central to most of Codrescu's poems (also to his essays, despite their personal, strongly opinionated nature). Codrescu "has more respect for the voices inside him (as his many assumed characters attest) than any other poet I can think of…."

Most of his collections published so far are organized in thematic cycles, each experimenting with a voice, an identity, a state of mind. Codrescu is, in the space of a single book (his first), a jailed Puerto Rican poet, "scout into a political future of prison reality, a sacrificial lamb"; an ex-Beatnik ex-Vietnam mystic writing about America from Istanbul; or his wife Alice Henderson Codrescu and the archetypal "woman in man." Or he can become, with equal ease, a monk in his barren cell, an opium eater, Masoch, Tristan Tzara, a political refugee, etc. Through these invented personas, Codrescu maps a wide range of experiences and cultural milieus (especially of the sixties and seventies), redefining recent history in dialogical terms as a confrontation between Eastern and Western models. Like much exilic literature that begins with an imaginative "leap" in space, with a "what if," his poetry has a projective, hypothetical dimension: it probes the very domain of the possible through these added identities. In many of his poems, the dramatic persona functions as an imaginative "grid," providing Codrescu with a consistent view from "inside the cheese holes" of reality, with a paradoxical self-definition:

     "tout ce qui existe est situe" said max jacob and one
     day my situation was such that only a detached, religious
     and ecstatic perspective could bring home all that i was.
     since i was nothing in particular at the time i became a
     monk because it seemed to me that monks had no ego, only
     visions and a sense of humor. i am still a monk to the
     extent that this is true. my professional services when
     i am in robes consist of techniques for sabotaging
     history with the aid of god, so to speak. (The History of the Growth of Heaven)

In other poems the technique of the persona is used ironically, with the speaker behind the mask trying to adjust himself to his new role or exit it when it becomes too constricting. The quixotic attempts made by the jailed Puerto Rican in License to Carry a Gun to escape prison parallel Codrescu's own efforts to disencumber himself from his poetic mask:

     rain cuts an exit in the wall
     for him who is of rain a square hole
     westward, through which the men of rain will fly.
     they prayed to water for a long time,
     they sold what they could.
     .....
     rain cuts an exit        wet like cunt
     in lonely nights from very left
     (Selected Poems 7)

Codrescu's more recent poems make this effort very problematic. The poetic persona gets entangled in an insidious network of roles, in a web of language; the "man of face" (Codrescu's self-definition) is caught in his own game with face realities and masks.

"I SELL MYTHS NOT POEMS"

As Codrescu explains in "De Rerum Natura" (Selected Poems 71): "With each poem goes a little myth…. These myths appear at the end of the magazine under the heading ABOUT CONTRIBUTORS or above my poems in italics. Very soon there are as many myths as there are poems and ultimately this is good because each poem does, this way, bring another poet into the world. With this secret method of defying birth controls I populate the world with poets."

There has always been an almost imperceptible borderline between fiction and reality, myth and its parody in Codrescu's poetry. The compilers of "Books in Print," taking Codrescu's authorial set-up ad literam, listed his name not as author, but as editor of License to Carry a Gun. One of the many personal myths that Codrescu's life and poetry illustrate is that of "clandestinity": the young man who stole across the Romanian-Hungarian border in the spare-tire compartment of a car, seemed predestined for a career as an avant-gardist poet. It might be argued that not all young Romanians who sneak across the borders stowed away in ingenious caches (car trunks, empty bass viol cases, refrigerator trucks) have in effect become experimental poets. But in Codrescu's case, there is a deep metaphoric continuity between his life and poetry. With poetry itself reduced nowadays to quasi-"clandestinity," what we need most is a versatile originator, "a rogue and a magician, a hustler and a monk; in short, a protean creator continually creating himself." Codrescu seems in many ways ideally qualified for that role. In Morton Marcus' words, "Andrei is the first truly existential personality … in literature," an incarnation of Camus' absurd man "who dreams himself into an unending series of identities in order to live as fully and meaningfully as he can in a meaningless universe and who thereby continually attempts to humanize an unhuman world."

Codrescu's use of masks and personas seems akin to the surrealistic principle of metamorphosis and game with "one in the other." But Codrescu ascribes to this kind of metamorphosis a more complex function: at once disruptive, "unlacing" the rigid structure of language and reality; and constructive, filling the fissures created in the conventional order of things with a paradoxical, multidimensional life (see Comrade Past & Mister Present 52). Where Breton would have looked further for a "fil conducteur" to rearrange the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent "champ magnetique," Codrescu is content to keep his poetic field in a state of active, provisional equilibrium. His "sermonettes for all the interlocking/tremors in the land" cannot promise more than an illusion of presence, a mental bridge:

      My next book will have a poem for each
      Saint dropped by the Church,
      33 poems in all …
      I will put a little cross by each poem
      meaning 'here lies,'
      a very deceptive move since no one
      will lie in there,
      no one, not even the Monk
      who will be out thinking of girls
      what are poems? (Selected Poems 23)

In Comrade Past & Mister Present this interplay of fiction and reality, textuality and life becomes the predominant theme. Codrescu stages ample dialogues in which real and fictitious literary figures mingle. In "The Fourth of July," for example, he debates the question of poetry with a Romanian exile in Germany and an American poet with a degree in versification. This piece ends significantly with a confusion of roles and styles, and a surrealistic-grotesque vision in which the poet's head and the breast "of reality" seek reciprocal adjustment:

     … But then a miracle happened.
     The head began to shrink. No, the other breast began to grow.
 
     No, the head began to shrink. No. And so on. I could care less. (16)

This is, I trust, Codrescu's version of the permanent (poetic) revolution. We sit back and wait amusedly to see which of his two spheres will explode first.

"SOMETIMES A WORD BLOWS UP LIKE A BOMB"

Semantic explosion, verbal fissures, existential division are characteristic motifs in "postsurrealistic" European poetry. Codrescu accompanies the deconstructive poetics of his French colleagues (Ponge, Deguy, Garelli) with an explosive, aggressive attitude, more akin to the early dadaists. Julio, the jailed Puerto Rican poet, is visited by an updated version of Don Quixote, expert in existential guerrilla tactics:

     they will forever refuse you the license to carry a gun but i am a gun …
     .....
     the license to carry a gun is a license to be.
     patricius, brutus, don quixote come naked
     to my mind vs. target! ("the license to carry a gun," Selected Poems 6)

Passages like this abound in Codrescu's early poems, contaminating even his erotics: the poet's heart is "a bomb with a fine trigger," his mind is restructured to look like a gun, his "woman shoots / him with her fresh body / of winter." Even "the Virgin holds a gun / not the baby" in a "Flemishstyle, late 17th century" icon. Codrescu's bellicose vocabulary and unexpected associations (or rather, dissociations) of images have made some of his critics uneasy, taking their attention away from other aspects of his poetry. For Abbott "there was too much shotgun and not enough target" in Codrescu's early poems. Other reviewers seem to better understand the essentially antithetic (oxymoronic) nature of Codrescu's poetry, "yoking together" the mundane with the imaginative, the concrete with the abstract, the profane with the elevated. Morton Marcus, for example, believes he can hear echoes from the surrealistic proverbs of Eluard in the terse, aphoristic contradictions of Codrescu's poetry.

But Codrescu's verbal and metaphoric audacity has a deeper purpose than that of "startl / ing / the reader into thought or out of it." In his more recent poetry he clearly moves beyond surrealistic contradiction, exchanging a type of "oneirocritique" (Apollinaire) for a broader cultural critique. In a poetic culture like the American, emphasizing the iconic, imagistic aspect of language, Codrescu's "eccentric image vocabulary" is bound to become noticeable. By smuggling "exotic," European layers of vocabulary into his American poetry, he disrupts the continuity of both imagistic traditions. As his most recent essay on The Disappearance of the Outside proves, Codrescu is engaged in a Baudrillardian critique of today's inflationary image culture. In his effort to subvert the "T.V. newspeak" or the self-reproductive iconography of pop culture, he often invokes the example of other champions against visual simulacra: Breton, Dali, Ted Berrigan, or the Romanian fairy tale.

There is, behind the superficial clash of images, a genuine dialectic of conflict, a confrontational philosophy. In a poem from the Peter Boone section of License to Carry a Gun, the persona rejoices at the universality of conflict:

     what happened to me,
     it isn't only this war in Vietnam.
     it's the war of my blood,
     the small wars in immaculate labs,
     the war of children in the flesh of assaba,
     the wars in cosmos over the heads of philosophers.
     (Selected Poems 10)

Codrescu himself echoes this notion of conflict in In America's Shoes (80) when he announces: "What America needs right now is a good war … I mean a poetic war." His half-serious proclamation recalls the traditional battlecry of avant-gardists against philistine culture; or the similar injunctions of the recent theorists of the post-avant-garde: "Let us wage a war on totality: let us be witnesses to the unpresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name." Given Codrescu's Romanian background, it is not surprising to find him engaged in a battle against totalistic forms of thought. As he reflects in The Disappearance of the Outside (166): "all people under the gun invent ways of escaping history through language," through a recasting of poetic tropes and existential concepts.

The prime conflict in Codrescu's poetry is that between a free-wheeling, wide-ranging imagination and the superficia of everyday reality. Abbott recognizes in Codrescu's poetry "a sense of deep, unfolding thought, but crosscut with a precise sense of falsity, a relentless mind that will not allow a pose to pass unexamined." The two faculties, that I would call analytical and deconstructive, collaborate to make his poems true "voyages of discovery (unlike most poems by Eshleman and Bly, the two who claim to do this, but who never surprised me with anything but the breadth of their pre-tested thought)." At times, when the analytical (reflexive) faculty proves stronger, Codrescu's poetry moves toward existential and metaphysical self-definition. At other times, when the playful, deconstructive type of thought prevails, his poetry becomes a comedy of contradictions, or a "schizoactivist" definition of our postmodern condition:

    Poetry-on-condoms parachuted on cities,…
    increase in man-machine, woman-machine relations,
    food & air agents causing
    sterility, the inability to love—all these added to
    psychocryogenies are propelling 85 percent of my generation to
    IBM (Imminent Mental Breakdown). IBM = Imminence of
    Bored Matter. Flight of Styrofoam cups around a
    malfunctioning humming Xerox. Nostalgia. Nostalgia & the
    Machine.
    (Comrade Past & Mister Present 72)

On the whole, Codrescu's poetry communicates an almost Blakean sense of the insurmountable obstacles a poetic mind encounters in today's world:

    The many windows framed in yellow light
    are pulled together making
    mind structures, more mind chains
    around the masses falling through the season.
    ("Drowning Another Peasant Inquisition," Selected Poems 116)

"A GRAMMAR" OF DIFFERENCES

Contradiction and antithesis move also the syntactic level of Codrescu's poetry. His texts have given at times the impression of disconnectedness, especially to critics more accustomed to follow a poem with a tight, argumentative structure. "In the early poems," Abbott complains, "the image/thoughts tended to peter out in 'of-of' phrases and not fold into each other…." It might be argued that in many of Codrescu's poems this syntactic discontinuity and jagged phrasing has an aesthetic function. Codrescu's unexpected syntactic and ideatic shifts in the middle of a line have dadaist and surrealist antecedents. Within the Romanian tradition of the avant-garde, one could mention not only Urmuz' or Tzara's early use of noncontiguity and semantic "suspense," but also the more subtle "grammar of poetry" theorized in the twenties by Ilarie Voronca (Codrescu also has a collection of poems entitled Grammar and Money, 1973). For Voronca, "The poem is not only made of words, but also of blanks, of gaps over which the step hangs suspended, slips and follows the infinite embrace." As this passage and others suggest, Voronca advocated not only a radically new syntax, but also a new poetic epistemology. Likewise in Codrescu, the syntactic discontinuity is related to his philosophy of (anti-) interpretation. As he confesses in one of his later metapoetic pieces ("Against Meaning," Selected Poems 126):

    Everything I do is against meaning.
    This is partly deliberate, mostly spontaneous.
    Wherever I am, I think I'm somewhere else.
    This is partly to confuse the police, mostly to
    avoid myself especially
    when I have to confirm
    the obvious which always
    sits on a little table and draws a lot
    of attention to itself.
    So much so that no one sees the chairs
    and the girl sitting on one of them.
    With the obvious one is always at the movies
    The other obvious which the loud obvious conceals
    is not obvious enough to merit a
    surrender of the will.
    But through a little hole in the boring report
    God watches us faking it.

Codrescu's polemics with the category of the immediately obvious (an aesthetic category created by our postmodern age), is accompanied by a subtle textual and syntactic movement that disrupts the "given" and opens unexpected windows in it for the not-so-obvious or supra-sensible. Two very different concepts of "grammar" clash here: one is the "official grammar" ironized in "Cohere Britannia" (Comrade Past & Mister Present 29):

     coherence in its own bag is being home
     coherence in a double bag at the supermarket is being in prison
     you boys better cohere here by the window
     a coherent view of the yard leads to a better and more coherent
     vision of things to come in a fine coherent world cells cohere
     coheres ceolli mundum
 
     lemme give you the coherent version of our position several
     years ago me and a country i've never been in meshed whereby
     I cohered into a society of former strangers and was reduced
     to coherence not to speak tears having to constantly enforce my
     and their coherency with cliches I got so much shit together to
     uncohere my anus to reflect the universe was one all this time

Against this iron-clad coherence, Codrescu mobilizes a personal "grammar" of discontinuity, contradiction and identity shift:

     I was dead and I wanted peace
     then I was peaceful and not quite dead yet
     then I was in my clothes
     and I took them off and then
     there was too much light
     and night fell
     then I wanted to talk to somebody
     and I spoke ecstatically
     and I was answered on time in every language
     in a beautiful way
     but I felt unloved and everyone
     Came to love me
     (The History of the Growth of Heaven 7)

OF POETIC IMAGINATION AND "TRANSCENDENTAL IRONY"

Codrescu's technique of "deep-frying/the/visual material," adding, subtracting, overlapping the details until an entirely new "reality" emerges, has baffled those critics more accustomed to find "something objective, and plenty to see" in a poem. In place of the mundane shorthand that often passes for poetry today, Codrescu promises something short of an epiphany:

     With the collapse of the vocal cords and through
     the graces of laryngitis, a new perception of reality
     knocked me off my divan and twisting my arms,
     delivered me dripping at the gates of heaven.
     ("Ode to Laryngitis," Selected Poems 118)

The trivial or innocuous everyday is thus transformed into "an occult new beauty" through a technique that reaches perfection in For the Love of a Cat (Four Zoas Press, 1978). But even earlier, in The History of the Growth of Heaven (1973), Codrescu created similar epiphanic moments in which the ice-box of domestic reality lit up with an eerie, transcendental light:

     Dear God, Cauliflower & Broccoli are so Beautiful Together!
     And the frozen ducks in the cracked cellophane pushing
     a slice of pizza into the side of a clam can!
     And the cheese singing!
     Oh I believe that all of us
     are ready! ("Us," Selected Poems 49)

From this point of view, Codrescu (who does not hesitate to quote Blaga with his theory of poetic "mystery": "Our job is not to uncover it, but to increase its mysteriousness") seems closer to the expressionist poetry of Lucian Blaga or to the Beats whose "sandwiches of reality" still allowed a peep "at the back of the real," than to the present-day textualists who celebrate universal opaqueness and lack of transcendence:

     Truly, there is no perfect opaqueness in nature.
     Someone is looking through me at you just as through you
     someone is staring at me.
     Ah, to be a beautiful narcissist wrapped
     like Christmas paper around
     a gentle voyeur!
     This is what I want. Seigneur!
     And then to glide out of focus ("Ode to Curiosity," Selected Poems 115)

But Codrescu is not a naive utopianist, to be sure. His tentative forays into an outside or beyond are often suspended halfway, blocked by the carapace of immediate realities:

     late night, san francisco
     so few things to write about
     when there is a sky full of the electric lights
          of san francisco
 
     stilling the lights in your head from the left
     and the sea some two feet away filling the other ear
     with the sounds of all things you ever wanted to say
     ...
 
     there is nothing here now.
     the whining after the unplugging of the world.
     (The History of the Growth of Heaven 71)

He knows that the category of the outside (understood, in almost romantic terms, as the domain of the spontaneous, imaginative, organic) is gradually vanishing. "Great areas of language are being colonized today by technocrats, propagandists, double-speak politicians. When the words reemerge from such use, they have been devastated, vampirized and drugged" (In America's Shoes 186). Under these circumstances, imagination itself can no longer afford to remain idealistic; it must become anti-utopian, anti-imagistic, ironic. Many of Codrescu's "revelations" are tentative, spoken through a problematic persona, like the monk fallen from grace in History of the Growth of Heaven. More often than not humor and a kind of "transcendental irony" fill his poems "like creme/de menthe" ("Irony as Nursery," Selected Poems 134): Codrescu seems to half-heartedly imply the existence of a higher pattern (a deeper scenario) behind things. But his "religion" works both ways, transfiguring the mundane everyday, and debunking the sacred beyond. It is not always clear whether what we read is an epiphany or a parody of a desecrated myth. Consider this passage on today's commerce with symbols:

     did you ever have a grey knot topped symbolically with lightning
     bolts and mounted in the middle of yourself like a pagoda? of course
     not, but I have. I have the only one in the world or rather I had
     because i've traded it for a scarf, this scarf is from god. you can see
     smears of cheese on it … yes, god's feet are made of cheese.
     whenever he walks he leaves smears, that's how he walked upon the
     waters…. the water went into the holes in the cheese and the whole
     thing swole up … like floaters … rubber balloons … well, anyway,
     that's how I got the scarf, but I will trade it to you for a paddle board. do
     you need a paddle board? no, but I know someone who does … he'll
     trade his gum wrappers for the paddle board. do you need gum
     wrappers? no, I will give the gum wrappers to a tall man … he knows
     me … /etc./
     ("Port of Call," Selected Poems 76)

A similar "swapping," reshuffling of planes takes place in Codrescu's poetry to the bewilderment of the reader who finds a piece of heaven in the refrigerator, a "barren cell" in the monastery, and snatches of divinity "breezing through the assholes of angels." Still, Codrescu's antithetical irony never ends with a wholesale cancellation of meaning, in a total blank. There is, as Marcus observes, "violence, anger, sex/in this poetry/,but no death. Codrescu's whole poetic seems built as a construct to transport seeds. He is concerned in his poems with living…." This statement needs qualification. If it is true that a volume like Necrocorrida (1980) directly exorcises the death impulse in Codrescu's imaginative biography, survival through writing is never unproblematic. Consider this splendid ironic elegy on life, death and books:

     books
 
     death covers me with fine dust.
     I love used fat books, they are
     like used fat bodies coming out of sleep
     covered with fingerprints and shiny
     snail trails.
     I wish to read the way I love:
     jumping from mirror to mirror like a drop of oil
     farther and farther from my death.
     but god gives us fat books and fat bodies
     to use for different reasons
     and less a metaphor I cannot say
     what is that haunts me
     (Selected Poems 40)

This poem outlines an entire poetic ontology, in nuce: moving between promise and incertitude, fragility of life and weight of textuality, it encircles reality with a metaphor. In itself that metaphor may not be much; then, again, it might turn out to be the very image Codrescu has been looking for, the "great healing metaphor"

     … invented by my first exiled self in Nueva York
     in the great year 1966 when the whole world was a disease
     only the brilliant metaphor of my young body could heal
     as it hurtled through Nirvana Village and Central Park open
     like a gold sieve to the wonder of possibility!
     (Comrade Past & Mister Present 88)