Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader, 1988-1998: Volume 2 - Fictions, Travels & Translations - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1574231413 ISBN 13: 9781574231410

Publisher: Black Sparrow Press, 2000

Synopsis

From 1983 to 1998, Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Books & Ideas delighted the indignant and the sophisticated and gave heartburn to the fearful and the tenured. A thorn in the side of the Literary Establishment, it attracted a cadre of contributors united by a kind of suicidal fearlessness against The Way We Think Now. Here, in two generous volumes, the editors choose some of their favorite items from an over-rich decade. These are the pieces that set the standard, enraged some peoplef, and made the magazine necessary to those readers who, in the words of the editors, "banged their fists on unread stacks of New Yorkers and cried out as one, 'Where were you when we were dying for lack of real poetry and speculation?' "

Highlights: "Lives of the Poets," including Pete Seeger on Charles Olson; Jan Kerouac on her father, Jack; John Kehoe on Charles Bukowski; Keith Abbott on Ted Berrigan; Edward Field on Alfred Chester; and (notoriously) Mark Spitzer on Ed Dorn. Fiction by Maxine Chernoff, Maggie Dubris, Barry Gifford, Eric Kraft, and twenty-three others. Travel notes (very loosely construed) by Hakim Bey, Andrei Codrescu, Pat Nolan, and Anne Waldman, And translations of Boris Vian by Julia Older, of Vladimir Pistalo by Charles Simic, of Attila Jozsef by John Batki, and of the Romanian poets of the 60's generation by several accomplished hands.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Aptly known as "the anti-literary literary magazine" (read anti-New Yorker), Exquisite Corpse, edited by prolific writer and translator Codrescu, has been delighting and outraging readers since 1988 with its often clever irreverence toward (and sometimes direct assault upon) anything that resembles "the Establishment" (which includes political correctness, institutionalized MFA programs and any kind of aesthetic conformity). Assembled in this hefty second volume are more than 100 of the best selections from the journal's first 10 years of publication (Volume 1, with poetry and essays, was published in 1999). While the voices and works represented here vary to the point of chaos (albeit a pleasant one), they are grouped into three sections. In "Lives of the Poets," we find writings by Pete Seeger, Jan Kerouac and Sparrow, as well as those on the journal's internecine "Ed Dorn controversy"Ainitiated by Mark Spitzer's negative portrait of his former mentorAwhich apparently still upsets certain souls. Included in fiction, which Codrescu prefers to call "prose efforts," are stylistically varied works by Maggie Dubris, Eric Kraft and Hariette Surovell. And in the most substantial and engrossing section, "Travel & Translation," we journey from a series on Derrida's possible use of LSD to "The New Bucharest" ("So much ugliness can only have been planned") by Richard Collins and "South Korea: At Play in the Year of the Dog," in which Robert Perchan describes being urged to consume dog meat to enhance his virility. The best aspects of the spirit of the Beats lives on in this frequently sassy, salty, silly and ultimately satisfying reading experience. (Feb.)
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Black Sparrow Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1574231413
• ISBN 13: 9781574231410
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 450
• Editor: Codrescu Andrei, Rosenthal Laura