25:4 Spring 1974

ANDREI CODRESCU

Remembrance of My Forgotten Skinniness

Andrei Codrescu, poet, essayist, and editor of Exquisite Corpse, contributed his “Remembrance of My Forgotten Skinniness” to the Spring 1974 issue of Chicago Review. Recently, Codrescu recalled the inspiration for the poem:

I wrote “In Remembrance of My Forgotten Skinniness” at the very first hint of middle-age in my late twenties. Since then I have written one hundred such works at every hint, but this one remains a true in memoriam to my enfant terribleness. The truth is that I was skinny as a match my whole adolescence and youth and then in my beer-guzzling poetic twenties I acquired a tiny pot belly which did not signify freedom, as it usually does for Eastern European men who look with satisfaction on their pot bellies as a sign of their lessening need of women, hence freedom. I was also equating I believe the carnivorous bounty of America with growing flesh and since Chicago is the very belly of that America it seemed appropriate to lament mine in the Chicago Review.

[DN, 1996]

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