Andrei the Giant: FFC Interviews Andrei Codrescu
September 21, 2003|The Rattlebrain Theater Company resides at a bustling intersection of Denver's 16th Street Mall in the basement of what appears to have once been a church. Backstage, with a little kid functioning as the company's receptionist for some reason that will best remain a mystery to me, I sat on a tatty sofa in what's essentially a catacomb, the "blue room," to meet NPR regular, Louisiana State English Professor, and founder of EXQUISITE CORPSE alternative literary magazine, Andrei Codrescu. An exile of Ceausescu's Romania, Codrescu found refuge in among the thinkers and bohemians of the American Sixties: William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg his spiritual and literary advisors in the new world, Codrescu sought with his life and career to redefine what Transylvanian poet and philosopher Lucien Blaga called "Mioritic Space"–an idea taken from Romanian folklore about the Romanian character defined by his geography, distilled by Codrescu into the idea that thought is its own nation and the poet, forever in exile, the only creator of its shifting borders.