Overview

I was washing an eggplant at the end of the world on

February 4 2020 when I heard from Vincent. It was

Mozart's 39;s birthday, a momentous event that the melophiliac

Vincent Katz would never have let pass without a

celebratory panegyric. There it was in the email, beginning

Its Mozart's39th birthday. He's only 264.years old; Mozart died young

but kept on living. Vincent and I were older already than

Mozart was when he died, but if we had any chance at

living as long as he did we had better get to work. We are

poets but our immortality is far from ensured. Our

contributions to the archive of the aptly named School for

Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University in Boulder

Colorado are so our only bid for a mozartian afterlife.

Not enough. Beginning with Mozart we began our search

for the aqua vita of the long poem that would be sung by

the melomanes of the future. CoVid was our last chance to

make embodied poetry that would keep living in the future,

as long as we washed our vegetables, masked our faces,

disinfected the doorknobs, stayed six feet away from all

human beings -- and wrote to each other via the as-yet

uncontaminated internet. And if we kept celebrating our

immortal predecessors while noting the daily routines to

preserve our bodies, we might make it into that future via

our (regularly disinfected) keyboards.

Our common bonds at that curious time of the planet-

engulfing Plague were various: we were friends, we were

poets, we took poetry seriously enough to believe in its

superpowers, but above all, we both had mothers who at

ages past Ninety needed the care and attention that we two

could provide them. Our exchanges quickly became an

ongoing epic of care. It became also a store of

reminiscences, activities and ideas that paid homage to

the women we cared for, communiques and confessions

that we would have liked them to appreciate. Happily, at

least for me, my mother was past appreciating our

fabulous antics though she smiled, sometimes

appropriately, when I hit Send. She passed away on

September 20, 2022, and is now in my room, listening

without recourse. Happily, Vincent's mother is, as of this

date, still listening in her body to this epic of care. Andrei Codrescu

ISBN-13

9798988085225

ISBN-10

Weight

0.55 Pounds

Dimensions

6.05 x 0.65 x 9.00 In

List Price

$18.95

Format

Paperback

Language

English

Pages

156 pages

Publisher

Commonwealth Books, Black Widow

Published On

2023-10-17



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