On the door of the Allen Hall’s room 26, an old anti-censorship sticker reads, “Don’t let others choose what you can read.” The door opens to a little-known literary journal on the LSU campus called “Exquisite Corpse.”
The journal has been motivated by this idiom for 20 years, seeking to grant a voice to unheard American poets and striving to create a medium without consequences.
Originally “a journal of letters & life,” the academic journal evolved into much more over the years to include political manifestos, artwork and serials.
Andrei Codrescu, founding editor of “Exquisite Corpse,” is a poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, syndicated columnist and contributor on National Public Radio. He has appeared on numerous television programs including The Today Show, The Tonight Show and The David Letterman Show.
Codrescu was born in Romania in 1946 and immigrated to the United States in 1966, eventually becoming a U.S. citizen in 1981. He is also a MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at LSU. In an interview conducted via e-mail, Codrescu explained the origins and future of “Exquisite Corpse.”
How did “Exquisite Corpse” come to be? What was the original intention for the journal, and how did you come up with that name?
I founded the journal in Baltimore in 1983, as “Exquisite Corpse: a Monthly Journal of Books & Ideas.” The name was a playful echo of a collaborative game played by the French surrealist poets and artists in the 1920s and `30s, but also a commentary on how I saw the state of American poetry at the time: pretty but dead. I hoped to create a forum for discussing cultural and political issues without fear or reticence, and to present the work of writers ignored by the academic quarterlies. In 1984 I moved the journal with me to LSU and, at some point, we changed the name from “a monthly journal of books & ideas,” to “a journal of letters & life,” because we began publishing six times a year instead of 12, and the journal acquired a very strong personality that was more about “life” than “books.”
How did you discover the French surrealists? How did that finding affect the development of “Exquisite Corpse?”
I grew up reading the French surrealists (in French) in my native Romania. My interest in literary avant-gardes is constant, but our tastes are far from dogmatic. We have published numerous translations from writers all over the world, only some of whom have “orthodox” surrealist views.
You are featured in many facets of the media, including NPR, among other distinguished outlets. What is it about the journal that remains fresh, even 20 years after its conception? Are you still passionate about the journal?
Personally, I always had plenty of publishers and outlets for my work. I started the journal as a forum for other writers who, though terrific, didn’t have my luck or my connections. Over the years, I’ve published very little of my own work in the journal, except for brief editorials in each issue. As I’ve said, the magazine acquired a personality, became a very particular kind of creature, and started dictating its requirements to me and everyone else. The “tone” of the “Corpse” caught on and many writers were drawn to it, writers who went on to become very successful after their (sometimes) first appearance in the “Corpse.” Amazingly, the critter is still alive after all these years, mainly because it has maintained its feisty independence. At the same time, we are faithful to a core group of “Corpse writers,” whose work is always welcome. Ten years ago someone called us “the New Yorker of the avant-garde,” which I thought was offensive at the time, but I now think of as fairly accurate. I’ve tried to kill the “Corpse” many times, but how can you kill a corpse? I’m afraid that it will keep running me as long as it wants to.
Were the early printed editions intentionally supposed to resemble a tombstone? What is the story behind that design?
No, no — the design, long and narrow, was the exact size to which people standing in the subway or on a bus fold their newspapers to be able to read them while hanging on to an overhead support. I saw this many times in New York and Europe and there is a famous Walker Evans photo of a man reading his paper in the subway just like that. The format was also useful for mailing because, folded in half; the magazine meets the mailing specifications for a letter, saving postal costs.
Why is the journal no longer in print? How has the Internet expanded the journal’s readership and has this tainted the credibility of the publication?
In 1987 it became too expensive to mail out 10,000 copies of the journal. I always have borne the expenses out of my own pocket, with the exception of three years when we received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Internet loomed as an interesting medium, so we became an online journal and entered a wondrous (and unimaginable) world of new readers. We now get close to 1 million “hits” a month, which means that 1 million people from all over the world wander over to our site, and more than half spend 10 minutes or more reading us. This is an extraordinary new readership, but on the other hand, it is very difficult to gauge just who are the new readers. The “print” readers were a dependable lot, lovers of “our” kind of writing, faithful, and intimate. Our new readers are fickle, fast, and easily bored. However, the advantage of publishing on the Web outweigh such concerns: We can publish five times as much material as we published in print (we’ve serialized whole novels, for instance), and we can present a generous sampling of art in color (forbiddingly expensive in print); we can also correct mistakes quickly and respond to our readers instantly.
Does the “Exquisite Corpse” get funding from LSU or any other source?
The “Corpse” gets no monetary funding from LSU, but has an arrangement with the University. We remain independent of LSU but are willing to employ graduate assistants to train in editorial positions. In exchange, we allow LSU to use the journal for recruitment purposes. Some of our best graduate students came to LSU because they were interested in “Exquisite Corpse.” Producing a national magazine as often as we do is hard work, and I foresee that at some point we may collaborate more closely with the University. LSU gets a lot of glory from it for very little money.
Have any careers been launched on the pages of the “Exquisite Corpse?”
It’s a long list. Some of our writers, like Tom Robbins, Barry Gifford, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Anne Waldman, were internationally famous before we published them. Others, like the late James Laughlin, publisher of New Directions, or the late James Broughton and Edouard Roditi, made the “Corpse” their magazine of choice and offered us first look at their work. Others, like Maggie Estep who became a sensation on MTV, or Mike Topp who is now the subject of much academic research, or Mark Spitzer (who was a student at LSU and an assistant at the “Corpse”) were “launched” by the “Corpse” and went on to publish successful novels and translations. The most recent writer to come to mind is Olympia Vernon, a young African-American student in our MFA program, whose first novel now is getting a lot of recognition; her first publication was in “Exquisite Corpse.” It’s a very interesting list, subject one day for someone’s dissertation. There are three published anthologies from the pages of the Corpse, the most recent being the two-volume “Thus Spake the Corpse,” edited by myself and Laura Rosenthal, published by Black Sparrow Press in 1999 and 2000, distributed by Godine.
What is the future of “Exquisite Corpse?” Is LSU an adequate home for the journal?
As I’ve said, I’ll keep publishing until I’m exhausted. LSU can help itself immensely by supporting the journal financially. We could, for instance, produce a print journal again, to complement Web publication. We can upgrade the Web journal to add visual work, such as short films, and audio pieces written specifically for us. We can also hold webcasts in connection with new issues, connecting our writers to perform live on given dates. The technological know-how is here for producing a cultural nexus that is way beyond the word “journal.” The magazine itself is (always was) just a locality, a place for creative workers to make things; if this “locality” becomes hospitable to interactive performance and discussion, we’ll be going to a next-generation type of publication that doesn’t have a name yet and doesn’t quite exist, but which might just give LSU a real place on today’s cultural landscape.