Nicolae Coande Comments

Coande writes, in essence, from the edges of death: not against it, but in complicity with it – his poetry is, after we've surpassed all the extremely intelligent labels set on him, a carefully controlled thanatophilia.

In a literary era influenced by minimalism and the 2000s miserable aesthetics, Nicolae Coande is brave enough to cultivate a maximalist poetry, to dig up from the subterranean of literary history where the romantic myth of the Messianic poet seemed damned to remain forever buried, and to reconstruct the existential dignity of the poetic act, associating it with a state of meditation similar to what the sacred generates.

There’s an anecdote saying that W.H. Auden would ask of a true poet to know two classical languages and to never write about the other poets. What, then, should we do with the fact that T.S. Eliot, who met the expectations of Auden, also wrote about other poets? His essays are memorable even today, whether they’re about Shakespeare, Dante, or Baudelaire: a great poet and thinker writing about other great poets.

Poetry today is a Cinderella, but you know that, of course. Yet I didn’t fight to be included in those programs. I just couldn’t afford that effort; I had other things to do. The fact that I don’t live in Bucharest also matters, even though there are principles of cultural autonomy in play. In the US, I think this is less important, although I’m convinced it’s not the same thing to live in Anchorage, New York or L.A.