Remembrance of My Forgotten Skinniness

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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 …