Nicolae Coande
area: Literature
Key Facts
nationality
Romaniaarea
Literatureresidence
Craiovarecommending institution
BMEIAtime period
December 2014 - January 2015Nicolae Coande (born 1962 in Osica de Sus, Romania), poet and essayist. Lives in Craiova.
Dramaturge at the National Theatre “Marin Sorescu”, Craiova, and editor-in-chief of the Theatre’s magazine, “SpectActor”.
He has published eight collections of poetry in Romanian: On the Edge (1995); Fincler (1997); The Dead-End Road Named Homer (2002); Folfa (2003); Wind, Tobacco & Alcohol (2008); The Woman that I Write About (2010); VorbaIago (2012; Persona (2013).
He has also published four collections of essays, the most recent of which is Romanian Intellectuals and the King's Court (2011). He has received several awards for his poetry from the Writers' Union of Romania (1995, 1997, 2002).
In 2003 he received a four months grant from Heinrich Böll Foundation (Köln) – November 2003-February2004; He received another scholarship from the „Künstlerdorf Schöppingen” Foundation for the period of July-August 2008. In 2012 he was invited by the Goethe Institut Berlin at the meeting of theater experts from South East Europe on the theme of documentary theater.
In 2013 he participated in 4.höfleiner donauweiten poesiefestival, Höflein an der Donau (Austria), organized by Peter Waugh.
His work has been included in the anthologies Gefährliche Serpentinen – Rumänische Lyrik der Gegenwart (Druckhaus Verlag, Berlin, 1998), edited by Dieter Schlesak; Of Gentle Wolves (Calypso Editions, New York, 2011), translated and edited by Martin Woodside; The Vanishing Point that Whistles (Talisman Press, USA, 2011), edited by Paul-Doru Mugur, Adam Sorkin, and Claudia Serea.
“… in order to find a poet you need the help of another poet” – Roberto Bolaño wrote once. And the help of a reader, I would add to complete the Chilean poet. I consider myself merely a poet-reader on the tracks of other poets: with my intuition, admiration, and especially with my sympathy for these people, men and women, for whom poetry is indeed what H.M. Enzensberger once said: “the only form of literature which is preserved in the mind, today like thousands of years ago […] with humor and rumor it divides the enviable capacity of circulating without individual mediation.” I am currently working on a volume of poetry critique, provisionally titled "The Poet Hunter", in which I try to "track down" some of the best Romanian poets of the last 30 years (a literary generation, in Thibaudet's conception), but I am also interested in reaching out to some foreign poets of great caliber, such as: Gottfried Benn, John Berymann, Fernando Pessoa, Umberto Saba, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Jerome Rothenberg, Seamus Heaney, and so on.