"This is not about you or me, I say,/ It is about aboutness itself," writes Jorge Guitart in "Part of What Makes No Difference" one of the 100 poems that comprise his new collection The Empress of Frozen Custard and Ninety-Nine Other Poems published by Buffalo-based BlazeVox Books.
Writing about "aboutness" is nothing new for Guitart--the Cuban-born refugee from Castro's dictatorship turned Spanish language linguist, phonologist, and longtime professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University at Buffalo--who excels in his droll, seriocomic mode:
So then you yawn
and I can see there is a yawning gap between us.
It has do with your mouth
but maybe also with the rest of your body,
suddenly relocated ten or twenty feet away.
You say you have your feet planted firmly on the ground
which is troublesome, since we are acrobats.
Or is it that all those loops in the air
have just been for show
and there is something smaller than us,
something explicable lying beyond this tent
and not worth the cost of the expedition.
In Guitart's poetry, language informs experience as much as experience informs language. The idiomatic is the real and figures of speech drive the prosody. There is no firm distinction between his "object language" and his "metalanguage", as his fellow linguists might say.
Some read him as a Cuban surrealist complete with obscure baseball phantasmagoria and exploding cigars. For others he's a deadpan Language poet who didn't get the dean's memo that Critical Theory is not for jokesters.
For me, Guitart has always been the most sincere of our village ironists, mapping out the formal ground where Wallace Stevens meets John Ashbery, and occasionally even venturing down the blind alley where Walt Whitman extols the day laborers while Dr. William Carlos Williams dresses the wounds of injured grammarians.
In an era when many poets, including such former kindred absurdists as Eastern bloc refugees Charles Simic and Andrei Codrescu, have shed their subversive language games for the laurels of mainstream acceptance, Guitart remains a cheerfully warped literalist:
There is the terrible absence of yes from pursed lips,
and the terrible presence of no in no admittance.
There is the old center of attention that is now
the center of inattention.
There is a hallmark card for everyone who has not left their mark.
There is paper-thin paper and there is
the thin perseverance of the fat
There are life size mockups
and death-sized sarcophaguses.
There are severe constraints on boys with toys.
There is expertise in making kitsch.
There is the snowbird that melts
and the blackbird that doesn't say bye-bye back.
Reading through Guitart's previous work, including the collections Foreigner's Notebook (1993) and Film Blanc (1996), I thought his work an antidote to the earnestness of American poetry and its tendency to posit its sources of meaning entirely outside of language. Here, however, he is less the witty deconstructionist than the skeptical, but kindly neighbor willing to indulge in the civic rituals of fellow feeling:
Sometimes I feel like redeeming more than coupons
but I end up redeeming only coupons.
Yes, you may call me ironic
but you can’t call me inaccessible.
I know where to go when threats to meaning dot the geography.
One huge dot is the unconscious with its caverns—don’t go there.
Yes, I am going to redeem my coupons, meet the other coupon redeemers.
They say mildly ironic things that you can get immediately.
In "From My Life with Jacques" he tells a hungry philosopher "You cannot eat interpretations!" and helps him "succeed over the slipperiness of meaning/ by teaching him how to call and order pizza/ and have the order obeyed" just as in the title poem--more of a tribute to Wallace Steven's "The Emperor of Ice Cream" than a parody--he observes that his Empress is "not some opaque metaphor...She will always agree that seeming/ is part and parcel of being."
"For a while after my conversion to realism/ I was idealistic/ as I had been realistic/ after my conversion to idealism," he confesses, but confession is just one of his tropes. Another one is disarming candor: "...art does elevate mysteriously," he concedes, "not unlike the way elevator shoes are designed to do."
He appears to let the synecdoches fall where they may, as in "Song Arising from the Lack of a Figure of the Fugitive Kind" where even Yeats gets twisted:
Someone unable
to tell apart
the things that had fallen apart
said the center had not held,
though someone known
as the Nose Tackle had.
Even in his epilogue, Guitart seems conciliatory: "There is the unequivocal message that there is no message/ but maybe it a mistake and they are checking, he writes:
They check some more and discover
that hope is not the thing with feathers
and it wasn't a truck that backfired during the assassination.
Now he takes his comforts where he can, as in "With No One to Say 'Fill 'Er Up' To":
Your self at the self station
alone with psyche, your soul
who goes on a nuptial flight
and marries the starry night.
You prayed for a violation
of one or more laws of causation.
Your case is encased in the case
encased in your head, which hardens with pleasures
then softens after the many erasures
and then there is nothing to face.
You can purchase
The Empress of Frozen Custard at your local independent bookseller, or order it from
BlazeVOX [books] or
Amazon.com
--R.D. Pohl
