NewsCenter See all sections

News Release

Witty and Playful, New Volume by UB Poet Is a Love Affair with Words

"The Empress of Frozen Custard" a delightful romp of language, literature and observation

Release Date: December 18, 2009

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- "The Empress of Frozen Custard and Ninety-Nine Other Poems" is the second volume of English poetry by Cuban-born poet and Spanish linguist Jorge Guitart, professor of Romance languages and literatures at the University at Buffalo.

Published by Buffalo-based BlazeVox Books, the poetry is, like Guitart himself, exceptionally witty and erudite, without being academic. Perhaps he can be a bit silly, but it is a most deliberate silliness and pointed, as when he describes cashews as religious nuts who believe they've been placed in their bowl for a purpose "They are right," says the poet, "Won't you have some?"

"The Empress of Frozen Custard" is a revel through a forest of sound, philosophy, language and memory, a love affair with words, their sounds and meanings and (as Guitart might say) their meanings and sounds. He even tiptoes in and around death with an arched brow, grinning.

The poet's literary references sometimes may be obscure, but certainly they are informed by his scholarship and the works of noted writers, with which he plays in sly and amusing ways.

Readers who share those understandings will appreciate more fully what he has done here, but most of his references are delightfully available. Readers will enjoy his linguistic glyphs and minarets, and hum along as he hops from observation to observation, for instance, to cite a book he never bought titled "The Leninist Bunny," and to plead, "Oh heavens above, we pray you are structurally sound."

Cuban-American novelist and fellow poet Pablo calls Guitart "a master of language, a tongue trickster, a feller of fashion," and notes that while "(his poetry) is not for the masses (it) is for everyone." Poet Ken Sherwood calls this book "a see-saw ride of Looney Hymns and Nutty Psalms to intense, witty re-workings of William Blake and Wallace Stevens."

The book's title is itself, of course, a nod to Stevens' celebrated poem "The Emperor of Ice Cream," which, Stevens' said, "seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry; that is the reason why I like it."

Stevens meant "gaudiness" in the original meaning of the word: as prank, trick, merry-making, re-joicery. Guitart's work, too, is up to its ears in gaud.

UB colleague Mark Shechner, associate professor of English at UB, illustrated this in a recent article when he spoke of Guitart's poems as "models of what happens when you cast off ready-to-hear spoken English and re-imagine the language so that your readers can hear it afresh, as you once did as a boy in Havana listening to big band jazz and baseball games on American radio. English then was a miracle. Thus Jorge writes in Ballpark Figures, 'Holy polluted mackerels! the sun is kindling its own temporal fire,' which is surely the voice of the late Yankee announcer Mel Allen calling the play-by-play of the Big Bang."

The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, a flagship institution in the State University of New York system and its largest and most comprehensive campus. UB's more than 28,000 students pursue their academic interests through more than 300 undergraduate, graduate and professional degree programs. Founded in 1846, the University at Buffalo is a member of the Association of American Universities.