Fragments of Fantastic Songs & Ninety-Nine Other Poems by Jorge Guitart

Jorge Guitart’s Fragments of Fantastic Songs & Ninety-Nine Other Poems is at once a lyric intervention and a poetics laboratory. With a wink and a tear, Jorge Guitart takes us on an experiential picaresque to confront the tragic joke of the human condition. Twinkling with insight and wit, this book dances around the paradox at reality’s heart. With the rhythmic inclinations of a musician, these poems are comic and tragic, reflecting and provoking the reader with playful, philosophical, political, linguistically insightful philosophical meditations all of which are open to those willing to engage and listen.

Jorge Guitart was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1937, and early on he decided that his favorite subjects in school were Spanish grammar and English. They have continued to be central to his intellectual life. In 1962, not wanting to live any longer under a Leninist dictatorship, he moved to the United States. He was not a stranger to American culture, having followed the New York Yankees since childhood and memorized great chunks of American pop music lyrics in addition to being a devotee of Mad Magazine in the Harvey Kurtzman era. In the mid-sixties he developed an interest in contemporary U.S poetry and began to write poetry in English as well as in Spanish. Guitart’s first collection of poetry in English was Foreigner’s Notebook (Shuffaloff 1993), and in 1996 his long cyclical poem Film Blanc was published as a chapbook by Meow Press. In 2009 his book The Empress of Frozen Custard & Ninety-Nine Other Poems was published by BlazeVOX. He has published in print and electronic journals. He translated U.S poets into Spanish (e.g., John Ashbery) and Latin American poets into English (e.g., José Kozer). He obtained a Ph.D. in Spanish linguistics from Georgetown University in June 1973. In September of 1973 he started as Assistant Professor in the fields of Spanish Phonology and Spanish Grammar at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He became Associate Professor in 1977 and Professor in 1992. He became Emeritus Professor in January 2020. He had been a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Massachusetts, Middlebury College, and several Latin American universities.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 116 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-399-7

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