José Koser

Cuban writer born in La Habana on March 28, 1940 but residing in the United States since 1960. He has published more than fifty books, the great majority of poetry, although among them are also found diaries and narrative works. He has been classified within the neobaroque aesthetic. He worked for three decades as a professor of Hispanic literature at Queen College in New York. He resides in Hallandale, Florida. His parents were Jews from Central Europe.

Master's degree and Doctorate in Luso-Brazilian Literature. University professor of Literature. Essayist, prose writer. Director of the journal Enlace. Cintas Fellowship (1964). Receives the Pablo Neruda Prize in 2013

Son of Jewish parents—Polish father and Czechoslovak mother—exiled in La Habana during the waning years of the 1920s, José Kozer (La Habana, 1940) grew up, as one of his poems testifies, listening to babbling "verbs of/ Yiddish to Spanish". That is, right in that liminal space, where even the mother tongue does not show itself to be stable or defined.

After a childhood and early youth also lived in the borderlands: between island Spanish and the Jewish-Central European ancestry bequeathed by his parents ("I present myself choleric and overwhelming before/ this angular book,/ I present myself like a rabbi dancing a/ sovereign polka"), the Kozer family had to exile themselves again in 1960 as a result of the triumph of the Cuban "Revolution" of 1959, this time in the United States. The parents and sister settled in Miami—with an interval of a few years in Mexico—, and in José's case, in the city of New York.

Already settled in New York, Kozer experiences the shock of another language (English), and therefore the adaptation to other codes of coexistence, the thousand and one labors to earn his bread, a first marriage that fails, children, a second marriage with Guadalupe (the wife who brings him closer again to Spanish), the profession of professor of Spanish literature and language at Queens College, the decision to live for (in) poems.

From 1972 to 1999 he would alternate New York life with summer stays in Spain, and then settled in Hallandale Beach (Florida), where he currently resides, and where day by day he makes a poem:

There, from my forty years of age onwards, and to this date, it began to happen to me: instead of seeking the poem, the poem began to seek me, and, let's say, instead of being its scribe, the writer of its writing, I became its potter, the officiant of its clay (Einstein repeats several times in his brief diaries: "Now inspiration has come to me").[i]

As the essayist Carlos A. García has well described in his article "This bridge made by joining words", in Kozer's case "it is a poet who, by habit, illness, game and religion at the same time, against the grain of the supposed slowness of the craft, lives in a state of constant creation or—as he himself has said—secretion of writing, daily eruption in the poem"[ii].

This multiculturalism that marks Kozer's biography is inserted and reverberates in a determining way in his poetic writing. This broad spectrum of cultural ancestry: the Jewish, the Central European and the Cuban, all with their respective mixtures, and this vast amalgam of languages that cross, juxtapose and confuse each other will decidedly mark (at both unconscious and rational levels, emotional and intellectual) his poetry.

The dense genealogical past proves to be for Kozer one of the driving forces of his poems, his happy and painful way of inventing an existence, since for him that genealogy is confused, unstable, "lying" as he himself names it:

The past in me is a void and that void becomes what I would like to call a lying reality. I close my eyes, I try to see myself and I see absolutely nothing: I close my eyes, I try to see the place, La Habana, to see what or who surrounds me: I don't see. What I see are words, I see what I invent in a present moment. Is there a past? There was a past, but I don't know if there is a past, I don't know if it exists. That lying reality is complex because it is made of superimposed planes; that lying reality contains the lying reality of my father, that of my mother's concealments, that of the ignorance of who they were, who my grandparents were, what I saw and those I didn't see (those who died in old Europe). I don't see them. It is an auditory reality, I am told things and those things that are told are perceived in a special way, through intellectual, emotional transformations. There is an entire sifting of information that makes the real something unreal, poetic, and I believe that at an early age […][iii]

For Kozer the family genealogy remains forever incomplete, dispersed and fragmented in the battlefield of memory. Therefore, memory invents. The poet is obsessed with imitating the scattered pieces, so he builds upon emptiness. This absence or presence of confusions (genealogical labyrinth, linguistic entanglements and palimpsests) will become catharsis in Kozer through his poems. This absence will lead the poet to build a universe that rivals the world, with Everything. But that rivalry in his poetry will range from the microcosm (the home, the family, childhood, the native country) to the macrocosm (literature, other cultures and knowledge, exile, language itself), and vice versa.

Due to this bellicose ardor (from an artistic point of view), derived from those vital voids, Kozer's poetry is sustained in a baroquizing operation, or, as the poet himself and critics have labeled it, in a neobaroque aesthetic. That is, in the words of Kozer himself, a literary endeavor sustained in a "split language, scar; language orifice, from which words come expelled, renewed, fetid, insolent, desperate"[iv].

In the "Prologue" to the first edition (1954) of A Universal History of Infamy, Jorge Luis Borges, with his characteristic acerbity, said that "baroque is that style which deliberately exhausts (or wants to exhaust) its possibilities and which borders on its own caricature". Kozer's poetry belies Borges' pronouncement, since his baroque conception of poetry does not stem from exhaustion, but from a void, from an emptying. Kozerian neobaroque is an expressive necessity, not an imposed style.

Some works

Padres y otras profesiones. New York. Ed. Villa Miseria. 33 pages. 1972.
Por la libre. New York. Ed. Bayú-Menoráh. 104 pages. 1973.
Este judío de números y letras. Tenerife. Canaries. Ed. Católica. Ed. Nuestro Arte. 43 pages. 1975.
Y así tomaron posesión en las ciudades. Ámbito Literario. Barcelona. 113 pages. 1978.
Jarrón De Las Abreviaturas. Mexico. Ed. Premiá. Sa. 56 pages. 1980.
La rueca de los semblantes. León (Spain). Ed. Instituto Fray Bernardino De Sahagún. 70 pages. 1980.
Bajo este cien. Mexico. FCE. 140 pages. 1983.
La garza sin sombras. Barcelona. Ed. llibres del Mall (Iberian Series). 160 pages. 1985.
El carillón de los muertos. Buenos Aires. Ed. Último Reino. 75 pages. 1987.
Carece de causa. Buenos Aires. Ed. Último Reino. 156 pages. 1988.
De donde oscilan los seres en sus proporciones. Tenerife (Canaries). H.A. Editor. 84 pages. 1990.
Et mutabile. Xalapa, Veracruz. Ed. Graffiti. 65 pages. 1995.
Réplicas. Selection and prologue by Víctor Fowler. Matanzas, Cuba. Ed. Vigía. Estero Collection. 45 pages. 1997.
La Maquinaria Ilimitada. Mexico. Ed. Sin nombre. 60 pages. 1998.
Rosa cúbica. Buenos Aires. Ed. Tse Tsé. 30 pages. 2002
La voracidad grafómana: José Kozer. Edition by Jacobo Sefamí. Mexico DF. Mexico. Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the UNAM. Paideia Collection. 447 pages. 2002.
Ánima. Mexico DF. Mexico. FCE. 161 pages. 2002
Un caso llamado FK. Mexico DF. Mexico. Ed. Sin nombre. 37 pages. 2002.