Primary Source

by Jason Schneiderman

Overview

Primary Source presents Jason Schneiderman's most exuberant volume of poetry, as he plays with the literary canon and explores his own personal archive. Starting with rewritten lyrics that put Cole Porter's "You're the Top" squarely in po-biz, Schneiderman takes on everyone from Shakespeare to Ashbery, making stops along the personal and the political, and interrogating ideas of race, sexuality, and love. Playful and profound, Schneiderman's light touch is guaranteed to send tingles up your spine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597097437
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	04/29/2016
Edition description:	1
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Jason Schneiderman was born in San Antonio Texas, but was raised around the United States and Western Europe owing to his father’s military service. He holds BAs in English and Russian from the University of Maryland, an MFA from NYU, and a PhD from the Graduate Center of CUNY. He is the author of two previous collections of poems: Sublimation Point (Four Way Books, 2004) and Striking Surface (Ashland Poetry Press, 2010), winner of the Richard Snyder Prize. He is also the editor of the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UniversityPress, 2015). His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish Poetry, Verse Daily, The Poetry Review, and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Schneiderman has received Fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and is the recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is an Assistant Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and lives in Brooklyn with his husband, Michael Broder.

Table of Contents

I

The Sadness of Antonio 15

My Rich Friend 27

Alternate Side of the Street Parking 28

White Boy 29

Self Portrait of the Artist as a Young Sex Object (Age 19) 30

If You Died 32

II

Vocabulary 35

Anachronistic Fair Use Self Portraits of 20^th Century Sylvia Plath (with "Daddy" Fixation) 40

To Please and Instruct 45

Ten Poems for Fluxus (For Private Reading or Public Performance) 48

Self Portrait of Gertrude Stein with Increasing Plath Fixation 58

Safe(r) Prosody/Erotic Errata 60

Theology 62

III

Pornography II: The Capacity to Love 65

The Turing Test 66

Tyra Hunter 67

Pornography III 69

In the Style of the Master 71

I Remember 72

The Worst Children's Book Ever 73

New York Schooled. Poem for Jen & Ada 74

Schuyler-esque 75

Why We Never Went Back to the Abstracted Forms of Government Café 76

In the Next Booth 77

The Buffy Sestina 78

Sita 80

On Last Looking into Ashbery's Self-Portrait 81

On First Looking into Ashbery's Self-Portrait 83

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Jason Schneiderman’s Primary Source is a sparkling demonstration of this principle: a poet evolves by making as many aspects of the self as possible available on the page. By turns sardonic and sincere, nakedly vulnerable or armored in irony, the wild magpie intelligence shaping these poems plucks threads from Shakespeare and Stein, borrows forms from Cole Porter and Wittgenstein, and bows to a variety of influences so vast (Sylvia Plath and David Lee Roth?) as to constitute a way of situating the self, introducing the dizzily happy reader to a queer subject, a livewire thinker at work, a breathing human presence.”

—Mark Doty

Editorial Reviews

Jason Schneiderman’s Primary Source is a sparkling demonstration of this principle: a poet evolves by making as many aspects of the self as possible available on the page. By turns sardonic and sincere, nakedly vulnerable or armored in irony, the wild magpie intelligence shaping these poems plucks threads from Shakespeare and Stein, borrows forms from Cole Porter and Wittgenstein, and bows to a variety of influences so vast (Sylvia Plath and David Lee Roth?) as to constitute a way of situating the self, introducing the dizzily happy reader to a queer subject, a livewire thinker at work, a breathing human presence.”   
—Mark Doty

From the Publisher