Primary Source

By Jason Schneiderman

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9781597095600

Jason Schneiderman

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 University Press, 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.

Book preview

I

You’re the top!

You’re a high that’s mellow

You’re the top!

You’re a P-Town Fellow

You’re the changing light

of James Merrill’s sprite

who told him of his soul!

You’re Helen Vendler

You’re Stephen Spender

You’re Yoko Ono’s fol-de-rol!

You’re the top!

You’re Shakespeare’s heather

You’re the top!

You’re Thom Gunn’s leather

I’m a tone deaf singer, a dying zinger, a David Lee Roth be-bop!

But if baby I’m the bottom, you’re the top!

THE SADNESS OF ANTONIO

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad

—The opening line of The Merchant of Venice, spoken by Antonio

We approach The Merchant of Venice with a question (Why is Antonio sad?) …

—James Longenbach, The Resistance to Poetry

I will argue here that The Merchant deliberately frustrates any

possibility of identification with its characters…

—James O’Rourke,

"Racism and Homophobia in The Merchant of Venice"

Antonio, we should remind ourselves,

is not real.

He is not in the body of the actor

or the words on the page,

and yet we return to the question:

Why is he sad?

There is no Antonio in the way

for instance

there is a homeless man

outside the subway,

his clothes made out of

newspapers, folded

to ribbons and tied into bows.

We would not

call him sad.

We would call him crazy.

We avoid his eyes,

we avoid his stench,

but he is there.

He is there.

There is no Antonio

in the way

that there are ten fifth