Half Starts and Trail Offs

Rose Huber on Jason Schneiderman

Apr 30

MeredithPoetry, Reading, Writing 4 Comments

I’m not sure there could be a better way to close out National Poetry Month than with guest blogger Rose Huber of On A Lobster Placemat. She’s my classmate, coworker, and friend, and today she’s going to tell you about Jason Schneiderman. I’m hoping to be back on the blog in a few days with some book updates (i.e. I hope to publicly announce that I am finished, finally, goshdangit.). We’ll see how that goes. But in the meantime, enjoy Rose’s post.

The first time I read Jason Schneiderman, I was sitting in a scratched-up wooden desk in a tiny college classroom in western Pennsylvania. I was taking a poetry class (and [I'm] most definitely a fiction writer) and feeling uneasy. His work was some of the first that opened me up to poetry – a late bloomer – but better late than never.

I had an opportunity to see Schneiderman read in a Pittsburgh warehouse of sorts in 2007. Driving up to the city, my friend Eric and I didn’t really think that the Gist Street Reading Series was actually on Gist Street. It was. We got lost, showed up right before he spoke his first word and somehow managed tight seats in the first row. After the reading, I bought his book, and he signed it: “To Rose: Doctor Who is better than Titanic! Your friend, Jason Schneiderman.”

To this day, I still think we’re friends.

Here is “Sublimation Point” from his book “Sublimation Book,” published in 2004:

Sublimation Point (for M.B.)
The answer is entropy – how smell works -
little bits of everything – always spinning
off from where they were – flying off at random
into the world – which is to say into air.

There are other ways of solid to gas -
they’re substance specific, like iodine,
or dry ice – how I felt when I saw you -
straight to a new state without passing
through expected ones – as though enough
of me left at the moment you appeared that
I could never be whole without you – apply
heat – I turn straight into ether.