Photo by Marion Ettlinger.
Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, including the forthcoming Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire; edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers; and is co-host of Painted Bride Quarterly’s podcast “Slush Pile” and guest host for “The Slowdown.” He is an English professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His awards include the Emily Dickinson Award, the Shestack Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship. Schneiderman is Zócalo’s Poetry Curator for July. He chatted with us in the green room about playlists, broadsides, and his recent inspirations.
How has the pandemic affected how you think about or write poetry?
It stripped away a lot of artifice. It made it harder to do things just because that’s how we do them. That we started doing less, doing stripped down versions, travelling less. The pandemic created a crisis of value for me and I’m still trying to sort out what to keep and what to discard. My frame of reference for a pandemic was HIV/AIDS. A lot has been written about how or there’s a lot of speculation from gay authors, particularly Randy Shilts, that if HIV/AIDS had affected everyone and not just gay men and people in that space, there would’ve been a faster, more committed universal response. And at the beginning of the pandemic, I was talking to my sister-in-law, and she said, “I don’t know how the schools can stay open,” and I said, “It’s America. We let people die. What are you talking about? That’s how we roll.” And then we did shut down. And I thought, like, “Oh my god. This is amazing. We’re recognizing interconnection, we’re recognizing the ways in which we are all interdependent.” And then it all went away. And so now, the polarization, I don’t know if it accelerated or slowed down, but it just feels very confusing to me.
You’re going on a long trip. What’s on your playlist?
A lot of Prince. A lot of Tuscadero, which is a band from the ’90s. Not sure if anyone remembers them, but I saw a lot of their shows. A lot of Erasure. A huge amount of Cyndi Lauper. Right now, there’d be more Sam Smith than I’d want to admit. A friend of mine is a DJ, so I stream DJ Thom Ford on Mixcloud. Annie Lennox. Lady Gaga and Madonna. I really love ’80s synth-pop, so there’d probably be a lot of that. I have very eclectic tastes.
What’s hanging on your living room walls?
A print by Dannielle Tegeder, an artist I absolutely love. I was with her at Yaddo [retreat] many, many years ago, and she did a subscription service, so I have a few of her pieces. These little cut-out guys that were gifts from Bernard Williams. We were in residence a very long time ago at the Fine Arts Work Center [in Provincetown, Massachusetts]. I was having a dinner party and he brought those over. There’s a photo of my sister-in-law making beans. A photograph of my little brother when he came from the hospital. I have a broadside of my own poem that was from a humor festival.
The broadside was from a humor festival?
It was a humor festival at Washington College in 2007. I read with George Saunders. At Washington College, they have this amazing print studio where they do all this fine arts printing, and I love broadsides, I love Vandercook presses, I love the sort of tactile nature of it. Even though it was after the internet—already the period of time where everything was online. As we get deeper and deeper into the digital age, I think we’re having some maturation of digital, of what it means to be in digital culture, and sort of that shift towards digital culture from print culture. And I’ve been trying to write about it in other places. It was one version of an older technology; I’m always trying to explain to my students that all technology has a history. Even the ballpoint pen, people used fountain pens before that, and before that, people used ink and dipped their quills in them. All of these technologies leave these weird traces that really fascinate me. So anyway, they did a broadside, that’s a really beautiful thing, and I love it for the impression in the paper, the plate, and the ink, and everything.
What was the most recent thing that inspired you?
One of the nice things about being younger was having inspiration. Everything was newer! So it was easier to be inspired because you’re like “Oh my god, I can do that!” The older you get, the more you’re like “I don’t know.” But I want to stay with “inspired.” Because that’s generosity, right? That’s reciprocity, that’s being part of a larger space… Occupy the Disco. They did something with the bass that I’d never felt before and I haven’t done anything with it but it was inspiring.
Who was your childhood hero?
Liza Minnelli. I was obsessed with her. She was in the movie Cabaret from the ’70s and everyone got Oscars, it was a huge thing. But I discovered it in a library on a VHS when we had moved to Germany—I’m a military brat—and went to the library because my family are big readers. I found this cassette and I thought it was really obscure, but turns out it was really famous. In my freshman film class, my teacher showed clips from the movie and I was like “Oh, other people know that.” I really loved her and would watch the movie over and over again, and I would listen to her records, and I just thought she was amazing. One night, I stayed up and watched this weird special she had with Mikhail Baryshnikov, who was a ballet dancer who defected from the Soviet Union, and he was a really big deal, and they had this ridiculous dance special. I can’t find it, I’ve been looking for years and people think that once something happens digitally that it never goes away. And it’s not true.
How are you preserving your own things to make sure it lasts?
I’m actually doing a really bad job. A number of years ago, someone asked me for a poem and I was opening my computer to go find the file, because it was in my first book, and every electronic copy of that Word document had corrupted. So I couldn’t open it. So I went to the hard copy and typed it out. And then I found one later in an email, and so now I have a flash drive with just that file. I’ve been trying to do a better job of having flash drives with not everything but just the books. I’ve been going through my CV and making sure I have a paper copy of everything, to have proof of it, and then keep those in watertight, plastic filing boxes. I know what I should be doing, but I’m doing it very silly. Unless your job is actually archiving, it’s kind of the last thing you do since everyone needs something from you now.