In August at Bryant Park’s Reading Room, Jason Schneiderman read from his new book, Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire. I had already read and enjoyed the book and wanted to record it and share the poems here on the blog. The video of the reading follows.
Gay and Jewish with the awareness that holocausts and Matthew Shepard happen, some of the poems in Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire give us a warning. We live in a climate changing world that is literally on fire, and where, if we don’t watch out, we may soon find ourselves in an awful mess best left to the imagination, which is where these poems can take us, to the edge, where we may read (and see) unharmed and leave better educated. Not everything is dire. And it’s all interesting. Some of the poems smile and laugh and some are thoughtful insights about art, literature, history, celebrity, and myth, and know where words go and how they’ll sound when they do, poems that are to be listened to as well as read, or better said: “When we read Jason Schneiderman, we listen.”
I’m including three poems from Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire to give readers an idea of what is to be found when they open the book and look. Enjoy.
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Summer
I was on the beach, it was morning, it was summer,
the gay men sparsely dotting the sand in their skimpy
bathing suits, and I realized I was in the opening scene
of Longtime Companion, that here I was firmly
in the before of every movie that had ever offered to tell
the story of my peoples: the happy Jews in 1930s
Europe riding their bicycles among the trees;
the dancing men in the 1970s, blissful in the dark.
I saw in that moment that I was at the end
of an idyll, that as the world is always ending
for someone, now it would be ending for me.
And then there was the shooing. And then the flags
were at half mast, and it made no difference:
the preparation, the rainbows, the grief.
…………………June 12, 2016.
At my drink-drunk-drunketty-unkest
I laid down in the road to see the stars
more clearly. I laughed a tequila shot
through my nose onto a man trying
to pick me up at a club. I decided I had
to translate Akhmatova at that very moment,
and woke up my host family by searching loudly
for her collected works. I threw up
in someone’s bed, again through my nose,
which may be a theme in my drunkenness.
I called my friend’s green card marriage
a “green card marriage” for the entirety
of a party, despite her insistence
that her gay husband was her husband
and that her family was not a ploy
or a trick or a legal fiction. Each time I stopped
drinking so heavily, for a year, two years,
three years, and I’m not admitting
to much here: a handful of stories across
two decades, the moments I thought
I ought to drink a bit less, and yet it bears
saying that every weepy drunk considers
himself a kind drunk; every mean drunk
considers himself an honest drunk,
and every handsy drunk considers himself
a flirty drunk. And is it so terrible, the joys
and regrets of drunkenness, if they’re just
a one off, if they don’t become a habit,
if we can disappear and come back?
I’m not sorry I saw the stars from
that gutter, though my sober sympathies lie
with the sober driver who was furious
that I had almost made him a murderer.
What I remember best is those stars,
and how they were as beautiful as any stars
could be and how much they meant to me
with my inhibitions stripped, and how well
I can still see them now.
……………originally published in Two Horatio
Wounded, not Broken
I think you were the one who told me
that the defining feature of alcoholics
is that they experience all their emotions
as anger, that shame becomes anger, love
becomes anger, sadness becomes anger,
grief becomes anger, and so on and so on,
and I thought about how sad that was, but
also I saw the appeal in making everything
anger, the way you would never have to be
scared or lonely or ashamed, but in those days
I thought that anger was something that
left the body, that anger was a projectile
you aimed at another person, and not a furnace
that burns a person from the inside.
Grief is the hardest emotion to live with,
because you hold it all yourself, because
whatever you lost is lost, and if alcohol
is the alchemy that lets the dull gravity
of grief turn to the hot fire of rage, I get that.
Sometimes I wonder why I spend
so much time thinking about feelings,
though I don’t think it’s strange I spend
so much time thinking about language
or thinking about bodies. My biggest fear
is that I’m broken, that something is so wrong
with me that I can never be fixed,
and that I’ll spend my whole life
trying to repair myself and never
managing it. But if I say I’m wounded,
not broken, that feels better.
If I’m wounded, I might still heal.
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Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire is published by Ren Hen Press. You can check it out here: https://redhen.org/book_author/jason-schneiderman/
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For “Stories about Love,” link to the Academy website: https://poets.org/
And for “A Story About Translation” link to The Night Heron Barks: https://
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Photo by Seze Devres
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