Review of Jason Schneiderman’s Sublimation Point

Four Way Books, 2004

“…astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror. In this case the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it. Hence arises the great power of the sublime, that far from being produced by them, it anticipates our reasonings and hurries us on by an irresistible force.” –

Edmund Burke from A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757

First things first (and beyond anything else I’ll be able to say), the poems in Jason Schneiderman’s book Sublimation Point are astonishing: formally, structurally, emotionally. I remember reading this book for the first time about a year ago and thinking, here is someone who knows not only what he’s doing in his poems, but also where he’s going, and what he’s after—and by “after,” I mean both in the sense of being in search of something and also in Alice Notley’s sense of “coming after,” as part of an historical moment and tradition.

Indeed, Schneiderman, unlike a lot of his contemporary peers, is at home in the tradition of poetry—that is, the whole tradition. He is not afraid of clicking his heels in a whirlwind of poetic convention, nor is he nervous in the post(avant)modern kitchen. There are no gimmicks, no tricks; his work is not pointlessly clever (though cleverness is something he uses from time to time in the service of invention, explosion, and bewildering style). He seems to realize that the poetry that matters (that has mattered and will continue to matter) both demonstrates something and tells something—is both written and writing, transformed and transformative, inventive and transcendent.

With this in mind, the “sublimation point,” the book’s epigraph tells us, refers to the temperature at which some substances are able to change directly from a solid to a gas without passing through an intermediate liquid state. This, it strikes me, is akin to how both metaphor and association work, i.e. the notion that figurative language—the language of poetry—works by way of transformation (as well as exploration), and furthermore that these transformations (because ordinary, linear logic is short-circuited by them) are by turns marvelous, improbable, and totally convincing.

In Sublimation Point one finds marvel but also violence, riches but also devastation, health and disease, and the pleasures of both epistemological certainty and also, in Keats’ famous words, of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” And where Schneiderman’s work is not entirely sure of “the answers,” at least that’s one thing it’s sure of. As he writes in the title poem

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.

One of the chief results of all this going “straight to a new state without passing/through expected ones” is that Schneiderman is able to say both everyday things with urgency, and urgent things without losing his cool. He doesn’t get bogged down in the middle-grounded-ness of middle management/argument. This is a poetry of controlled extremes (a control, which is accomplished largely and beautifully by an adept use and abuse of form. That is to say, when it comes to form, especially received forms, Schneiderman works with them and against them, but never within them). One might say then that Schneiderman’s poems struggle to be comfortable against both: all-out satisfied exuberance and also defeatist resignation. They achieve an acrobat’s highwire distance, an uncommon commons, a middle ground wherein the holocaust, Charlie Brown, AIDS, Leibniz, love and Elvis can all be dealt with appropriately and freshly within mere pages—or sometimes even lines—of one another. Take for instance the opening lines of the collection’s first poem, a sonnet called “The Disease Collector”

Odd word: culture, as though this swab cared

About art and music, loved the opera,

Saw the Ballet Russe when Nijinsky still bared

His chest, could quote the illuminata

In the original Italian. As though the Petri dish

Were a center of learning, and parents wished

For their children to go there

The constant wobble in this poem—the shifting back and forth between the recognition that “culture” is both mankind’s greatest achievement and also a diagnostic test for “explaining” everything that ails us—is exactly the sort of move that Schneiderman is so amazing at making. He takes a word, a phrase, or a form that we ordinarily employ for the purposes of meaning-making, and instead deploys it in the service of making it mean everything it can (instantly!)(and in a way which is both simultaneously scary and radiant: solid to gas, body to spirit, culture to “culture” to “culture.”). What this points to I think is an almost diagrammatic clarity on the part of the poet with regard to his world, involving not only the ability to see and make connections in the face of overwhelming disconnectedness, but also to infinitely disassemble and make plain that which appears indivisible and unfathomable. “I want only day one—math’s simplest/sum,” he writes in “The Lover of Math to His Lover,” “The one plus one of thee and me that cannot break/For if ever thou shouldst subtract thyself from me,/ my science is void, and my world all darkness be.” Schneiderman reminds us that language itself is a constantly shifting substance, but one which in poetry often shifts unexpectedly (even alchemically, magically) in terms of its meaning without fundamentally changing its original shape. As Lyn Hejinian has written, “Language not only exists in multitudes of contexts it is multitudes of contexts.”

This same diagrammatic impulse is, it seems to me, clearly (and visually) demonstrated in the diagram of the book’s two sentence epigraph, which appears just after the epigraph itself, at the beginning of the book:

This diagrammatic urge is crucial to the poems in Sublimation Point, in which we find over and over again the mind, modalities, and keen analytical sensibility of the scientist, the physician, and metaphysician all rolled into one and perfectly married to the eccentricities and strangeness of a poet’s way of seeing, saying, and above all feeling. However, what’s really important here is that the transformation itself, the actual “change” the sentences speak of is “absent” from the diagram. In Schneiderman’s poems one is always put at a loss in the face of their extraordinary results, arising from seemingly ordinary and/or controlled experiments/experience.

Take, for another example, these lines from “Physics III: Super Powers,” which is incidentally another of the book’s sonnets and implicitly a poetic exploration of a question much discussed in a popular segment of NPR’s This American Life: namely, if you could have either the super power of invisibility or of flight, which would you choose?

A student tells me that he’d like to be invisible

and I tell him that he’d have to be blind

because if light passes through you,

then it can’t stop in your retina, which is how

you see. He gives up on invisibility

From there the student moves on to flying, and at the speaker/teacher’s further question as to whether the student would choose bird wings or bat wings, he chooses bird wings, “…because they’re more like angel wings./ I think he’s a traitor. He’ll have to give up his arms.” With these final lines the poem suddenly explodes into something a lot bigger than a hypothetical question about comic-book-style super powers. Rather, now it points to the military might of the world’s actual super powers, nation states with arms of overwhelmingly devastating potential. In the end the poem poses questions about the role of the individual in the face of overwhelming arms/odds, as well as about what it means to be a citizen in the shadow of one’s own (out-of-control and often contradictory) tentacles. Finally, ironically, there is also an unarticulated yet implicit connection being made between military arms and moral responsibility—how we must ultimately give up the former in order to attain the latter—one cannot, it seems, have one’s cake and also blow up the world.

Ultimately, Sublimation Point proceeds in terms of an almost methodological joy in creating unexpected twists and surprises—the results of formal maneuvering, an exploratory process of discovery, and an unflagging attention to detail. Schneiderman’s approach in these poems is thus weirdly Aristotelian, delicately taking himself and us (and all that comes with that) apart, so as to better understand just what the hell is (in fact/in figure) going on. Nevertheless, these dissections neither descend into permanent solutions nor bewildering derangements. This is clear-headed/clear-hearted stuff. Stuff at which sometimes one is required to gasp or cough or sing to proceed—not because the work is primarily startling in its candor (which it is) or in its intensity of sentiment (ditto), but because the work is, in a word, cathartic. Or put another way, it produces, out of ashes, so much fresh air. And if there’s one thing that’s clear it’s that breathing is necessary, and therefore (in some sense) also good. Jason Schneiderman’s poems help us to breathe, leaving us lightheaded, awe-stricken, blood-rushed, etc. These poems, like the 18^th century philosopher Edmund Burke’s Sublime, anticipate our reasonings and hurry us on by an irresistible force.

—Matt Hart