Jason Schneiderman: THE USES OF ANAPHORA • Book Reviews

Adrie Rose
THE USES OF ANAPHORA in Jason Schneiderman’s Poems “Anger” and “Star Dust”

When I first heard Jason Schneiderman read his poems “Anger,” and “Star Dust” in a 2021 episode of Rachel Zucker’s Commonplace podcast, I realized both make make extensive use of anaphora, the repetition of words or phrases. Hearing (and then reading) these poems coincided with my rising interest in long poems—what they can do that a short poem can’t, how they work, what their limitations are. I became especially interested in how Schneiderman uses anaphora to shape and steer these poems.

“Anger” is the first poem in his collection Hold Me Tight, which is a bold placement for a nine-page poem. “Star Dust,” as it appears in the Spring 2023 Massachusetts Review, is only two pages long, relatively short in comparison. However, in a book format, such as the Hold Me Tight collection, “Start Dust” would be three or even four pages long. “Star Dust” has lengthy lines, using much horizontal space on the page. And so, in my mind, the two poems take up a similar amount of breathing room.

Compare the opening five lines of “Anger” with the opening five lines of “Star Dust”:

When I was angry,
I kept asking how
anger works.
No one understood

my question.

(from “Anger”)

Ok, fine, so we’re all made of stars, but being made of stars
is like being descended from Noah or Adam—it’s no big deal
if you truly believe it—and what good is it to me that our sweat
is made of star dust, that the unsanitary hand dryers at my school
are made of star dust in the star dust bathrooms that the nursing…

(from “Star Dust”)

“Anger,” continues with stanzas of four lines each. Each line is brief, indented right far onto the page, creating a great deal of white space. “Star Dust” continues as a single stanza, its lines long and sprawling.

In both poems, anaphora is present at the start. Or, even, before the start, beginning with the poems’ titles. “Anger” or “angry” is the repeated word in the poem “Anger,” along with the phrase “is anger…” at the beginning of the series of questions that make up the bulk of the poem.

Is anger
a finite
material.

Is anger like hydrogen,
and there’s simply
a certain amount
of it in the universe.

Is there a zero sum
of anger, a law
of the conservation
of anger…

In “Star Dust,” the title begins with what proves a relentless repetition of the word “star.” “Star” appears everywhere, jammed into phrases, hitched to words it does not typically appear next to, aligned with people and objects it seems anathema to, and in contradiction of:

What good is it to me that the train to work is a star train
or that my job is a star job, or that the star human star body
contains nine to eleven star pints of star blood? When I was
star seven I was star woken, star gently, in the early morning,
because my star mother was losing her star blood. She collected
the star blood in star cartons, which had held the star milk
I drank on my star cereal, to make measurement of the blood
for the star doctors at the star hospital where she and my
star father went to complete the miscarriage of her star fetus…

While both of these poems employ anaphora, in some ways doing similar work with it, the anaphora acts differently and creates different possibilities in the two. In “Star Dust,” Schneiderman’s repetition of “star” (this celestial, mystical object of awe, otherness, and wishing) is intentionally spliced onto everyday, mundane, bodily, earthly, even repulsive objects. Adding “star” to hand dryers, bathrooms, feces, hands, blood, jobs, milk cartons, cereal, and hospitals intentionally disrupts the reader’s assumed knowledge of these ordinary things. We know about hand dryers and feces, but do we, the anaphora insists, know about star hand dryers and star feces and star jobs and star milk cartons? What do we really know at all? Is a star job any different from a job? The anaphora serves to make the ordinary strange. It heightens the ordinary and forces us to reconsider it anew.

Through this repetition that, in some ways, becomes its own mundanity, anaphora renders the strangeness of stars, ordinary. If the reader enters the poem thinking “Wow, star dust! This is going to be magical,” Schneiderman’s anaphora quickly dispels that notion. “What good is it to me that the train to work is a star train / or that my job is a star job, or that the star human star body /contains nine to eleven star pints of star blood?” What’s so wonderful and strange about stars, after all, the anaphora demands, while simultaneously being itself wonderful and strange.

In moments of tenderness in the poem, the continued anaphora heightens that tenderness.

…………………………………… ………………………………….…When I was
star seven I was star woken, star gently, in the early morning,
because my star mother was losing her star blood. She collected
the star blood in star cartons, which had held the star milk
I drank on my star cereal, to make measurement of the blood
for the star doctors at the star hospital where she and my
star father went to complete the miscarriage of her star fetus,
while I went to the house of her star friend, quietly, sleepily,
and I didn’t even miss a star day of star school. Oh stars.
Will you listen when I tell you I remember this?

The work of following the anaphoric “star” brings the reader into the action of the reversal the poem is engaged in. The reader is a participant here–parsing the syntax, engaged along with the poet in being interrupted by and re-oriented by the stars.

In “Anger,” Schneiderman uses anaphora similarly, and also differently. “Anger” does not interject the word anger into unexpected places, like in “Star Dust.” The word “anger” and the questions beginning “is anger” are the train that moves the reader through this long poem. At the beginning, Schneiderman writes, as if to dispel the same question from the reader,

I kept asking how
anger works.
No one understood

my question.
Friends thought I was joking.
Or being obtuse.
Friends would say: What

do you mean
how anger works.
Anger is anger.

Already in the first three stanzas of the poem, Schneiderman has used “anger” or “angry” five times. Like “star,” the word “anger” is a common one in the English language, part of everyday speech. It is a word we use so commonly, that we do so without questioning what it means. From the start, Schneiderman is asking the reader to do just that, to question, along with the speaker, what anger is and what it does. The repetition of the phrase “is anger” is the inquiry that drives the poem, and keeps it moving when it might otherwise stall.

Is anger like pus,
a response to a wound,
that you can drain,
or that you can heal,

or is anger like a gas
you can vent
because it is compressible
but combustible…

Similar to “Star Dust,” as “Anger” continues, Schneiderman uses anaphora to signal a sort of change or volta within the poem, by bringing in a new repeated phrase (without ceasing to use the original anaphora). In “Star Dust,” after the mother goes to the hospital for multiple miscarriages, she makes the speaker promise not to hurt himself:

and I think that’s what she meant when she made me promise
over and over again that I wouldn’t ever hurt myself, even though
I had never shown any inclination toward self-harm or suicide,
and yet, she brought it up over and over as though she knew
something I didn’t about myself…

Note that while the “star” refrain returns soon after these lines, it is absent here, and instead the phrase “over and over” is repeated, with the first introduction of the idea of self-harm, which begins to turn the poem towards its ending. A similar move happens in “Anger,” on the fifth page of the poem when Schneiderman speeds up the longer questions about anger into a short burst of questions that elide the word “anger” itself:

Can you drain it?
Can you vent it?

Can you stop it?
Can you heal it?
Can you trade it?
Can you sell it?

This changes, rhythmically, the expectation that the anaphora had created, of several lines for each question beginning “is anger…” It also signals a turn for the speaker, a faster, more frantic questioning, a sense that something is about to break or burst. And in the next stanzas, it does break, signaled with a new repeated phrase, “no one”:

And no one,
no one, no one,
no one knew
what I was asking

until finally
someone asked me
to describe what I was feeling,

and she said
you’re not talking
about anger,
you’re talking about rage…

The change in anaphora here shows the reader there is a change in the understanding of the speaker, and a change in the poem’s inquiry. We are not, suddenly, talking about “anger,” which has been so thoroughly the drumbeat of this poem. We are talking about rage.

After this brief change in anaphora, which lasts only a few lines in each poem, both return to using the original anaphora until the very end. Then, at the end of both “Star Dust” and “Anger,” there is a new repeated phrase. In “Anger,” the new anaphora begins six lines from the end:

I’m a bomb
no longer ticking,

but I was a bomb.
Hold me tight.
I was a bomb.
Hold me tight.

In “Star Dust,” the new anaphora begins eight lines before the end, and like the repetition of “star,” it has a similar relentless quality, nearly swamping the lines it appears within. This new anaphora, unlike in “Anger,” appears interspersed with the original anaphora of “star”:

I’m so sorry, star mother. I’m so sorry star corpse. Be at peace,
for now, in the star ground, as I carry forward this star life,
so star wasted on star me, the life you star wanted to make
so star badly, this star life you star wanted enough to risk death for,
and here I am with no star children of my own, waiting to star crawl
into the star earth, saying I’m sorry, so sorry, thank you
for this life, star mother, so sorry, so sorry, I just don’t want it,
so sorry, so sorry, I just want it to be over, so sorry.

The effectiveness of the final repetitions in these poems is owed to all of the previous anaphora. The expectation that there will be repetition and longing for the fulfillment of that repetition heightens the impact when a new anaphora appears. The ear (and the mind) are delighted by change, as well as by repetition itself. With a new anaphora, both of those are fulfilled. Using a novel anaphora to signal a change in the speaker or the subject sets the reader up to understand that the new anaphora at the end signals another change within the poem. The final anaphora hits like a double bass drum beat, or two fast punches, all the more effective because of all the hits that came before.

Adrie Rose lives next to an orchard in western MA and is the editor of Nine Syllables Press. Her chapbook Rupture is forthcoming with Gold Line Press in 2024. She has a micro chapbook forthcoming in 2023 with Porkbelly Press. She is a Poetry MFA student at Warren Wilson College. Her work has previously appeared in The Baltimore Review, Nimrod, The Night Heron Barks, the Ploughshares blog, and more. She was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2019, named a Highly Commended Poet for the International Gingko Prize in 2023, and won the 2023 Radar Coniston Prize. Find her on Instagram @AdrieRose_