Description

 

Many Hats

by Mike Schneider

“Time & space collapse in poems about hats,” writes Mike Schneider in his poem “Astrakahn,” orienting readers to the anarchic lyricism of his Many Hats. In “Astrakhan” alone, for instance, Marge of TV’s The Simpsons coexists with Francisco Goya, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Bolshevik terror and the poem’s namesake lamb’s-fur hat. As with many of these poems, each titled for a style of hat, “Astrakhan” brings widely diverse people and things together in a linguistic space bounded only by imagination.

With an epigraph from Max Ernst’s 1920 collage, “The Hat Makes the Man,” Schneider invokes the dada-esque spirit of European artists and writers a century ago. Each hat—from “Fedora” to “Tuque”—triggers a round of lexical play, touching many pages of western culture along the way. Stylistically, unlike much contemporary American poetry, these “hats” rely almost not-at-all on “confessional” narrative. The autobiographical “I” seldom speaks. “Exuberance is beauty,” declared William Blake. Drawing from pop culture, including movies, novels and cartoons, Schneider injects—as he says in “Stovepipe” —a dose of exuberance into the body of the world.

 

Early Praise

In Mike Schneider’s new collection, Many Hats, moments of sharp self-interrogation break through the surface of playful, pop-culture-saturated poems titled for a variety of different hats. Schneider is quick-witted, and his deft handling of language heightens the poems’ music. Surveying the role the titular hats play in twentieth-century cinema, he highlights the relationship between whimsy and contemplation.

—Speer Morgan, editor, The Missouri Review

 

With Mike Schneider’s brandishment of hats, I’ve taken my fine time to see how each one fits. I recommend them—an education in headwear that’s also an exercise in serious poetry-play. Original, entertaining, informative, memorable—joyfully creative, what else would we want a collection of poems to be? To Schneider and these poems, I take my hat off.

—Jeff Worley, Kentucky Poet Laureate (2019-2020)

About the Author

Mike Schneider began writing during the Vietnam War when, while serving in the US Air Force, he published an anti-war “underground” newspaper. He has practiced law, worked as a science writer, won awards for magazine writing, and written book reviews and essays on culture for several publications. For essays in the Thomas Merton Center’s New People, he received a 2003-04 Creative Artists Stipend in Arts Commentary from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Three times nominated for the Pushcart Prize, his poems appear in many literary journals, anthologies and three chapbooks. He received the 2012 Editors Award from The Florida Review and the 2016 Robert Phillips Prize from Texas Review Press. With a colleague in 2010, he founded East End Poets, a group of Pittsburgh-based writers. In September 2022, the Hungry Hill Writing Group in West Cork, Ireland awarded Schneider’s work second prize in its Poets Meet Politics 2022 International Open. His full-length collection Spring Mills (Ragged Sky) came out in 2023.