“Voxel”: Eight Questions for Jason Schneiderman
Teenagers scroll on social media for hours. I myself realize how much I spent time on my phone staring at the screen for hours, looking for something interesting, silly, or funny to fill that void of boredom. High schoolers like myself spend so much time online, while we could be learning new knowledge through books, stories, and poems. I found a poem, “Voxel” by Jason Schneiderman, that combined both my interest about the “doom of scrolling on Tik Tok” and a new, helpful way to spend my time. “Voxel” presents an interesting, humorous, and positive take on how new technologies are being implemented into our lives.
Jason A. Schneiderman was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1976. Since then he became the author of five collections of poetry books such as: Hold Me Tight (2020), Primary Source (2016), Sublimation Point (2004), Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (2024), and Striking Surface (2010). His poems have been published in Poetry London and Tin House among others, and he has won the Richard Snyder Prize, the Benjamin Saltzman Prize, the Emily Dickinson Award. Schneiderman is happily married to husband Michael Broder, and he currently works as a professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan College, CUNY. He finished a busy 2025 with the publication of Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture.
While researching more about you, I noticed that you spent a lot of your childhood in England. How has your experience living in England impacted your writing?
I’ve often asked myself this question. Moving to California from England as a six year old was very disorienting. I had to ask my mother what things cost in pounds so that I would know what the prices really were. When I lived in England I learned about all the inventors of the Industrial Revolution as Brits. Then in California, I was taught that all the inventors were Americans. The first time the inventor switched, I thought that the teacher was mistaken, but then I realized what was happening. It gave me an odd sense of perspective, and an awareness of what I suppose we now call information bubbles. I had a strong English accent, and I was cast in the school play about the American Revolution as Paul Revere, and after I got to the stage on my hobby horse shouting “The British are coming!” the audience was in hysterics. I knew I’d done something funny, but I didn’t know what, and I didn’t find out until my father told the story when I was in college! I think it was the first time that just being myself meant being seen a way that I simply couldn’t understand. So I feel like it made me both very self-aware and absolutely clueless in an odd combination that I think shows up in my work.
I do think that English accents tend to have a sharper distinction between louder and softer syllables, and I suspect that shaped my sense of rhythm.
In your poem “Voxel,” you used a reference to a character such as “Donkey Kong” toward the end of line 52. I gave it some thought about how it could be a metaphor for simplicity, or to better connect with the audience by implementing a playful reference. Can you offer me the true theory, idea or tone you were going for with that specific reference in your poem?
I’d be glad to! It’s mostly a playful reference, but it’s also literal. In the 1980s, video games had huge square pixels that you could see quite clearly. The images were like mosaics made out of big, bright, light-up squares. Over the course of my life, I’ve watched those pixels get smaller and smaller, until the squares shrank, to the point where now you can’t see the pixels. Some time in the last few years, Apple introduced the “retina display” in which the pixels are so small that they are no longer detectable to the human eye. Marshal McLuhan understood all technology as an extension of the human body, and I think he’s correct: pixels work because they mimic what happens in our body, as the rods and the cones in our eyes register light. I love that the now ancient arcade versions of Donkey Kong had huge pixels that were these giant squares of color, so when I called that version “blocky”—I meant that you could clearly see the blocks. I’ve gotten to see those pixels get smaller and smaller until this point, when I literally can’t see them anymore.
Toward the beginning of the poem “Voxel” you used another reference to Ancient Greece such as “Plato” and “his Republic” in lines 9 and 10. Though the idea of such allusion may have many interpretations, I would like to know if this was an allusion to Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” and if not what were you trying to emphasize by this?
It is a reference to the Republic, but not a reference to the Allegory of the Cave. I was referring to the passage in which Plato objects to artists because learning how to paint a bed is not learning how to make a bed. He objects to artists making the appearance of things that they can’t actually bring into the world. But with 3-D printing, is there still a difference between representing and making? Painting a bed on a flat canvas creates a bed you can’t sleep in, but what about sculpting a bed through 3-D printing? Are we still only making surfaces, or did we start making the real thing. If I buy a 3-D printed vase, I’m not sure Plato’s distinction can hold.
In the last 6 lines of your poem “Voxel” featured in Best American Poetry I noticed you used a lot of repetition such as “my neurons, my face, my planet.” Unfortunately I could not quite understand the full importance of such repetition. Would you mind taking me through on how and why did you reach the decision to include this literary device in your poem?
This is an ongoing question I have about materiality, that kind of started in a High School Physics class where my teacher was teaching us about magnetic fields and I kept insisting that they weren’t real—not in the sense that they don’t exist, but in the sense that they aren’t made of matter. Most people use the word “materialist” in the philosophical sense to mean that they don’t believe in the supernatural; they don’t believe in miracles, or magic, or an afterlife, or a benevolent universe. I didn’t have the language then to insist that they weren’t material, so of course my teacher wasn’t wrong when he was like Jason, magnetic fields are REAL. In thinking about what can be printed, I was trying to include the material and the immaterial, the representable and the unrepresentable, at scales both interstellar and subatomic.
I took notice that you had undergone your residence with Katheryn Maris. Would you say that Katheryn Maris was a major influence in your poetry during your residency years, and are there other artists or people that influenced/inspired you to write, or in some other way?
Thank you for bringing Kathryn into this interview! Kathryn is a dear friend. We met when were both at the first book stage, and we did become close during our time in Provincetown, and I’m lucky that I still get to see her on a regular basis. I think we have a similar sensibility—a wry, narrative impulse joined with an ironic, observational distance and an awareness that the tragic and the comic are often joined by a narrow seam. I love Kathryn’s work, and she’s a brilliant editor and writer. I was very lucky that in my early 20s, I met so many of today’s best poets. I was in an MFA program with Ada Limón, Gregory Pardlo, Jennifer L. Knox, Kazim Ali and many others. At Bread Loaf, I got to meet Jericho Brown, Tracy K. Smith, and Sarah Manguso. At Provincetown I got to meet Kathryn Maris. I think that a lot of the friendships and connections are now formed online, and I’m a little nostalgic for the days when those connections happened more commonly in programs and conferences and residencies.
There are many new social media apps that were created throughout the years like: Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. Would you say that your poetry benefited or was harmed by the rise of these social media industries?
I don’t think that social media has really changed the way I write, though it has definitely changed the way that poetry circulates and how readers find my work (and me!). A wonderful account on Instagram called @poetryisnotaluxury featured an elegy for my mother that was published in my second book in 2010. My second book received very little attention, and I was sad that those elegies had been a bit forgotten, but then thousands of readers found that poem through the Instagram account, and now my elegy circulates on Mother’s Day as a bit of an alternative for those of us who miss our mothers, and feel acute grief on the day when everyone else is sharing hearts and flowers. I’ve largely checked out of social media—I’ve given up on X and Facebook, and I won’t learn tik tok or snapchat, so I’m really only on Instagram. Which too shall pass.
I have read one of your other poems “Anger” and since then it has become one of my favorites. In your poem the tone starts out as curious and confused, however, at the end it’s more peaceful and placid, yet the end lines include, “I’m further from rage. I’m a bomb no longer ticking.” Can you provide me with some insight if the narrator in the poem still feels the anger and rage but learned to deal with it, or if by the end of the poem the narrator is fully free of the feeling of rage?
It’s a good question, and I think the answer is “both.” To some extent, a new understanding of what had happened released a lot of that rage, but also, the residue of those negative emotions has never really dissipated entirely. It’s a bit like the volume has been turned down, and while the revelation allowed the speaker to drop the volume on his rage from an 11 to a 5, the volume has been turning down from a 5 slowly, slowly, slowly. Now it’s around a 2, I’d say. Audible, but background noise you can talk over, not something you’d have to scream over anymore.