Many Hats

As Mike Schneider writes in his poem "Astrakahn," time & space collapse in these poems about hats, orienting readers to the anarchic lyricism of his Many Hats. 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. The poems, each titled for a style of hat, bring 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.

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)