John Schertzer is a poet and hybrid writer whose work moves through surreal association, linguistic systems, fractured narrative, comic logic, and the strange behavior of ordinary objects. His books include Second Nature and Bellamonia, and his poems have appeared in journals including Big Other, American Letters & Commentary, LIT, and The Cortland Review. His writing repeatedly treats language as an environment whose rules become visible through interruption, recurrence, and unexpected relation.
Second Nature
Second Nature, published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2023, is built around shifts in voice, system, object, and perception. The title carries the familiar idea of a habit learned so deeply that it begins to feel innate.
Schertzer uses that concept to examine how constructed systems can acquire the force of nature. Language, social routines, interpretive habits, and formal structures become environments people inhabit almost automatically.
Nature and system
The phrase “second nature” creates tension between inherited physical conditions and learned behavior. A system can feel natural after enough repetition, even when it began as an arrangement produced by culture or circumstance.
Schertzer’s poetry activates this tension through lists, diagrams, broken continuities, and surreal images. Each device asks the reader to discover the operative rule while the poem is already moving.
Surreal association
Surreal association allows distant objects or concepts to occupy the same sentence. The resulting relation can feel comic, unsettling, or suddenly precise.
Schertzer’s images often gain force through this collision. An ordinary object may enter a metaphysical field, while an abstract idea may acquire a physical surface. The poem develops through the pressure created between them.
Lists and invented order
Lists create the appearance of order because each item is placed inside a shared sequence. The relation among items can remain mysterious, which makes the list a useful form for experimental poetry.
Schertzer uses such structures to make classification feel provisional. A reader may search for category, chronology, hierarchy, or hidden logic while the poem keeps offering new evidence.
Diagrammatic thinking
Diagrams imply visible relation. Lines, boxes, arrows, and labels can organize information spatially. A poem influenced by diagrammatic thinking can distribute ideas across the page and make relation itself part of the subject.
This tendency suits Schertzer’s interest in systems. The reader encounters connections as something built, tested, and revised through form.
Bellamonia
Bellamonia extends Schertzer’s practice through another invented verbal environment. The title feels like a place name, a proper noun, or a linguistic construction whose meaning has to be discovered from context.
Such invented terms give the writer room to create a system from the ground up. A name can suggest geography, character, history, or atmosphere before the reader receives any explanation.
Hybrid writing
Hybrid writing gives Schertzer freedom to move among lyric, prose, list, conceptual structure, fragment, and narrative. Each mode changes the expectations placed on the sentence.
A prose block can sustain thought across length. A lyric fragment can intensify sound or image. A list can expose classification. A diagrammatic passage can make relation spatial. Their combination keeps the reader’s interpretive habits active.
Comic logic
Comedy in Schertzer’s work often emerges from systems behaving with excessive confidence. A rule may be applied too literally, an object may acquire an impossible role, or a sentence may continue along a logic that becomes increasingly strange.
The calm presentation of such moves gives them extra force. Humor becomes a way of examining how language creates order and how quickly that order can become absurd.
Unstable being
Contributor notes and recent poems associated with Schertzer continue his interest in unstable being and metaphysical pressure. Identity, objecthood, and perception feel subject to the systems used to describe them.
This gives his work a philosophical dimension grounded in formal play. The poem asks what a thing becomes when language keeps changing its relations.
Language as environment
Schertzer’s poetry gains coherence from treating language as an active environment. Words classify, connect, interrupt, and transform. Formal devices make those actions visible.
Second Nature and Bellamonia show a writer interested in the systems through which experience becomes legible. Surreal association, lists, hybrid form, comic logic, and diagrammatic thinking create poems that seem to discover their own rules while the reader discovers them too.
Readers can continue through the site’s contemporary poets collection for other writers engaging hybrid form, surreal systems, lists, conceptual structure, and experimental language.