Maxine Chernoff, Under the Music: Collected Prose Poems

            What, then, are we holding when we pick up a collection of Maxine Chernoff’s achievements in the prose poem form? If not a collection of fables, or a collection of first-person lyrics without lines, or a collection of elliptical dreams—one filmless Un Chien Andalou after another—what do we have, exactly? What binds them together, except for the publisher’s stitching or glue? In the end, it is an act of affirmation with the whole, complex, contradictory heritage of the prose poem’s tradition that comes to the fore. The refusal of lineation is, like the use of lineation in more conventional poems, a signifier, directing us to a context against which the work before us can be read. And more than any other significant practitioner of the prose poem form, Maxine Chernoff embraces the whole breadth of that tradition. (Robert Archambeau, “Introduction: Embracing the Ghost”)

I am pleased to see a new volume from American poet and editor Maxine Chernoff, the collection Under the Music: Collected Prose Poems (Asheville NC: MadHat Press, 2019), and curious at the particular thread pulled from her extensive published work-to-date, her lengthy history of working within the tradition of the prose poem. In his impressive introduction to the book, poet and critic Robert Archambeau provides a rich history of the prose poem, specifically the prose poem that emerged across the American tradition—setting Chernoff’s work in a tradition that stretches from Aloysius Bertrand and Baudelaire to Russell Edson, Michael Benedikt and Rosmarie Waldrop—and how Chernoff writes her own way across the whole length and breadth of possibilities, but seems to provide little in the way of context of how these poems situate themselves across Chernoff’s own writing (and I’ve never understood the fascination with Edson in the tradition of the “American prose poem” over, say, Lydia Davis’ fictions, which are far more lyric and powerful). While I’ve been an admirer of Chernoff’s work for some time [see my review of her prior collection here], I would have been curious to understand better how her explorations through the prose poem over the years have interplayed with or even relate to other elements throughout her work. Is this something that exists in roughly half her published work? Two thirds? A quarter? Perhaps this is information that informed readers of American poetry generally, or of Chernoff’s work specifically, already know, but it does present itself here as an absence. An interview conducted by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa for Jacket magazine back in 2009 suggests that Chernoff is predominantly known for her work in the prose poem, as the interview begins:

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa: Your reputation is obviously associated not only but especially perhaps with the prose poetry genre. Is your process for writing prose poems very different from the process you follow when writing other poems? Could you comment on both? And as someone who also has published fiction, about the differences between writing poetry and fiction you would like to say…

Maxine Chernoff: When I began as a writer in 1972 (age 20), it was a rich time of prose poetry in other countries, and I was strongly drawn to the Latin-American fabulists and postmoderns such as Marquez, Cortazar and Lispector, as well as the earlier French practitioners including Cendrars, Jacob, and Ponge. The only American prose poems that existed (or that I knew of) were those by Robert Bly, which felt mawkish to me, and those by Russell Edson, which I enjoyed very much. Of course there was Gertrude Stein, but I hadn’t discovered her yet. I began writing prose poems based on this reading, and my method, as far as I can remember, was to have a concept (a head in a garden, naked Benjamin Franklin, a fan made of moustaches) and then write the poem in a rush. One might say that the “topic,” as arbitrary as it was, made me inspired to produce it. This was my early practice.

When I more or less left poetry for fiction about ten years later, I continued a similar practice of finding a line of conversation or a concept that would launch me into a story that would come out quickly and then get revised in close proximity to being written. It took me awhile to leave the prose poem, though. I was full of dread about assigning characters actual names and giving them a more concrete and “human” existence than my “shadow-puppets” had in my prose poems. In some way it felt audacious to me to make people up to the degree that fiction required.

When I came back to poetry after about a decade writing only fiction, stories and novels, I was no longer interested in the prose poem. I wanted to explore sound and line and a lot of the aspects of poetry that I had left unexamined earlier. So my method right after writing fiction became one of using sonic connections as can be seen in my book Japan, which was a radical departure from my earlier work. In the book preceding that, New Faces of 1952, I had collected prose poems that had been unpublished when I had started to write fiction as well as poems in lines that were far less interested in narration and much more attentive to wordplay and sound than my previous poems.

I also began to write whole series or books in the case of Among the Names of related poems.

In everything I’ve written, compression is a method. I’m not a big or messy writer. Nor am I a minimalist because my eagerness won’t let me hold back as much as I might.

As well, there doesn’t seem to be an editor listed in the collection, which suggest that Chernoff herself made the selection. While I have no issue with that in the least, I would have liked to hear her thoughts on the process of selecting such a particular structural thread from her four-plus decades of published work. What did that process entail, or even reveal? The selection process also opens a series of questions: is this a complete prose poems, or only a ‘selected’ in terms of collected prose poems; is every prose poem she published in book form included in this volume? Were there pieces that straddled the line between prose poem and something other, that were considered but, in the end, not included?

If this is in a book as most things turn out to be, the woman will have read it twice: once when she was young herself, a reader whose eyes grew teary for Mrs. Ramsey and all the love in the world that gathers in unmapped corners where someone comes to stand for no good reason, and then again when she is older and knows the pleasure of overhearing in her own voice things she might have said to calm herself and soothe a boy. (“A House in Summer”)

The poems from the volume are pulled from her books The Last Aurochs (Iowa City: Now! Press, 1976), A Vegetable Emergency (Venice CA: Beyond Baroque Foundation, 1977), Utopia TV Store (Chicago: The Yellow Press, 1979), New Faces of 1952 (Chicago: Another Chicago Press, 1991), World: Poems 1991-2001 (Cambridge England: Salt Editions, 2001), The Turning (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2007), Here (Denver CO: Counterpath Press, 2014) [see my review of such here] and Camera (Boulder CO: Subito Press, 2016), and provide a wealth of some two hundred pages of Chernoff’s work across forty-odd years. What is interesting, also, are the shifts that emerge through Chernoff’s short narratives, from the more lush end of the lyric to the short short story, the music of her prose poems existing at a variety of points between those two poles, and even, occasionally, beyond their scope. I would think this, for any readers unfamiliar with Chernoff’s work, a lovely place to begin, and a fascinating focus on her prose poem work. One would hope, also, this might be a jumping-off point for further critical exploration on what she’s been doing, and doing with verve and purpose for years. Where are you, critics?

Stereopticon

She examines the tiny globe, world underwater, and writes slowly, “Answerig this letter means I am lost, love.” Dark boughs of a tree hit the side window. She imagines a rustling in all of nature, wind swarming the trellised gate where he stood among the almond trees blossoming. He had shown her the picture of the snake-headed woman with delicate, smooth arms. He collected amber bottles from the market that summer; poison vials, he called them. He had never hoped. If bees sent him solace, if love were a cure. She found comfort in a blue door frame surrounded by the dark, ancient ivy of novels. Soon it would be winter, the harbor frozen, fish like embers under ice. Ultimate cures, a slogan on the pier, a trick of summer when amber shone in a wondow to decorate an hour.