Maxine Chernoff, Diary : Poems

 

Diary

You write “Diary,” and suddenly the room opens like a hinged shell. In it are the sorrows of the world. What to attend to as one lone voice? There are children to love, imposters to expose, flowers writing in the sun, too warm for September, and worse, a catalyst for fire. A man has published a photo of a dead Steller’s jay among the leaves in his yard. Another corrects him on the specifies of bird. Pedantry has a long history, but birds will outlast us all with their petulant wings and shiny, button eyes. Those with talons will fare better still with their unyielding grasp. You are not here to mend the world but to observe the pages as they burn slowly, slowly, as in a lit cathedral.

The latest poetry title by Mill Valley, California poet and editor Maxine Chernoff is Diary : Poems (Niantic CT: Quale Press, 2026), a book that follows more than twenty prior titles including Light and Clay: New and Selected Poems (Cheshire MA: MadHat Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], Under the Music: Collected Prose Poems (MadHat Press, 2019) [see my review of such here], Camera (Subito Press, 2017) [see my review of such here], Here (Counterpath Press, 2014) [see my review of such here], Without (Shearsman Books, 2012) [see my review of such here] and The Turning (Apogee Press, 2007) [see my review of such here], among others. The poems of Diary : Poems are made up of sixty-three self-contained prose poems, only one beyond a page in length (and only just), each of which share the same title, “Diary.” There is something quite fascinating, compositionally, in a series of poems all underneath the same title, a process that the late American poet Noah Eli Gordon (1975-2022) did for more than a couple of his poetry titles, including Is That the Sound of a Piano Coming from Several Houses Down? (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2018) [see my review of such here], or American poet Sawako Nakayasu, in The Ants (Los Angeles CA: Les Figues Press, 2014) [see my review of such here]. I’ve done my own smaller versions of same as well, and the process is one that quickly removes the obvious pieces one can write underneath such titles, forcing further poems to go in, often, quite unexpected places. “Inches from here,” she writes, to open a further poem mid-way through the collection, “rain’s new declension declares itself a boundary and an entrance. Shiny ants carry last leaves from one dark mound to another, sun splays over the scene as you rehearse the words you spoke before names cluttered the airwaves and songs become notions. The access to your day builds purpose and definition.”

Across her own explorations around form and content, set underneath a shared, repeated title, Chernoff composes a sequence of prose-moments, articulations of a single thought-cluster, stretched, some of which feel akin to quickly-sketched diary or journal entries, and even short monologues, as much as prose poems. These are poems of attention, not only seeking to see how far one might take an idea, but of ethics, of ethos, attempting to articulate a way one might not only write in and through the world, but to exist alongside and against such purposeful chaos. These poems are subversive, suggesting and subverting the straight narrative prose line to not only attend, to capture attention, but to provoke the reader to attend the same.

Diary

It’s hard to believe one can write a poem, paint a canvas, cultivate a garden with all the ugliness out there. Bombs torture the sky over Ukraine. Mothers and babies perish of hunger. You’d think this boiling brew of chaos and capitulation could yield no more than millions of replicas of Guernica or The Scream, an Andy Warhol torture display. You might imagine there is a reversal coming, when the poem asserts that words will heal, paintings glitter, roses bloom—but no. it is the scene at the watering hole when the herd of wildebeest meet their doom. Nowhere to hide, no tiny oases of peace except in our minds several moments a day the denial, the necessary denial.