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.
.jpg)
