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.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Geoff Bouvier

Geoff Bouvier’s first book, Living Room, was selected by Heather McHugh as the winner of the 2005 APR/Honickman First Book Prize. His second book, Glass Harmonica, was published in 2011 by Quale Press. He received an MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 1997 and a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University in 2016. In 2009, he was the Roberta C. Holloway visiting poet at the University of California - Berkeley. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his partner, the novelist SJ Sindu, and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and Vermont College of Fine Arts.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
I don’t remember the first book I ever read, but it fundamentally changed me. The mere fact of words – lines of little scribbles that were somehow signs of meaning – shifted my basic understanding of everything.

The first book I wrote – “The Cake Who Lost Its Crumbs,” when I was three – taught me that I could sculpt those little significant meaningful scribbles. My audience was my mother and father, who were quite encouraging.

The first book I published, thirty-three years later, relined my confidence. Though Living Room found only a modest audience, it did earn me some inroads into academia, where I’ve been able to cultivate a life of the mind.

With my new book, Us From Nothing, I wanted words to again shift my basic understanding of everything. I had to try to understand who I am, why I’m here, where I came from, and where I might be headed. It took me 7 years to research and revise what became a serial epic prose poem about the most important milestones in human history.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
Psychologically, from the moment I learned to read, it was the words that got me, first and foremost. The mere fact of words. I didn’t care about stories or characters. Those words were drawing attention to themselves as words. That’s the poetry. That hooked me.

Factually, I grew up in a house full of books – my parents were both teachers and readers – but the shelf with the poetry books was the only one with cobwebs on it. I think I gravitated toward it because no one else ever touched it; the poetry books could be mine, all mine.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I’m an inveterate reviser. It takes at least a hundred versions of me to make one good line. Everything changes radically from draft to draft. It’s a long and fun process to mint a memorable phrase that sounds like it just appeared spontaneously at the tip of my tongue.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
With my new book, I knew I was writing a book – an epic poem – right from the beginning. But that’s the first time I ever did that. Usually, I’m just writing stuff down – I call it “collecting bricks” – and then eventually, I’ll turn back pages and look for bricks that might combine with other bricks, so that I might start building something. Eventually, the poem, like a wall or house, starts rising into view. Come to think of it, I built a lot of my new book that way also, even though I knew beforehand (once I’d curated the table of contents, at least) what the various parts of the epic poem were going to be.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I do love to do readings. I think any good poem should be read out loud. And recently, I’ve started projecting my poems onto screens when I read them to people, so that they can read along. Everyone seems enthusiastic about that. It makes public readings even more fun.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I deeply believe that we don’t yet understand the way the world really works – coming at the whole thing piecemeal, as we have – and every time I sit down to write I’m trying to advance my understanding. I’m always asking myself, “what does poetry need, and can I help provide that?” Implicit in that question is “what does the world need, and how can my writing help?”

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I think everyone in the world should be a writer (and a reader). Imagine that world! In the meantime, though, I think it’s a writer’s role to show others the code to empathy, beauty, truth, and understanding.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Depends on the editor! But, in the end, I’m always grateful to have someone who makes me think deeply about my work.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I like to wake up and “have a morning.” For me, “having a morning” means ascending slowly into my waking mind with a writing apparatus nearby. But I do most of my writing these days in the evenings (“writing nights”), and I start to feel irritable if I’m not able to have a morning or a writing night for more than two days in a row.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I’m an advocate of having more than one project going at a time. When one stalls, I just turn to another. Sooner or later, they all get done. And if none of my projects are calling to me, then the sparks of inspiration almost always find me during a good long walk in the woods.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I’m actually scent-sensitive, and have a very strong sense of smell. As such, I’ve worked very hard over the years to detach associative memory from my olfactory sensors. Further, my concept of “home” is shifting and modular; there is no house or place that encapsulates “home” for me. All that said, my partner – the novelist SJ Sindu – who, in the decade she’s known me, hasn’t been able to wear scented lotions or perfumes (sorry, my love!), has a natural pheromonic smell that is absolutely “home” to me. So, there’s my answer: Sindu’s smell reminds me of home.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
I was a musician first, and I think about everything musically. To me, every good poem is very much a musical composition. I’m also biophilic, and my first, deepest and most enduring love is birds, trees, grasses, flowers, rocks, rivers, lakes, oceans, mountains, insects, and wild animals.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Franz Kafka (the GOAT), John Ashbery (GOAT poet), Gilles Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus would be my desert island book), Giorgio Agamben (the person alive or dead with whom I’d most like to have dinner), Anne Carson, Lydia Davis, Eduardo Galeano, Kamau Brathwaite.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
I love traveling, and I haven’t yet been to Japan, Australia, Hawaii, Iceland, Greece…

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I’m a professor, and writing and professing (“living a life of the mind”) are my dream jobs. But if that hadn’t worked out, I’d be a professional poker player.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
To state this again in a different way… when I was so young that I found great meaning in tinker toys, I learned that there were these intricate black scribbles arranged in lines on white rectangles, and those scribbles could tell your mouth what to say, and your mouth could relay those scribbles to another person’s ear, and I thought that extraordinary transfer was the master code for everything. I started making little books when I was three or four, and I’ve never stopped.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I think Virginia Konachan’s Bel Canto is a great book. I wrote a fawning review for it. And I think Asteroid City was a great film, and I’m not even a particular fan of Wes Anderson.

19 - What are you currently working on?
What do you write about after you’ve written about everything? Immortality! It took me a while to find that next subject, but for the past month or so I’ve been on fire with my answer-call to Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode. The working title is “I’ll Never Forget.”

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Barbara Henning

Barbara Henning is the author of three novels, seven collections of poetry and four chapbooks. Her most recent books of poetry are A Day Like Today (Negative Capability Press), A Swift Passage (Quale Press), Cities and Memory (Chax Press) and a collection of object-sonnets, My Autobiography (United Artists). She is also the editor of Looking Up Harryette Mullen and The Collected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins. She lives in New York City and teaches for writers.com and Long Island University in Brooklyn, where she is Professor Emerita.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different? 
My first book was Smoking in the Twilight Bar.  I wrote these poems when I was living in Detroit in the late 70’s, early 80’s.  Lewis Warsh published the collection as a United Artist book.  A first book is important because it is first, and this book helped set me on my path of writing.  I started writing these poems because I had visions of my past as ghostly, almost as if past events were ongoing in the present. I could walk into a room and experience my past self as a shadow.  I wrote many of the poems about moments and places where that feeling was strong. Others were about the Cass Corridor in Detroit and a group of on-the-fringe friends. “The Twilight Bar” was a neon sign inside a club (Alvin’s Finer), a place where we used to hang out, dance, read poetry and commune. The sign came from another more local bar that had closed long ago.  That more local place was what I had in mind for the poems. The poems were narrative and somewhat surreal in overall effect.  When composing these poems I went back and forth between lined verse and prose poetry, ending finally with prose.

My new book is A Day Like Today (Negative Capability Press 2015).  These are lined poems and they were composed initially as journal entries in 2012, responding and arising from events in my life and world/national events.  There was a particular procedure used for researching and collaging text from The New York Times into the poems.  These two projects, my first book and my last book, are very different and yet both used events from my life, as part of the process.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I grew up in a household where I never witnessed my parents reading anything other than the local newspaper.  My father had a GED and my mother was the only one of nine to graduate from high school. But there were a few books in the house and my mother took my brother and me to the library every week; I developed a relationship with books and words. As an adolescent, I was a voracious reader of 19th century novels.  For some reason, even though as a child I read mostly fiction, I first became a poet. Maybe it was something as simple as praise by a teacher in high school. I loved the way words could evoke and transform mood, and I always loved Emily Dickinson’s quirky poems.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
I invent projects pretty quickly, but sometimes they are elaborate and last for a long time.  This last project for A DAY LIKE TODAY took three years to complete. I constantly revise and tinker and invent ways to interrupt and question my own facile thinking.

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?  
Often I begin projects in journals that culminate into a series of poems.  Sometimes there are ten poems.  Sometimes the work becomes a novel. Sometimes a collection of 100 poems (A Day Like Today). 

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? 
I love giving readings. They inspire me to write and revise. 

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
At one point in my career as a poet I was very interested in Jacque Lacan, Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva. Why was I reading them?  I felt there was some secret that they knew about life and language. Of course, I am writing to understand my life/our lives, see more clearly or less clearly or just differently. My writing is experiential and my reading is part of my experience, so ideas and categories and the language of others segue into mine.  I was very taken at another time with writing by Mikhail Bahktin; I suppose that over the years, I have become more dialogic, sometimes allowing the many voices of consciousness to speak together. Also, I’m always hoping to learn something new about myself and the world I live in, through my poetic projects. 

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be? 
Various roles.  I don’t have a “should” about this. Maybe a slogan: “Do no harm.”

Maybe another slogan: “Be wise. Be wary. Be wild.”

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)? 
I share my work with a couple of friends, but usually after the work is very close to being completed.  Is that essential?  No, but it can be helpful.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
Once when I was in an art colony for the summer, a visual artist friend, Georgia Marsh, and I made a pact. We weren’t going to worry about our careers. Instead, we were simply going to live as long as we could and keep making our art.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I have written several collections of poetry and three novels; now I am working on another novel.  It has seemed natural to go from one to the other. I like story and I like language. Sometimes the material I am gathering starts to look like story and then it becomes a novel. Other times, a poem.  In the novel Thirty Miles to Rosebud, I took earlier poems, rewrote them as prose, and then worked them into the story.  

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?  
I work whenever I have time, intermittently everyday.  Usually when I am revising a work, I am also writing a new journal to work with later.   I tend to do a lot of my writing work in the evening.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration? 
My writing only gets stalled if I don’t have enough time because I have to teach too much and my rent is too high.  There are unlimited possibilities for writing.  Someone asked me last week how I can be so productive. My answer was, I spend a lot of time alone.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home? 
The smell of cigarette smoke. I grew up with two parents smoking Pall Mall cigarettes.  That smell permeated everything.   Probably the reason I now see a pulmonologist.  Well, also the smell of Old Spice in the bathroom after my father went to work.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?   
I have been practicing yoga for about 20 some years. Over the years, I’ve also learned to also consider writing as another type of meditative practice, something I do to understand, express and create my life, and therefore, not dependent on “inspiration.”  There is a kind of clarity of vision that also comes from meditating and practicing asana.   That also influences my writing.  Everything in my environment (including nature, music, science, visual art, books) becomes part of my consciousness and thus part of my writing.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?  
It’s been quite wonderful to have communed and collaborated with so many poets and artists: Lewis Warsh has been very important in my life and work, as inspiration and a dear friend.  My visual artist friend and collaborator, Miranda Maher, the poets at St. Marks Poetry Project, the Belladonna women, my friends from POG in Tucson where I lived for four years, and so many others.  I’m very thankful for the writers on my shelf, on the sidewalk and in my address book.  It’s also great to have the internet and the minute-by-minute research possibilities.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Finish the novel I’m now writing.  Open my writerly shoulders into urdva dhanurasana.   Live into the future for as long as I can, as gracefully as possible with my lover, children, grandchildren and friends.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Maybe a musician.  I play the harmonica a little bit and I wish I could belt something out, but as of now, all I can play is “Summertime,” and even then I’m out of tune.  

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
I have a mind that’s always working.   My youthful mind needed to find a language art form so I could slow it down, figure it out and revel in the nuances between the phrases and words.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Elena Ferrante is quickly becoming one of my favorite novelists, especially her Neapolitan Series (3 books), starting with My Brilliant Friend.  The narrator tells the story of her life, growing up in Naples, with her best friend, how they try to make sense of the violent oppressive life around them, the narrator managing to slip away (somewhat) with education, while her friend becomes tangled in her childhood.  The world gets wider and wider as the narrator becomes more aware.  It’s a gripping story of a girl/woman adapting to and banging against her feminine identity and location.  

The other contemporary author who I adore is Roberto Bolano.

Films – a month ago I saw Whiplash written and directed by Damien Chazelle.  It was horrifying and beautiful. One of the other films that stays in my mind from the last few years is Melancholia by Lars von Trier.  I can still see that planet spinning toward earth. 

12 or 20 (second series) questions;