Salt Modern Poets
2 total works
"World", Maxine Chernoff's first full-length collection of poetry in ten years, explores the borders of personal and group experience, public and private language. From brief riffs on jazz to prose poem dialogues to long sequences about Emerson's essays and the problematic relationship of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe ("World"), she examines the range of poetic possibility in "linguistic cuts and connections" that surprise the mind and ear.
Like her more recent previous collections, "New Faces of 1952", "Japan", and "Leap Year Day", "World" is written in a mixture of styles and tones from the sonic, terse lyrics of the sequence "World" and the ten poems based on Emerson's essays to the vernacular of the prose poems, which are lively, dialogue-based explorations of relationships.
Part One of "World" consists of individual poems that examine the relation of language to reality at the seams of representation. From collisions of the language of the personal and public in such poems as "Todorov at Ellis Island," "Politics," "Transactional" and "Next Song" to poems like "Nature Morte" and "The North Sea" that interrogate the relation of the world as object to the world as subject, Chernoff is interested in the meaning of the poetic act and its repercussions. Nothing is solid or sealed in these poems but rather in flux, nervous movement between the certainty of intention and the imperfection of words.
Part Two, "World," is a poem in twenty-one movements, an "account" of the relationship between Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stielitz in all of its complex loyalties. "How can I be jealous of a place?" the aged Stieglitz asks his reluctant partner and muse. How her own art and the New Mexico landscape vied for her affections is the story of their pained love. The poems, fragmented and abstract, explore the landscape of their long relationship.
Part Three appropriates the language of some of Emerson's famous essays to discuss the American thinker in essential, stripped-down poems.
Part Four of "World" consists of prose poems, many of them dialogues reminiscent of short Pinteresque plays. The tension and illogic of human desires are examined in confrontations between two unnamed speakers, often a man and woman. These stark and comic prose poems are the latest of Chernoff's work in this genre, which she has been exploring for nearly thirty years.
A strong and varied collection, World is certain to please new readers and reassure those familiar with her work of her consistent project.
Evolution of the Bridge: Selected Prose Poems collects work from Maxine Chernoff's previous volumes written over the past thirty years. It features such classics as "The Last Aurochs," "A Vegetable Emergency," "Utopia TV Store," "New Faces of 1952" and provides the reader with ample evidence that Maxine Chernoff continues to be one of the most significant practitioners of the prose poem in America today.
As Michael Benedikt, editor of The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, said of her work, "Underlying all of Maxine Chernoff's prose poems is the possibility of magic." Writing in the fabulist mode, she explores the bizarre in everyday life and questions the very rules of engagement with language, social norms, and politics. The reader is jolted out of his complacency by the lens of her writing. "If the world could look through Maxine's eyes for even five minutes every day, there would be no need whatsoever for the pompous self-righteousness that currently spoils the polis. Her views of human life are wise and corrective tales that cure by correcting perspective" (Andrei Codrescu).
Her abiding interest in the prose poem has led to a collection that not only shows what she has done to revitalize the form but also where it may go from here. Witness the new prose poems in the section collected from World: Poems 1991-2001. As Rachel Loden notes, "The absurdist playlets-cum-vaudeville skits are some of the best fun ever vouchsafed to a poetry book. Each of these routines is a valiant attempt to limn the shape of human logic, a project that turns out to be both daunting and curiously satisfying.... What's left is the spine of language and the rippled furrows of the human brain. And perhaps Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont at war in a sort of paradise. " Ethan Paquin, referring to the same dialogue-based prose poems states that "these comedic scenes are remarkable for their transcendence of comedy. It is as if the speakers were engaged in the world's final debate. The only question is `Which world?'"