Maxine Chernoff

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Biographical note:  Maxine Chernoff is the author of five books of poetry including New Faces of 1952, which won the 1985 Carl Sandburg Award, the abcedarium Japan, and Leap Year Day: New and Selected Poems. Co-editor of the journal New American Writing and Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, she lives with poet Paul Hoover and their three children in Northern California.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857301
ISBN-10:  1876857307
ISBN-13:  9781876857301
Author:  Maxine Chernoff
Title:  World
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Nov-01
Extent:  120pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  180 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  “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.

Table of contents:
Part one
Claims for Lost Objects
Todorov at Ellis Island
The Nature of Evil
Time out of Which
A Relief Map Glows
Next Song
The North Sea
Nature Morte
Care
Beneath the Form
A Sentimental Education
Politics
Not
Transactional
Vacancy Signs the Map
Winter
Chorale
She Shows you Where to Look
So This Is How We Live
A Small Sound
Regarding Apples
Miss Cedars
Photo in LIFE
Landscape Without River
God
The Case for Day
River’s Edge
In the Timing
Part two
World
1. Magnification …
2. Skeletal (blur) nor riper …
3. An older dreamer …
4. Easily vocal …
5. And Alfred’s …
6. Sometimes anthracite …
7. If boodle and book …
8. Shyly ensconsed …
9. Dainty automation …
10. King Lear subsumer …
11. Herself (though armor) …
12. Numbers Ptecambrian …
13. Cold gone corner …
14. Remorse …
15. Until raw weather …
16. Two thousand painters …
17. Riddled tongues …
18. Bones …
19. To say it freely …
20. To preserve …
21. In bed …
Part three
Fate
Illusions
Society and Solitude
Experience
History
Self-Reliance
Compensation
Spiritual Laws
Circles
The Poet
The Over-Soul
Nature
Part four
Nomads
Beauty
Heavenly Bodies
Wearing Moe
Her Many Occupations
Guilt
Husband and Wife
An Epiphany
Killing Himself
The Method
The Sound
Wash

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Excerpt from book:  

A Relief Map Glows

Until personal identity,
wise men,
the use of metonymy
in slavery
become an encrypted
engine touched by drama.

From the captain’s window
tributes to Mapplethorpe
felt like the wedding day
of speech and recitation.

He’d been sent to find
subjects, patterns of
syntax, crystalline notes
on yellowed paper,
ancient accounts
of typographical errors.

The final movement
pointed to politics,
as in, “I feel afraid.
Hold me, Ira.”

Of the possible uses
of poetry and culture,
he could name only three;
poverty, artifice, ageing—

secret graves of the many
who could not speak but
were wakened nonetheless.

Review quote:  Maxine Chernoff’s poems can be read and relished for their brilliant comic timing, but that timing is always indivisible from her extraordinary lyrical and metaphysical gifts. World, her first full-length book of poetry since 1990’s Leap Year Day (a new and selected), shows the writer in full command of her powers, lighting out for unmapped and radiant territory.

Rachel Loden
Jacket Magazine