folio : (further) short takes on the prose poem
I’ve had a sometimes rocky love affair with the prose poem since 1974. Forty-five years working in that form is a long relationship marked by many influences, trajectories and insights.
When I first began I was a Russell Edson devotee and wrote little fables and story poems about such things as wanting to have a toothache, a broom and a shoe’s love/hate affair, Van Gogh’s ear.
After several books in this vein, I moved into longer prose , eventually stories and novels (once I got over a phobia with naming my characters.)
Ten years passed before the prose poem and I reunited in my book, New Faces of 1952 (Ithaca House). The prose poems in that book are more associational, loose, and expansive.There is less story and more balls in the air. By then I’d read and loved Cortazar, Calvino, and Lispector. The prose poems in that collection are mixed with verse poems, all characterized by fancy and chance operations.
Then again, for a long period, I abandoned the form until 2012 when I wanted to follow a book of many skinny poems with a book of very long-lined poems with long sentences. That decision brought me back to the prose poem, many of which were dream-like, sonically resonant, and among my best work, I believe. They are collected in Here (Counterpath, 2014).
Just recently, wanting to write often if not daily, I conceived of a project called “Diary,” which thus far is 30 prose poems about current subjects from war in Ukraine to tv show madness (based on my son’s experience writing on a show.)
For me the prose poem, with its highly flexible approaches and sources, has been my home that I have left but always returned to. In the early 70s when I began writing them, prose poems and writers of them were rare: now they are a commonplace in world poetry and have evolved new approaches such as the prose poem/essay used by Claudia Rankine in Citizen.
When I first began the prose poem was an outsider form—I remember applying for a poetry teaching job and being deemed ineligible because I wrote in that form, which the interviewer scorned despite its long history in Europe and some Middle Eastern countries.
Thankfully, it is a well-accepted alternative now for poets seeking fluidity, expansiveness, associational methods or fabulism or for those wanting to work in the Language-influenced New Sentence, I’m so glad that at 22 I found an opening for my notions of how to write a poem. I have followed that thread my entire life.
Diary
In your noir dream, you and your partner at the agency are working late: He wears a double-breasted suit and wide, harlequin tie. You have on a tight, woolen, dove-gray dress and pearls. You are detectives creating a new dictionary. The evidence you seek is hiding in plain sight: he finds a "c" under the wing-backed chair, and you a "p" near the window where French rain is obviously falling. Under the glistening chandelier, the lights form an s. When you find enough letters, they will curl into each other's lives like flowers troping toward the sun.
Diary
Horror and honor are virtually twins, cousins at least. Your horror of broken worlds and citizens buried alive is our honor. In horror you find the bodies: in honor we boast at our strength. Your horror of circuses or elderberry wine or squeaky floors, our honor at existing and vexing you out of your state of repose. The world calls in many voices. The haunting one of someone lost to you stands next to a lullaby, a remembered kiss, the last notes straining in Adagio for Strings. The world strains to contain the horror of silence that fills a room in Syria or Yemen or Ukraine after the bombs rain down, honoring each victory, which is a horror uncontainable by those of us wanting to live as trees do, their underground roots sending melodies unheard by the forest. The bomb-sniffing dog doesn't understand, his nose a sensing instrument, not an emotional register. To him it is a science of sorts, an honor to smell the bouquet of chemicals.
Diary
One moves on by letting go: as leaves do, as goodbyes. Two stones replace a slippery rock, two feathers, two hopes. Your worry beads are lost at the shiny water's edge., you remember that day at the lake, the little grove hidden from view, how rowers passe the lovers even as they napped, legs tangled, under the blazing sun. To the world they had disappeared. What remains of that day is some sky in a jar, loosely sealed, our memory, our forgetting.
Maxine Chernoff is the author of 17 books of poetry and six works of fiction,
one of which was a NYT Notable Book. She's the winner of a 2013 NEA in poetry
and the 2009 PEN Translation Award. In 2013 she was a visiting professor at the
University of Exeter in England. In 2016 she was a visiting writer at the
American Academy in Rome. She is a former editor with Paul Hoover of New
American Writing and a professor at SFSU. Her prose poems are collected in Under
the Music: Collected Prose Poems (MadHat Press), and her next book, Dust
and Clay: New and Selected Poems (MadHat Press) is out this fall.