"Singular" by Maxine Chernoff
A Prose Poem and Commentary
During the summer, I will be posting every other week. On the other weeks I plan to champion the work of other prose poets, along with their commentaries on their poems. Today’s post is an excerpt from an anthology I edited for MadHat Press called A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly: Commentaries from 80 Contemporary American Poets on Their Prose Poetry. A Cast-Iron Aeroplan That Can Actually Fly
In this anthology I asked 80 masters of the prose poem to choose one of their own poems and to write a commentary about the process of writing it. Not only are these prose poems and commentaries interesting in themselves, but they prove that there really is no one way to write a poem, or anything else for that matter. They also are wonderfully insightful mini essays on prose poetry, which is why the anthology has been used in classrooms. Students, and poets in general, are always interested in overhearing a conversation on how other poets compose.
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Most poets would agree that Russell Edson is the Father of the Prose Poem in America and that Gertrude Stein is the Mother, if we are speaking about about its modernist roots.
But for contemporary prose poets of my generation, especially women, Maxine Chernoff is the most important figure. She was writing prose poetry before it was cool, and her two books, A Vegetable Emergency (1976) and Utopia TV Store (1979), were the main influences for any woman prose poet born between 1949 and 1960.
If you want to discover more about her multifarious career, go to Chernoff
Her newest books are: Light and Clay: New and Selected Poems (MadHat Press, 2023) Light and Clay and Under the Music: Collected Prose Poems (MadHat Press, 2019) Under the Music
SINGULAR
“Death’s outlet song of life . . .” Whitman
“Every man should be so much an artist that he could report in conversation what had befallen him.”—Emerson
High-mindedness is a construct of mind and its metals, its iron and zinc, its blue mercury.
It is a waste to consider how we relate to the human condition—we are the human condition in cotton and lace and charms that fit in thimbles. We are broken and fixed. We are mended and torn. We are the underlining of the soft belly of kangaroos crossed with examination books. We tell jokes that aren’t funny and laugh with our eyes closed. When we open them, someone has died and another been born.
We praise Jove. We praise Allah. We praise the mark-downs at the Nordstrom Rack where a handsome young woman was weeping into her hands. We praise the immaterial essence of clouds that resemble your uncle on Wednesday. We praise the material grace of your hand on my collarbone, soft in its landing there.
We are unkind to our neighbors. We cheat on our friends. We are witnesses to the first bee in the jasmine we planted at noon. We are witnesses to the harms of a life and its slow repetitions that lead to new beauty. We travel to see peasants enact old rituals that we would find foolish in our own doorways. We are peasants as well under our skirts and children and finally fools. Who knows the height of a well-built arch or the dimensions for travel to Mars? They say if you fly there, you cannot return. There are those who will fly there. I heard them on a show discuss how they’ll grieve for irises and children and the small fond expressions of those that they love.
We all leave cathedrals and ashes and bony candles burnt to their wicks. We all leave nothing we wanted and everything we did and that of an in-between state of a small conversation involving the beauty of spires.
We are not jugglers. Planes fall and leaves too and nothing that crashes or lands without sound gets repaired. Our ankles have sight of the horizon of small endings. We look forward to more as we leave more behind.
When my mother was dying, she asked, “Will I live?” I remember the silence as she turned from our silence to make herself ready, the quiet of an afternoon in a room where light and sound were present but respectful. I remember the quiet later that day as we stood alone with her. Absent at last, she withdrew with a tact saved for endings.
Please save me from all that I know must follow. Please give me a book or a song or a look that means less.
COMMENTARY
“Singular” is a poem from Here, a 2014 collection in which I tried to find a way in the prose poem to move subject matter away from the “fabulous or fantastic toward available moments of observation and commentary.”
I wanted to write prose poems more open and nimble in movement. I hoped to construct poems of very long and short lines, allowing the terrain to change sentence to sentence, syntax as topography, and within the poem, I wanted to allow for an observant voice to range over a number of experiences, reflections and realizations: to take in the inner and the tangible world was the goal.
As the poem progresses, a series of general and particular observations create a narrative in the first person plural, a “community voice,” speaking of human agency in areas from religion to nature to friendship to love to death. The poem culminates in the narrator, reliving the death of her mother, making a plea for less meaning, a “way out” through language of what life holds. How we measure language to observe our sorrows and their passing is the culmination of the poem. To take in the moment’s complexity and provide lucidity and range is the hope of the poem.
Unlike my earlier work, the voice is not meant to entertain or to confuse. Rather, it is a field in which feeling and voice explore their limits and fields of permission.
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories
Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss
People complain that FB is a cesspool. But occasionally I come upon gems - like the review of Maxine Chernoff's poetry. I can't wait to catch up on the prose poems that I somehow missed between 1976 and now.