By Yongbo Ma

I translated contemporary American poetry into Chinese in the 1990s; and Maxine Chernoff’s poems were included in the book American Poetry Since 1970: Up Late (its Chinese translation was published in 2000). I e-corresponded with Chernoff last year and translated some of her new poems. The following interview is part of my series of interviews with twenty-forty American poets, which will be published in Chinese in 2025.

Maxine Chernoff is the author of nineteen books of poetry and six works of fiction. Winner of the NEA in poetry and a PEN Translators’ Award, she was a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome. Former editor of New American Writing and former chair of Creative Writing at SFSU, she lives in Mill Valley, CA.

Ma Yongbo: Please talk about the main stages of your poetry’s development and the poetic philosophies associated with each stage. Provide specific examples from your poems.

Maxine Chernoff: I began writing in high school and none of those poems exist anymore. My earliest poems were influenced by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. When I had read more of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams, and Robert Bly’s Leaping Poetry, I saw my first prose poems and was very attracted to that form. They inspired me to make more room for imagistic expansion and tonal play. I read the American prose poem writers first and then found great examples in James Tate, Russell Edson, Clarice Lispector, Julio Cortázar, Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, Max Jacob, Blaise Cendrars, and many others. There weren’t many women writing in the form in the 70s, when I began my career. Other times, I wanted to narrow my field and wrote terse collections like Without, sound poems like Japan, and researched poems as in Among the Names and some poems in The Turning.

Other than the fact that the prose poem as a hybrid form is flexible and can allow for the expansion of image over the worry about the tighter rein that verse poetry requires, I haven’t much to say. It was a natural expansion for me, playing to my strength with image, elaboration, and the visual. My terse sound poems were the opposite. But the prose poem is what allowed me to grow and imagine many approaches to it: early poems were narrative à la Edson and Tate; and later poems became more complex and lengthy, more abstract and associational, especially in “Here,” 2014.

It also allowed me to write “mini-plays”-as-prose poems and explore setting/atmosphere. One might say my prose poems are about creating atmosphere.

Ma: How has feminine consciousness influenced your poetry? What are your views on feminism, on Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop?

Chernoff: One can’t help but write from the perspective of one’s gender. I have a poem called “Breasts” and I have many poems about having children, lost children, multiples of children (I had twins), and many love poems in Here, a later collection. Regarding feminism, I am a feminist. The recent ban on abortion in twenty-four U. S. States has prompted many political writings from me as well.

I enjoy Moore and Bishop’s writing: particular poems of theirs. They were two of the too few women poets prominent in the 1950s, the sexism of the time ensuring men’s greater power, prominence, etc. Bishop is smart and careful and has a few poems I love. She was a terrible alcoholic and had a terrible life. Moore was more playful, I think, and strange.

Ma: Which school of postmodernism do you belong to? What do you think is the constructive significance of postmodernism?

Chernoff: Postmodernism frees the poets from the limits of the self and sentimentality and allows for possibly fresh orientations to making a poem. The books of mine that seem the most postmodern to me are my sound poems in Japan, where sounds are the primary principles of joining language and in my researched poems, which tackle war, philosophy, relationships, etc. I’ve written a prose poem-as-play regarding Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt’s romance, with an aspect of Japanese puppet drama also included. I also have a very fragmented poem about the relationship of painter Georgia O’Keeffe and her photographer husband, Steiglitz. In both cases, I use their actual letters and Arendt’s poems.

Ma: Daily life has a seeming duality, an absurdity and, simultaneously—from the perspective of faith and eternity—a sacredness. How do you perceive and depict this in your poetry?

Chernoff: The sacred and profane are always present, sometimes at odds, in American culture. If a poem is simply beautiful, that may work, as might its profane nature or absurdity, which are both needed at varying times to depict both the beauty and strangeness of life. There is a prose poem in Here—a book of mostly love poems—that’s filled with imagery, some surrealistic, and the sacred and profane.

Ma: Uncertainty is a common feature among many poets, like John Ashbery. And your poetry suggests a tendency to seek meaning in uncertainty. How do you perceive this aspect?

Chernoff: Meaning is fluid. There are very few fixed ideas except perhaps in ethics and religion. So a poem can explore uncertainty and sometimes find linguistic certainty in an entirely new construction or choice of images. Two poems that come to mind for me in this respect are Robert Duncan’s “Often I’m Admitted to Return to a Meadow” or “My Mother Would be a Falconress.” They are on traditional subjects of place and relation but he shakes the form up; and the outcome is both beauty and fierceness. Ashbery is marvelous in trusting the reader to be as intuitive and as smart as the writer. No apologies.

Ma: Please elucidate how language is both commitment and betrayal, revelation and concealment. How do you handle the ambivalence found in language? I consider figures like Rimbaud as a starting point of this seeming duality.

Chernoff: Of course everything can and can’t be expressed no matter how we try; and therein is the tension. As hard as we try, some states of mind and presentation elude us and others communicate easily. Language is slippery, of course, and is used by everyone, including villains. But a poem’s commitment in language and to language is different from, say, a contract: one can be as opaque as one wishes or as clear; and sometimes it is the ambivalence that’s felt most strongly. Saying and meaning are two different animals.

Ma: Many contemporary Chinese female poets are influenced by American Confessionalism (e.g., Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton). What are your thoughts on Confessionalism, and are there elements of it in your poetry?

Chernoff: I am one of the least confessional poets, though I am fond of some Plath and a little Sexton. I don’t think my private life is all that interesting or a proper field for my poems. I am more interested in paying attention to the world than paying attention to myself. The world needs me more. And my life isn’t a linguistic show. But we must acknowledge how slowly women were seen as acceptable and among our best poets. This has changed greatly since I was a young writer. And female poets today, some of my students among them, hugely concentrate on women’s experiences but not through the tragic lens of Plath and Sexton. They talk more academically about embodiment, trauma, female roles, etc.

Ma: I can sense the influence of Surrealism on your poetry. Would you talk about this influence and your own creative transformation in your poetry?

Chernoff: I was never a formal Surrealist though, not even an American Surrealist, like Franklin and Penelope Rosemont. When I switched mainly to prose poems, my poems became more imagistic. Writing thus, I became interested in Surrealism as a technique toward wildness and expansiveness.