Maxine Chernoff (USA) 1952

Maxine Chernoff (USA)

1952 

Raised in Chicago, Maxine Chernoff was educated at the University of Illinois, where she was a University fellow. She has been Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University since 1994 and Chair of its Creative Writing Program since 1996. With her husband Paul Hoover she edits the journal New American Writing.

     Chernoff has published seven full-length collections of poetry: Utopia TV Store; New Faces of 1952, which won the PEN Poetry Award and the Carl Sandburg Award; Japan; Leap Year Day; World: Poems 1991-2001; Evolution of the Bridge: Selected Prose Poems; and Among the Names, a serial poem on the subject of gift theory. She has written two novels, American Heaven (1996) and A Boy in Winter (1999).

     She has read and discussed her work in many locations, including Cambridge, English; Sydney, Australia; Berlin, Germany; Liege, Belgium; Glasgow, Scotland; Vancouver, British Columbia; and Yunnan Province in China.

     Of her work in the prose poem, critic Michell Delville was said: “…Chernoff shares a metapoetic extravagance of the likes of Henri Michaux, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar.” Her other poems have been described as “the triumphant survival of wit and intelligence” (Jayne Anne Phillips), a poetry that “relishes the delirious possibilities of language” (Booklist).

     Chernoff also translated from the German and with Paul Hoover has completed a selection of Hölderlin’s work. 

BOOKS OF POETRY 

The Last Aurochs (Iowa City: Now Press, 1976); A Vegetable Emergency (Venice, California: Beyond Baroque Foundation, 1977); Utopia TV Store (Chicago: Yellow Press, 1979); New Faces of 1952 (Ithaca, New York: Ithaca House, 1985); Japan (Bolinas, California: Avenue B Press, 1988); Leap Year Day: New and Selected Poems (Chicago: ACP, 1991); Next Song (Saratoga, California: Instress Publications, 1998); World: Poems 1991-2001 (Cambridge, English: Salt Publications, 2001); Evolution of the Bridge: Selected Prose Poems (Cambridge: England: Salt Publications, 2004); Among the Names (Berkeley, California: Apogee Press, 2005); The Turning (Berkeley, California: Apogee Press, 2008); To Be Read in the Dark (Omnidawn, 2011); A House in the Summer (Argotist Press, 2012); Without (Shearsman, 2014); Here (Counterpath Press, 2014); Camera (Subito Press, 2017)

Click below for the poem: