Contributions by Maxine Chernoff
Maxine Chernoff 's first prose poems were influenced by Julio Cortázar and Clarice Lispector. She continues to be a fan of Latin American literature. She is chair of Creative Writing at SFSU, editor of New American Writing and the 2009 PEN USA Translation Award winner with Paul Hoover for the Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin. The author of 14 books of poems, most recently To Be Read in the Dark (Omnidawn 2011) and Without (Shearsman 2012); her next book, Here, from which this poem is taken, will be published by Counterpath Press is 2014. She is a 2013 NEA Fellow in poetry and a recent Visiting International Scholar at Exeter University in Devon, England.
Maxine Chernoff
Published on
June
14th
of
2013
by
Maxine Chernoff and Valeria Meiller
in Poetry.
For every appetite there is a world.
—Bachelard
You starred in the movie with Maud Gonne and Socrates and Juliet and a flock of sparrows that were a fixed point like the spire of a cathedral but made of feathers. You were naked and clothed and wearing nothing visible except when you sat or stood or began to speak, and then the words were made of black yarn and your fingers held them as in an outline of reverie. You were there and not there and when I partially held you, the idea of you faded into a hint of light tinged by a window in the westernmost sky. And under the window, your face was not intimate as those of persons one loves but vaguer and therefore more intimate in its shadowed complexity. If water … Read More »
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