Maxine Chernoff’s poems often feel like palimpsests around a given topic, image or idea & in Among the Names – her most ambitious project to date – she raises this to a higher level: 33 poems, all directly or indirectly touching on the act of giving & the social relations it enacts. There is, especially in the early poems in the sequence, great pleasure in the cascade of short lines, often shorter than a simpler phrase –
(“her snazzy
new Lexus”)
– that cumulatively feel a good deal like the work of the late Larry Eigner (tho without his own poems’ rightward drift across the page).
Chernoff at first is dazzling in the number of aspects she can raise with regard to this question or knot of interactions. Later, tho, as the book rushes to completion, I found myself irritated instead, as if, rather than opening issue up the way, say, Rachel Blau DuPlessis does the question of the unspeakable in Drafts, Chernoff is content to have her cycle, which ultimately feels claustrophobic & contained – if this book & its individual sections were only a fraction of what was/is needed if this to be a real investigation. Indeed, to yield just 53 pages of text for the 33 poems, Apogee has been most generous in its use of space, giving what is really a chapbook a major presentation – the cover is a photo of an Anselm Kiefer construction.
My dissatisfaction made me wonder if I was completely misreading this project. What if, for example, these 33 poems were in fact first drafts of texts that would ultimately come to
