JAFFE, MAXINE “MAGGIE” (1948-2011)
Poet and teacher Maggie Jaffe died in San Diego on March 5, 2011. She was 62 years
old.
Born Maxine Aronoff in Brooklyn, on June 21, 1948, Maggie Jaffe began writing poetry
during her teens. Her early poems were heavily influenced by Allen Ginsberg and the Beats—
though as she recounted later, “For some inexplicable reason I would only write on the subway.”
While employed by a temporary agency, Jaffe was at one point “assigned to work on Wall Street,
tallying up closing stock quotations.” As she recalled, “While seated in my cubicle, I recollected
a fragment from Ginsberg’s Howl: ‘who wept on typewriters.’ I left for lunch and never went
back for my pay.”
This departure signaled Jaffe’s growing disaffection from mainstream American culture.
After receiving her BA in Literature from Manhattan’s New School for Social Research in 1975,
she lived in Latin America, principally in Guatemala, for a number of years, where she read
deeply and widely among the great post-war Latin American poets. In addition to the
appreciation she gained for these poets’ varying styles, Jaffe also recognized that their poetry
was not a mere intellectual exercise, but something that expressed the reality of their lives. This
recognition, together with her empathetic response to individual and collective experiences of
political and social injustice, would be central to her own work as a poet, as well as to the many
classes she taught at SDSU, Cal State San Marcos, and other universities.
In 1982, Maggie moved to San Diego and began work on her MA in Literature from
SDSU, which she completed in 1984. Around this time, she began publishing poetry in many of
the leading poetry magazines and collaborated with Deborah Small, a San Diego conceptual
artist, on Against Apartheid (1984) and 1492: What Is It Like To Be Discovered? (1991). Jaffe
and Small’s mixed media works were exhibited at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art
and other West Coast galleries. Their exhibition, 1492, was displayed at numerous galleries in
the U.S. and in Europe (1991-93) as part of a traveling art installation entitled CounterColonialismo.
Following the publication in 1989 of her first book, a collection of politically charged
poems entitled The Body Politic, Maggie’s work began to appear widely in literary magazines
and anthologies. Five more poetry volumes were published, her most recent in 2010: Flic(k)s:
Poetic Interrogations of American Cinema. Two of these books, 7th Circle (1998) and The
Prisons (2001), received the San Diego Book Award for poetry. From 1998 to 2000, she served
as poetry editor for The Cedar Hill Review and as associate editor of Rattle. In 2001 she earned
her MFA in poetry from Vermont College at Norwich University. Nominated three times for the
Pushcart Prize, Maggie was also the recipient of a California Arts Council Grant in 1998 and of a
National Endowment for the Arts Grant in 2009.
Maggie saw herself as a “counter cultural” poet. Taken collectively, her poetry explored,
and responded to, a broad range of political, economic, and cultural issues addressing among
other subjects the struggles of Vietnam veterans, Native Americans, and the incarcerated. Her
work as both poet and teacher sought to illuminate injustice, yet always tempered its fierce moral
outrage with wit and eloquence.
Describing Jaffe’s latest book, Flic(k)s, Ilya Kaminsky, co-director of the SDSU MFA
creative writing program, notes, “Maggie Jaffe’s new book is a brilliant investigation into the
world of cinema and cinematic movements of our own lives. Similar to us, the actors on these
pages are humane, naked, beautiful, and pained. We learn how Maria Callas died in Paris alone:
‘Well, her maid was with her.’” Another poem from Flic(k)s depicts the moment when Bertolt
Brecht
fled Hitler’s Deutschland
for McCarthy’s Amerika
where he bombs in the Big Apple
and goes hungry in Hollywood.
Only HUAC understood his work
............................
“Americans aren’t as bad
as Nazis. At least they let you
smoke while interrogating you,”
Brecht said, smoking his fat
green Cuban.
As Professor Kaminsky writes, “The voices in this powerful book are frightening, and sad, and
sweet, all at once: their days are ours.”
Maggie is survived by her sister, Eilene Glick; her cousin, Judith Cohen, and Judith’s
husband, Gerald; nephews Kenneth and Douglas Glick; and her soulmate, Dave Rhodes. Her
family and Dave are grateful to Maggie’s caregiver, Shareen Bacon, and ask that in lieu of
flowers, memorial contributions be directed to San Diego Hospice and Institute for Palliative
Medicine, 4311 Third Ave., San Diego, CA 92103. Services will be held at a later date.