I find the idea that we write alone laughable, even egotistical. Poetry is a palimpsest that has been endlessly rewritten—it’s a social space we share with others.
—
Jen Bervin
Two Poems by Christopher Chambers
- Elevator Repair Service by Coco Fusco
- Mary Heilmann by Ross Bleckner
- Zoë Wanamaker by Bette Gordon
- Catherine Gund-Saalfield by Kendall Thomas
- Alan Warner by Amy Hempel
- Scott Spencer by Lorrie Moore
- Cassandra Wilson by Glenn O'Brien
Interviews
- George Negroponte by Betsy Sussler
- James Siena by Shirley Kaneda
Artists on Artists
- Project Toward the Reconstruction of the Definitive Recording of Brahms’ Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor: Part I, Allegro by B.G. Firmani
- Two Poems by Christopher Chambers
- Four Poems by Glenn O'Brien
- Salt by Ken Kalfus
- Two Poems by Wanda Coleman
- Suffer the Fool by Will Christopher Baer
- Reading a Garden by Maya Lin & Tan Lin
First Proof
- A Day in Brasilia by Carlos Brillembourg
- Revenge Effect by Vernon Reid
- Shonagh Adelman by Grady T. Turner
- RoseLee Goldberg’s Performance: Live Art Since 1960 by Saul Ostrow
- Shohei Imamura’s Dr. Akagi by Lawrence Chua
- Stefan Gritsch by Marjorie Welish
- Roy Haynes’s Praise by Zoë Anglesey
- Stupid Club’s Made to Feel by Suzan Sheman
- Lhasa de Sela’s La Llorona by David Krasnow
- Peter Guralnick’s Careless Love by Jim Lewis
- Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses by David Trinidad
- Michael Ondaatje’s Handwriting by Rebecca Wolff
- David Dante Troutt’s The Monkey Suit by Rone Shavers
Editor's Choice
Discover MFA Programs in Art and Writing
Madeline Steps:Four Colors
1.
Madeline steps plum prelude,
predawn vineyard dreams,
her feet fluid fermentation.
2.
Bleached blonde beachcomber,
Madeline steps a daisy shimmer,
like grapefruit slice mirage.
3.
An opening orchid, Madeline
steps in wet cement, a lipstick
fossil for impending night.
4.
Powdered granite and sesame seeds,
pale Madeline sleeps in Aladdin’s lamp,
a wineskin of footsteps in the sand.
Liberal Arts
A constant hum in apocryphal Tuscaloosa—
I’m fixing to perchance fish sober with Ned,
the good liar’s life
unreeled, or else a felony. Firearms beckon
my short-trousered gloom. I ring a li’l belle
sweet and lo—tempting
the gods of the heroic, gin-soaked South, way
auntie bellum. I make it most all up, a true
artiste. Them others ain’t
like bored you and I, being elsewhere cozy than this
chipboard tavern witness to a goldtooth’d black man
eating lit matches for drinks.
On ragged clause the tide scuttles in, strong boys
mind & lawyer; the rolling houndstooth circus
spectates its perennial
Defeat? Amusement? Madonna studies meanwhile,
my dead white ass—prurience, boy, the U’s vested
interest in who’s rung whose.
—Christopher Chambers lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where he works as a carpenter and edits the Black Warrior Review. His fiction and poetry are forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Confrontation.
Related
The artist and documentarian on capturing the vernacular South.
Unseasonably exposed to fuchsia, / I left that Southern town / knotted to why-what / secrecy. # Like my / first time on a Ferris wheel.
On writing without moral objectives, Florida’s thunderstorms, and jobs both terrible and sublime.
Originally published in
BOMB 67,
Spring 1999
Featuring interviews with James Hyde, Mary Heilmann, Alan Warner, Scott Spencer, Catherine Gund-Saalfield, Cassandra Wilson, Revenge Effect, Elevator Repair Service, Zoe Wanamaker, and A Day in Brasilia.
