As the apple songs John Berryman seems to have invented
formally while dreaming his way to a picnic on the Apple River
where in the meantime we floated a cooler of beer in a tractor tire
inner tube drunk in the same river twice before I began attempting
three six-line stanzas unconscious of the confluence of pentameter
gathered vernacular fragments in a metaphorical picnic basket.

Christopher Chambers works as an editor and a bartender, and he’s the author of two books of fiction, Delta 88 and Kind of Blue, and Inter/views, a book of poetry. He lives in Madison but has been spending a lot of time lately in Milwaukee.