Christopher Chambers

CONTACT:
Email: christopher.chambers@wisc.edu
Website: christopherchambers.net          

BIO:
Christopher Chambers is a writer, editor, and bartender. He’s the author of Inter/views, a book of poems. His poetry has appeared over the years in Louisiana Literature, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, The Georgetown Review, Ninth Letter, Asheville Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Lit, Crazyhorse, Epoch, Florida Review, Sonora Review, The Madison Review, Mid-American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, BOMB Magazine and Hummingbird. He’s lived in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, Florida, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, and Wisconsin again. He's worked as a farmhand, a carpenter, a bartender, and a lifeguard. He's worked in a warehouse, in a slaughterhouse, and in an English Department. He's repossessed cars. He's a lapsed Catholic, an erstwhile Teamster, and he's given up tenure. These days he bartends at Working Draft Beer Company and has been spending a lot of time in Milwaukee.   

PUBLICATIONS:
inter/views, poems, and a correspondence (2021).

Poetry

An Accident is Always Happening

We all like motorcycles, to some degree.  
I know I do. I drifted west to Minneapolis 
on a secondhand Honda 750 Four 
but there’s no press conference 
the summer of 1986 when I lay it down  
in a motor oil rainbow and slide through  
the intersection of Hennepin and Lake  
roughly twenty years after Bob Dylan crashed  
his Triumph in upstate New York near Yasgur’s farm.  
I figure we’re about the same age, struggling to lift  
the mangled bike and hobble stunned to the curb, 
road rash and a hip contusion that will return 
to haunt me years later as osteoarthritis.  
The way I hear it he crashed on the back roads 
sparking rumors, the voice of his generation  
disfigured, paralyzed, quite possibly dead.  
I’ve thought about it a great deal, 
about what’s the equivalent of the motorcycle  
as an image in songwriting, or poetry. 
Where’s the line between a desire for speed 
and hurtling off into the trees? 
I want to ask the young folksinger  
what’s the meaning of the photograph  
on that record jacket of him  
wearing a Triumph t-shirt.  
I figure there’s philosophy in it,  
that it’s got to mean something 
more than liner note exercises  
or tonal breath control. 
It’s the two-wheeled, death-defying 
northern white boy blues. 
I want to ask him about Highway 61, 
those two lanes of blacktop that nearly killed me  
once in the rain outside Dubuque 
two lanes that will take you to the source, 
to Memphis, and Clarksdale, Tunica, Indianola, 
all the way to Airline Highway and New Orleans. 
An accident is always happening 
and the motorcycle’s a metaphor 
in the ballad of youth even  
if we don’t know what it means, 
all the lucky drifters now limping,  
spinning old vinyl and dreaming 
of flying down the river road  
into the dark reprise.