John Chamberlain: Black Mountain Poems 1955

In the North Gallery, CvsD is honored to announce the exhibition Black Mountain Poems 1955, featuring poetry manuscript pages by John Chamberlain.

Long before he gained fame for his crushed metal and compressed foam sculptures, John Chamberlain (1926-2011) resided at Black Mountain College, in Ashville, North Carolina, composing poetry alongside future literary luminaries Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olsen. At the time, he was only making a few sculptures, all under the spell of David Smith. To Olsen, the dominant voice in Black Mountain’s hotbed poetry scene, Chamberlain wrote the short poem “for C.O.”:

the afternoon had sun you
felt on the back of yr head leaning
forward, between halves, no
band, silent; save
the look across the green to
me. i say nerves
nervey
of me but from you i
see a kindness
that becomes you.

These little-known works have a striking formal quality, with text organized into blocks, sometimes columns, occasionally sporting alternations of lower- and upper-case letters, the typewritten manuscripts dotted with crossed out lines or hand-annotated marginalia. Collecting words, sometimes without worrying about their meaning, Chamberlain used them as a material arsenal, combining them in unexpected ways. “The greatest influence on my work and on my thinking actually came from the poets at Black Mountain College,” he once said. “I’m still making sculptures in the way that I made the poems. It’s all in the fit.”

Image: John Chamberlain, Untitled poem, 1955, typewritten manuscript page on onionskin paper, approx. 8 1/2 x 7 inches.