Hambone is a small literary magazine that has published major poets. It is edited by poet Nathaniel Mackey

Nathaniel Mackey

Nathaniel Mackey is an American poet, novelist, anthologist, literary critic, editor and Professor of Literature at UC Santa Cruz. Mackey is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. Mackey is currently teaching a poetry workshop at Duke University....

.

Writing in The Nation

The Nation

The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...

magazine, John Palattella described Hambone as "an indispensable little magazine that for more than a quarter-century has featured work by everyone from Sun Ra

Sun Ra

Sun Ra was a prolific jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, poet and philosopher known for his "cosmic philosophy," musical compositions and performances. He was born in Birmingham, Alabama...

, Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan (poet)

Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...

, and Beverly Dahlen

Beverly Dahlen

Beverly Dahlen is an American poet who lives and works in San Francisco, CA.-Life and work:A native of Portland, Oregon where she attended public schools, Dahlen moved with her family to Eureka, California after World War II. In 1956, she resettled in San Francisco where she has lived for many years...

 to Edward Kamau Brathwaite

Edward Kamau Brathwaite

Edward Kamau Brathwaite is widely considered one of the major voices in the Caribbean literary canon. A professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, Brathwaite is the 2006 International Winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize, for his volume of poetry, Born to Slow Horses.Brathwaite...

 and Susan Howe

Susan Howe

Susan Howe is a American poet, scholar, essayist and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among others poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre...

."

The magazine's first issue was published in the spring of 1974 under another name as a group effort by the Committee on Black Performing Arts at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

. It was dormant for several years before Mackey renamed it Hambone and revived it as a significantly different journal. The second issue appeared in the fall of 1982, with Mackey as sole editor and publisher. Since then it has appeared irregularly, a bit less than one issue per year.

Although the Fall 1982 issue of the magazine was the first with the Hambone name, Mackey called it Hambone 2. It included work by Sun Ra, fiction by Clarence Major

Clarence Major

- Biography :Clarence Major is a poet, painter and novelist who was born in Atlanta, Georgia and grew up in Chicago. In his early twenties he started publishing his own literary magazine, Coercion Review, which featured poets and writers such as Henry Miller, Kenneth Patchen and Lawrence...

, Wilson Harris

Wilson Harris

Sir Theodore Wilson Harris is a Guyanese writer. He initially wrote poetry, but has since become a well-known novelist and essayist. His writing style is often said to be abstract and densely metaphorical, and his subject matter wide-ranging.Wilson Harris was born in New Amsterdam in what was then...

 and poems by Robert Duncan, Beverly Dahlen, Jay Wright

Jay Wright (poet)

Jay Wright is an African-American poet, playwright, and essayist. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he currently lives in Bradford, Vermont. Although his work is not as widely known as other American poets of his generation, it has received considerable critical acclaim...

, and Kamau Brathwaite.

In a 1991 interview, Mackey said, "Whether it will go on my whole life? I'm pretty sure that it won't. I don't know how much longer it will go on." The magazine was still in existence, however, with the publication of Hambone 19 on November 15, 2009.

External links

• Hambone at the Chimurenga Library