A Best of

The First Nine Years

© 2009 Rebecca Wol!. All rights reserved

Detail of watercolor drawing by Elliott GreenCover design by Rebecca Wol!

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA Best of Fence Volume I/ Edited by Rebecca Wol!. —1st ed.Library of Congress Control Number: 2009902549isbn 1-934200-06-9isbn 13: 978-1-934200-06-3

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Distributed by University Press of New England (upne.com)

All works are reprinted by permission of the authors.

No part of this book may be reprinted without written permission of the publisher. Please direct inquiries to:

Fence BooksPermissionsScience Library 320University at Albany1400 Washington AvenueAlbany, NY 12222fence.fencebooks@gmail.com

Fence Books are published in a"liation with the New York State Writers Institute and the University at Albany and with help from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endow-ment for the Arts.

Fence, or the Happy Return of the Modernist Alligator 15

Introduction: Weird Is An Emotion 21 Fence Manifesto of 1997 25

Distinguishing Areas: One Experience Editing Fence 29

“I Can Control the Car But I Can’t Control the Road” 40

Nobody: A Homunculus 44 The Hummed Space Between Marooned and Migration 45 Various Readings of an Illegible Postcard 46

333-2451 Susie Asado Break-Down 47 Poison of Gold’s Fly-by-Night Signatures 49 Villanelle on Being Alone 51

[Cold black little puddle stops] 52 [Let’s see if she’ll run away] 53

Duet 56 Denigration 000

Essay: Histories III (Early Greece) 57 Essay: Who Thinking on Her Legs (Manifesto) 58

Ballad 60 The Consolation of Philosophy 62

Guest + Host = Ghost: Fence Nonfiction 1998–2004 67

Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and Thucydides on War 77

Eight Statements From: “Where Lyric Tradition Meets Language Poetry: Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry by Women” 84

Twelve Writings Toward A Poetics of Alchemy, Dread, Inconsistency, Betweenness, and California Geographical Syntax 84

Cheshire Poetics 92 Poetics Statement 100 As It Is: Toward A Poetics of the

Whole Fragment 104 Some Notes Toward A Poetics 108

Myself A Kangaroo Among the Beauties 118 Remarks 122

Afterword & Conception 126 A Call for Dissonance 131

“Pourmoreformore PoMoFunk dunk, dun paramour” or Duriel E. Harris’ Bootybone Scattergram scatty pas de quatre in one act 135

Poetic Statement 1–10 136 Construction of a Black Poetic Self in

Four Narratives 139 From Jersey City (Dub Version) 142

Tu No Le Recuerdas 143 Double Agents 144

Defensive Driving 145 Jo Seraph F(iend)eign 146

Black Took Collective’s Call for Dissonance 150 Fence 1998-2007: Nonfiction, Prose, & Other—A Bibliography 152

Fence 157 Calypso Illogics 168

The Letter 170

Bees 171 Styrofoam Cup 172

from Deepstep Come Shining 173 Birth of a Masochist 181

The Red Planet 183 Alcibiades 190

Socrates 190 So Now You Know 192

Flower Day 193 The Most 193

Counter 194 Currency 195 In Time 196

Unday at Glenstal Abbey 198 Disposable Chinese Camera 24 Shots 202

Recollection 207 Deliverance 212

Miraculous Food for Once 214 Value 215

Rushing Through the House I Behold the Numinous Dark of Forks, the Light-Bearing Phenomenology of Sunrise 216 The Raving Fortune 218

Sternum 220 Macular Hole 224

She May 225 2:53 226

9:02 226 A Dream of Financial Ruin 227

from FALLTIME 229 Bad Samaritans 231

And Who is Crying 232 “The whole cast of them in

hands passing . . .” 235 In An Uncurling Game 237

Little House 240 Glassworks 241

Summer Breeze 244 Unobstructed 245

Critique of the Metaphysics of Bees 246 John Fucking Ashberry 248

Being An Oral History of My Work With and for Fence, 1998 to the Present 253

Among the Musk Ox People 266 At the End of the Famous Catalogue of the Ships 267

Comprehension Questions 269 The Annunciation 270

On Being An Editor for Fence 273

Ghosts (2) 286 The Freezer Works Hardest in the

Middle of the Night 288 from “The Nines” 289

Postcard to Horace 291 Postcard to Lucretius 292

The Box 294 Semaphore Land 295

John Singleton Copley’s Favorite 296 Note in a Bottle 299

303 Chromatica 305

St. Paul in St. Paul 307 from Involutia 308

Attempted Autobiography 312 And When 313

What’s Good? 317 from “Open Box” 328

Razor Sharp Penny Candy 335 Immigration: Rapprochement 345

Nonfiction: A Frying Pan 347 A Blackwater Tour of Upper Manhattan

(with Jimbo Blachly) 358

371 Related 373

Hazy Day in the Composition 376 Tremendous Vehicles 377 Sympathetic Magic 379

A Half-Door Near Cluny 382 Thinking I Think I Think 383

Alcoholism 386 Stadia After All 387

Two Shops Dealing in Tie-Dyed Fabrics 388 The Bedouin Ark 391

What’s American About American Subject Matter? 398

Two Words Two 401

She-Devil 402 Black Horses in White Envelopes 403

from “Ghosts” 407 Book of Love 412

My Relationship with Jesus 414 Three Songs About Snow 414

Viarme 416 1000 Ghost Stories About My Grandfather 416

The Props 417 Rhapsody 419

Masters of the Cante Jondo 421 Excerpts from a Long

Interview with D. A. Powell 426 Friend 431

Bird 432 The Government of Heaven 433 The Blaze of the Poui: An Epithalamion 439

Shocking Me With Only Ease 444 Snow Angel 445

4 Quotes 446 Charter 448

The Azalea Bowmen 449 No Word No Sign 450

Seeing As 452 The Lilting Heavy 456 Floating Gardenia 458

With Hidden Noise 459 Memoir Distrait 461

The Deep End 462

Norths 463 The Breaks 465 Wakes, Possibly Leaves 466

Fear 467 How to Make Your Daughter an American (Again) 467

Framework 468 [Meanwhile the grove tree…] 470

[Nor the artist…] 470 [Then the synesthetes…] 470

Whose Monster’s Noise and Weather 471 from 100 Clews 475

The Great Loneliness 477 A Picture of Christ 478

The Right to Buy 479 Vial 479

Sexual Pressure 480 Seven 482

Document (2003) 486 Duties of an English Foreign Secretary 495

Investigation 499

As far as I know, none of the people who shaped Fence expected or hoped to start a self-conscious movement. More like the reverse: the early 1990s—especially in poetry, but in fiction too—seemed thick with schools and movements, manifestos and charismatic teachers, who mapped out the routes they encouraged young writers to follow. Some of those routes looked far too much like plans of attack: New writing, during those years, defined itself too often, and too earnestly, by divi-sions and by taken sides. Who did you represent? who did you attack? whose work, and what program, had your work “come out of”? whose work would you come out against? Were you a Post-Language Poet? a New Formalist? an Identity Writer? a Confessional? An Apostle of Craft, or a Poet of Witness? A Minimalist, or a Maximalist? A Big-Ender or a Little-Ender? The first editors of Fence knew those sides up close: All of them lived in New York, and most had come from graduate programs in writ-ing (Iowa, Columbia, NYU). Those editors (principally Rebecca Wol!, Caroline Crumpacker, Matthew Rohrer, Frances Richard, Jonathan Let-hem, and, slightly later, Max Winter) recognized (as the magazine’s title implied) that there might be fertile ground on both sides of a fence, fun to be found, and aesthetic profit to be had, in conducting a quasi-covert trade (“fence” as in “fenced goods”), despite the embargos that kept older writers apart. Fence wanted to see new writing that felt new, and Fence knew that such writing would more likely arise the less we felt restrained by inherited rules; would more likely arise the more we felt able, not to shrug o!, but to combine, to play o! against one another (as a fence might “play” rival buyers, or rival sellers) supposedly incompatible aes-thetic goals. Like any set of intelligent readers, the editors favored some

kinds of work, some e!ects, some tones over others, and you could see which ones (that is, you could say something about the editors’ tastes) by seeing, even after the first issue, what work—especially what work by not-very-famous writers—they chose. In not becoming a movement, Fence became, as very few literary jour-nals become, a moment. The late-comers’ interests in hearing all “sides,” the supposedly immature refusal to choose among competing rules of thumb, the “fence-sitting/ Raised to the level of an aesthetic ideal” (John Ashbery), the eclecticism as a goal, the defiance of anything that looked like a set of rules, turned out to be, not quite a new set of rules, but a description of where the arts that used words seemed, to the builders of Fence, to be headed—and, ten years on, of where those arts have been. Fence was expansive, inclusive, eclectic by temperament and by con-scious declaration, happy (like Ashbery) to let everything in; careless of hierarchy; unafraid of frivolity; attracted (like Ashbery) to surface dif-ficulty, to unresolved dissonance, fragments, and loose threads. Fence preferred questions to answers—Fence liked questions so much that it even liked questionnaires: witness the reprinting of Wallace Stevens’ “Response to Twentieth Century Verse Questionnaire,” the contributors’ notes that answered the question “What are you reading?,” and the sym-posia (live and then on paper) on such questions as “What Makes Ameri-can Poetry American?,” later satirized in a poem itself published in Fence. The magazine later played host to manifestos (note, especially, the Black Took Collective), but the manifestos—manifesti? manifests?—themselves defended ambiguity, open-endedness, puzzlingness, ambitious attempts to become and remain multiple, on the part of the artist and on the part of the art. That attraction to open-endedness, to pieces of puzzles (but not to the puzzles as wholes), extended to the wide, even comically overstretched, range of reference within the stories and poems. Fence works referred to many, many things, sometimes without explaining any of them: a nine-

teenth-century painter who died in a Vermont insane asylum, “maxillo-facial kisses” that somehow presaged “total emasculation,” old-time radio (“Don’t touch that dial”), a never-built “ocean front temple substantially resembling the Pan Am terminal at Kennedy,” the decadent Roman emperor Heliogabalus, Gertrude Stein’s non-character “Susie Asado,” Robert Coles’ work on the moral lives of children, Ashbery himself, the Beach Boys, the Pretenders, and some purely figurative personages who might feel at home in the verse of Wallace Stevens, e.g. “in the case of Miss. Fleur vs. The State.” All those references come from the last half of the same issue (Volume 2, Number 1); Miss Fleur joins us courtesy of a poem entitled “How All Things Vestigial Gained Prestige”—long titles, at once winsome and ungainly, became another Fence hallmark (see, here, especially, Lutz and Kocot). You weren’t supposed to know, or even to look up, all the bits of culture (high or low or middle), all the references, in the poems; rather, you were supposed to notice their range, to say to yourself (I paraphrase): “This world is more various and weirder than I had expected, and, at least in principle, a work of art can be made from any subset of its parts.” The risk in such an approach involved callow irony, a superior skim-ming over the surface of all things, and an attitude that therefore treated all things alike. The reward—which, often enough, proved worth the risk—was a space that seemed to welcome experiments in tone, in scope, in “voice,” without committing itself to one clear goal. (Fence became more “experimental” in this sense than the magazines of the self-declared avant-garde: It’s not an experiment if you already know the results.) Fine as a venue for new poems and stories (especially for those stories that would not fit well in commercial venues—too open-ended, too caustic, too weird), Fence may have had its greatest success in encouraging the cre-ation, the completion, the discussion, and the dissemination of works of art that were neither prose narrative nor yet lyric poems: “new essays” and quasi-journals in verse and prose (see, here, Rankine, Truitt, Wenderoth),

multi-page explorations of personal-but-not-merely-personal experience, organized so as to parody kinds of nonfiction, or else shot through with verifiable fact. Fashion-forward, eclectic, friendly to irony, unapologetic about the chaos in some (but only some) of its parts, a place for the young, but a place for the famous too: that clutch of descriptors fit the magazine, but it also fit the city from which the magazine came. Though it’s pub-lished from a campus in Albany now, the look and feel of the journal still reflects—as the first Fences certainly reflected—the lives of fairly young, fairly optimistic writers in New York City during (till late ’01) fairly opti-mistic years: Its melange of qualities, its di"culties and its eclectic fri-volities, its busy surfaces and its obvious ambitions, its eagerness and its hypersexuality, characterized the city at that time too. No wonder the dead writers who looked to the living writers of Fence like appropriate models were, with one exception, cityphiles themselves: Ashbery, John Berryman, the Gertrude Stein who spoke to the art-world of Paris, the Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde, the Frank O’Hara whose post-humous collection of verse received the appropriately paradoxical title Standing Still and Walking in New York. The exception was Emily Dickinson, whose influence on the pres-ent generation of writers—the ones who placed poems from their first books in Fence, the ones who “grew up” reading it (if we can say that any young writer now does grow up)—exceeds her influence on any genera-tion of writers before. You will find in Fence-ish poems, and even in some Fence-esque fiction, some characteristics straight from Dickinson: the whimsy, the oddball stanzaic construction, the tolerance of ambiguities and privacies, the sense that a clear public declarative voice is for others, but never for me. At their best these writers channel both Dickinson’s frivolity and her seriousness: literature is a kind of private game in which each move may change all the rules, but it is also a way in which we react

to the parts of life, the truths of life, that we would otherwise find our-selves unable to face, unable to say. There are dangers in trying to separate yourself from the supposed battles that slightly older, or less attentive, writers want to fight. One risk: You might seem to cast aside not just those older writers’ combat-ive rhetoric, but also their accomplishments, leaving the next generation with little to build on. That danger Fence did well to avoid: It solicited work from those older writers, and ran some of the best things that those writers did, at times alongside their own explanations as to how they did them (see here, especially, Revell, C. D. Wright, Hejinian, Lydia Davis). Litmags that are all youth, all the time, find it very hard to get atten-tion; new litmags that are all Names have no reason for being, since the Names have other places to publish good work. The trick is to combine the first with the second: Fence, more than any other new mag in its decade, did the trick. It’s important not to make, about this or any magazine, claims that no magazine’s print run could support. Considered under the aspect of eter-nity, set beside “Lycidas” or Mrs. Dalloway, most of the work in any issue of Fence—most of the work in A Best of Fence, even—might not look so good: but that has been true of almost every issue of every literary jour-nal that has ever been. The good magazines are the ones that can find some good work; the best are the ones where even the less impressive works can either entertain an alert reader, or else say something notable about the state of the language, the state of the age. When we look back (sometimes not very far back), we find that such magazines defined a moment. The moment of Fence, it may be, is not over yet. The turn of the century blessed or cursed Fence with the sincerest form of flattery: Like woodears on treetrunks, literary journals turned up in sudden clusters in Brooklyn and Manhattan, in Bu!alo and Oakland and Internetland, with one-syllable titles, sans-serif fonts, post-surrealism

in their tables of contents, declared policies of youth and eclecticism, and obvious admiration for some of Fence’s most prominent contributors (Wright, and Davis, and Dean Young, and Anne Carson). Popularity, as always, attracts ressentiment: Poets and critics committed to avant-garde programs said Fence had sold out the avant-garde on which it drew, whose tricks—like an unscrupulous TV magician—Fence had exposed for gain. Old-school defenders of High Culture As Such disdained the journal, as their forebears once disdained William Carlos Williams; at best, those defenders instead noticed (with some justice) that the range of reference for most Fence writers extended back confidently to Williams’ genera-tion, to Spring and All and Tender Buttons and a pack of firecats let loose in the 1910s, but came to a halt right there. Williams, twenty years afterwards, wrote that The Waste Land—the poem that turned Modernism into an Authority, that made collage techniques, speedy juxtapositions and unstable speakers connote not so much Brave Experiment as All-Knowing Gloom—had “wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it and our brave sallies into the unknown were turned to dust.” The springy, deciduous, gaudy, unscholarly, optimistic immediacies of the New York modernism that Williams and his allies hoped to create was, Williams had reason to fear, gone for good. It wasn’t gone; it was just sleeping, fitfully, somewhere under the Hudson River, where the metal walls of its tunnel eventually echoed with old sitcoms, indie-rock practices, twelve-tone recitals, and the stray jokes of insult comics, where the ducts got clogged with disposable cam-eras, soggy road maps and high school alumni newsletters (see Lipsyte), with the detritus of the recent past, which we had mocked but could still make into art. An optimist about literary magazines in general, a reader who enjoyed the 1990s, a sometime subscriber—and I have been all those things—might say that with Fence that modernism awoke.

Oh, I’ve learned my lesson. Inarticulation comes with a price: One sounds dumber than one even is. One must explain oneself, even at the risk of mental strain. Still, sometimes I prefer not to make the e!ort. Here is one place you’d imagine I’d really want to have my say, and for posterity, and for the record, and to set the record straight, and all the rest. And you’d be right, but I’ve chosen to do it in a way that feels right to me now—what else matters?—in that for far too long Fence has been overly identified with just me, when in fact the editing of Fence is now and has always been multipart, providential, “cacophonous” as Stackhouse says (p. 277). I am duly pleased to present a history of Fence that is sliced up and speculative. Herein, you’ll find an essay by each of the main genre editors of Fence over the first nine years, immediately followed by that editor’s selection of their favorite work from the issues that they edited. I asked the editors to record their impressions of Fence, their time with Fence and even before and after their times, if they so desired, so that this book could stand as the Edie of Fence, if you will: Each of Fence’s editors has witnessed and experienced his or her own aesthetic and practical time with the magazine. Each came to it from his or her own jumping-o! place, and saw the magazine take o! or unfold within the context of his or her own aesthetic and practical a"liations, prejudices, and ethics. Each poetry and fiction and nonfiction editor has had her own particu-lar experience of the journal, and has with her editing created her own particular piece of the pie that is the public perception of Fence, and I wanted to let each one stand as was, without any of the usual editing for redundancy or for emphasis. The emphases are, in each case, all theirs. The redundancies stand as barometer of impact. The single most important thing to understand about Fence, and

which you will hear reiterated within, is that as editors we do not seek a consensus. Instead we seek to come to a real understanding, and potential acceptance, of why another editor might sincerely and with integrity choose something that we did not from the gigantic pile of submissions. Fence is not a magazine of innovative writing,1 though often the writing that we have published and will continue to publish is informed by some of the significant developments in the art form over the past century, including Confession, Metafiction, Narratology, the New Narrative, Objectivism, Realism, Surrealism, the New York and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E schools. Fence is not a magazine of “poetics,” though many of the poets who have graced its pages are themselves engaged in discourse. Fence retains, at its root, a grounding in at least the concept of “the general reader”: There is no good reason why this reader, if he or she existed, might not apprehend the pleasure inherent in lan-guage and its narratives, given repeated exposure. Something Fence has never done: Published ourselves. With the exception of those who came onto our sta! post-publication, and one tiny entry under a nom de plume (not reprinted in this anthology but preserved forever between the covers of one of my favorite e!orts ever, the Ghost Stories feature of Volume 2, Number 2), and even though each one of our editors is a writer of singular worth, Fence has never published writing by its own editors. So this means that I’ve never, and shall never, have had the pleasure of editing any of my editors. Herein I have instead chosen to editorialize: a vastly di!erent e!ort and one that I hope will not be interpreted as pushy, or intrusive, or un-shuttupable, but rather as fond, and reactive, and interactive, if not quite attaining intertextuality. Here I have responded spontaneously and sincerely to various ideas and facts as they arise in each editor’s essay. If at times I must chime in defensively about some referenced slight, or jump at the

1. rw: see page 219 in Lynne Tillman’s essay for more about the problems of descriptors.

opportunity to clear up a misperception . . . I don’t feel that I ought to be chastised. My intention and hope with this collection is to make a record of something that was, over its first nine years, deplored, applauded, assimi-lated, and at times, misunderstood. Most of all, or most relevantly to this book, Fence, a journal of poetry, fiction, art and criticism published biannually since the spring of 1998, and independently for all of its first nine years, has gone virtually unrecorded: There has been much personal discussion, many panel talks, and many interviews on the subject of its inception, its development, and its successes and failures, but up to this point none of this has been gathered in any significant way. There have been no definitive, declarative statements made about Fence. And with this anthology we will keep it that way. In Fence’s first years, I was often asked to make statements about Fence, in the media, such as it was—you will remember this was before literary blogs, before so many venues for speculation and declaration were available to us. And make them I did, often to the chagrin of Fence’s other editors, as it was then made to seem as though we were all in agreement over whatever statement or other I might have made, however o!-the-cu!, partial, or ambivalent a statement it was (and it was). Again, Fence has never been a product of solidarity, aesthetic or otherwise, but rather of an intentional engine of dissimilarity. After several scu#es and brouhahas came and went (though they never entirely go, do they) I determined that my real mandate at that time was to keep my mouth shut and my hands busy, to continue to do what I please as an editor and publisher of literary works with a minimum of opining or explaining. This has been, in part, a function of exigency, as is appropriate for a magazine whose most integral editorial function and aim is to find and publish writing that bears the mark of the author’s singular impulse—its exigency, if you will (and I will). It has been my great delight to compile these essays and the editors’ selections from Fence’s first nine years that sandwich them. Nine years

ago—now really ten, but I prefer to avoid the tedium of the decade even to the point of inaccuracy—Fence called me out of a thirty-year span of solipsism and inaction, in which I mostly just wrote poems and cooked tasty vegetarian meals. Nothing much going on in the larger sphere, back then. My impulse to make Fence happen was strong in commensurate degree to my incoherent realization that my own poems were “weird”: I thought at the time that this might stand as a literary-critical term, and though it did not serve me well when I trotted it out in public, you will see that it still might be used, however ungainfully, to describe the writ-ing that I hold dearest, and that Fence will continue to publish for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading. Next, and for the first time in print, I include the manifesto Caroline Crumpacker, Jonathan Lethem, Frances Richard, Matthew Rohrer, and I created together in my living room, and which we included in our solicitations for our first issue: a truly collaborative and most hopeful piece of work.