A Best Of Fence: The First Nine Years, Volume 2
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A Best of The First Nine Years D=:C;3 (471B7=<<=<471B7=<
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© 2009 Rebecca Wolff. All rights reserved Detail of watercolor drawing by Elliott Green Cover design by Rebecca Wolff Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A Best of Fence Volume I/ Edited by Rebecca Wolff. —1st ed. Library of Congress Control Number: 2009902550 isbn 1-934200-04-2 isbn 13: 978-1-934200-04-9 Printed in Canada by Printcrafters Distributed by University Press of New England (upne.com) We are grateful to have been granted permission to reprint the following copyrighted material: “The Artist’s Voice: Hearing is Believing” copyright 2005 by Manuel Gonzales. Reprinted by arrangement of Mary Evans Inc. All other 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 Books Permissions Science Library 320 University at Albany 1400 Washington Avenue Albany, NY 12222 [email protected] Fence Books are published in affiliation 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 Endowment for the Arts.
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/0Sab]T4S\QSD]Zc[S77(4WQbW]\O\R<]\¿QbW]\ B/0:3=41=
Young and Green 21
AVSZZSg8OQYa]\ Cancer 27
9SZZg:W\Y Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose 38
8cZWOAZOdW\ The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg
at the Maidstone Club 53 /ZO\2S\W`] Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead 63
03<;/@1CA D]Zc[Sa" ³$ The Fence Years 87
;ObbVSe2S`Pg The Father Helmet 92
5O`g:cbh Her Dear Only Father’s Lone Wife’s Solitudinized,
Peaceless Son 108 8O\SC\`cS Seven Favorite Dog Stories 123 ESZZaB]eS` Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned 134 /W[SS0S\RS` The Meeting 153 AO[:W^agbS Feeling Is Not Quite the Word 156
/
2O\WSZZS2cbb]\ Nine Attempts at a Life 169
9W`O6S\SVO\ The Investigation (Asher & Cabal) 174
DWSb2W\V Delenda 180
;O\cSZ5]\hOZSa The Artist’s Voice: Hearing is Believing 193
;W`O\RO8cZg The Man on the Stairs 175
/0=4 #
:G<<3B7::;/< D]Zc[S$ ³]\ Doing Laps Without A Pool 217
:gRWO2OdWa Kafka Cooks Dinner 224
9ObVS`W\<]ZbS Things Penguins Do 234
1V`Wab]^VS`A]``S\bW\] Misapprehensions 241
@SPSQQO0SSUZS This is How Life is Created 259
/ZWQS0`ORZSg The Panty Thief 267
;O`YAeO`bh Three Places to Stay 278
DcB`O\ The Gift of Years 282
8O[SaEOU\S` The Angel of Truth and Decency 308
8/A=<HCH5/ D]Zc[S' ³]\ Nonfiction: A Frying Pan 319
0`OR1`O\ Cinéma Vérité and the Collected Works of
Ronald Reagan: A History of Propaganda in Motion Pictures 329 @30311/E=:44 D]Zc[S ³]\ 369
AO`O:SdW\S Sleep Approaches 371
:WaODOOa I Love to Write 381
AVS``g;Oa]\ Tooth and Bag 389
>VWZW^^S/`]\a]\ I Have Something Important to Tell You 395
$
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I was there at the beginning. In fact, I was sort of there before the beginning of Fence. In the following way. I had a gig teaching in Houston. This was twelve or thirteen years ago. They were going to put me up in a hotel, I was going to read some student work, and then I was going to meet with the students individually. In this case, the disconcerting feature of the post was as follows: No one from the English department ever called me or came to see me or take me out to dinner—not until the last night. I think whoever had suggested me for the position had moved on, which is often how things go in writing programs. So I was on my own in Houston. Where I’d never been before. There was a live butterfly exhibit just up the block from the hotel—it was the first time I’d ever seen one. I’d collected butterflies as a kid, and thus a live butterfly exhibit called out to me. I spent an excellent couple of hours there. There was also the Rothko Chapel to see. Rothko, for me, runs in second place, right after John Cage, among my enduring heroes. Who can complain about being paid to fly down to Houston to see the Rothko Chapel? Despite these welcome distractions (and the hours of CNN), I found the gig in Houston really painfully alienating, and I would probably go to great lengths to wipe the whole thing from memory, were it not for one of the students there, one Rebecca Wolff. Despite the fact that I think she already had an MFA from some other program, Iowa maybe, she was in Houston getting a second graduate degree. And here’s another factoid. In the moment that I was reading her work, she was writing prose, though she was better known as a poet. All of which is to say that this student was ambitious and unlikely to proceed in the usual fashion. And as further befits the editrix of Fence, Wolff’s prose, which I was reading in my lonely hotel room, between fits of CNN, didn’t exactly feel like prose, nor did its structure exactly feel like
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short fiction. It seemed to stand astride the genre question, refusing to make up its mind. For these reasons, I hit it off with the student in question—she was an easy person to like—and it wasn’t long after (back in civilization)—that I got a note from her saying she was thinking of starting a magazine, and did I want to be involved. I did not want to be involved! Not at all! And I could think of no less good idea for this Rebecca Wolff. She should have been, in my view, off writing her poems, or her genre-busting prose works. And I knew this because of my own experience, which for some years had included attempting to edit and write at the same time. The two couldn’t be done at the same time! They created a terminal bifurcation in the personality from which one never entirely recovered! Bad idea! And anyway the road to hell was littered with literary magazines. There were too many of them, and most of them were irresolute, half-hearted, or excessively parochial. Nor could I, heading into the season in which The Ice Storm movie came out, with all of that attendant excess, and in which I was trying to finish a novel and edit a book of essays on the New Testament, really find any time to work on this project. No way! Bad idea all around! But I was bad at saying no, am still, and so I said yes. Later, before I convinced Rebecca Wolff that I really couldn’t be fiction editor, though I was more than honored to be asked, before I realized I would be crushed beneath the weight of that responsibility, I did manage to be involved with the first iteration of Fence, the first few issues. Here’s what I thought: I thought that in a magazine that was doing an impossible thing—creating a vision of American poetry that didn’t get into the partisan and pusillanimous bickering that so afflicted that form, the autophagic poetry world rampages—the fiction should also range far and wide and steer just as clear of conventional wisdom. For example, it should avoid the formula of New Yorker–style realism, and it should avoid the deliberate and self-satisfied obscurantism that was associated with some experimental presses, at the other extreme. In short, I felt like
Fence fiction should do, more or less, what Fence poetry was trying to do. It should create its own history and momentum and point of view. Because if the poetry world had its own distractions, American fiction was not out of the woods either, not with the myopic literary publishing efforts at the larger publishing houses. Not with the cookie cutter realism of the larger writing programs. We needed some vision in fiction, just the way American poetry did. Fence has gone on to exhibit that very thing, vision. And it has done a fine job of it. Since I have been enjoined from hortatory language here, I’m not going to belabor my feelings on the success of the fiction department at Fence. But I will note that this volume gathers together fiction from the three administrations that have presided over fiction at Fence, each of them, it seems to me, more than successful at finding prose work that digs deeper and goes farther, taking the American narrative work to a place it rarely goes these days. I was proud to be associated with the magazine at the beginning, I’m still proud to be associated with it, and this is a really excellent place at which to begin, if you are wanting to get acquainted with Fence. Behold what a decade or more of commitment, taste, and style can do. There are stories here to challenge, confront, arrest, and to send you off in search of the later work of these many excellent prose stylists, most of them now rather well known. And if you like this volume, you should definitely investigate the volume of Fence poetry as well.
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@SPSQQOE]ZTT E37@27A/<3;=B7=<
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 effort. 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. TK). 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-off place, and saw the magazine take off or unfold within the context of his or her own aesthetic and practical affiliations, prejudices, and ethics. Each poetry and fiction and nonfiction editor has had her own particular 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
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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 language and its narratives, given repeated exposure. Something Fence has never done: Published ourselves. With the exception of those who came onto our staff 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 efforts 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 different effort 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.
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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, assimilated, 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 off-the-cuff, 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 scuffles 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
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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 writing 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.
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the skeleton of a wall, the embodiment of a line . . . a pause between fields and a conduit for pleasure . . . a structure at once transparent and definitive . . . Fence is a new journal of poetry, fiction, criticism, and art. Its editors are writers, artists, participants in the cultural throng who are dissatisfied with the stratified, self-consuming body of literary journals available. Our contributors are those whose work sits resolutely on the fence, resisting easy definition. We are convinced that mystery, as it is manifested in the subjective voice, is a legitimate and pleasurable by-product of the agency of the author. We have devised a journal with an explicit mission: if not to erase the lines as they are drawn, at least to expose, defy, and recontextualize them for a new readership: the converted reunited with the curious. a marker of territory Fence is a response to a perceived need. We wish to provide a reliable home for the fence-sitters: those writers who are intent on following the lead of what they truly hear as opposed to what they have heard before or what they have read about and with which they hope to align themselves. a willful ambiguity, an informed non-commitment Fence is a resting place for work that we recognize by its singularity, its reluctance to take a seat in any established camp, its insistence on the reader’s close attention to what is not already understood, digested,
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judged. Readers will be surprised and refreshed upon encountering in our pages an editorial presence that is unusually self-conscious in its attempts to contextualize, inform, and reciprocally reveal our contributors to our readers—to expose the skeletal cross-purpose of our document. a shared boundary We intend to be literally didactic, to enclose territory for an unhindered, unburdened encounter with the discussion of theories, styles, histories, movements, and tastes. Fence offers its readers a richesse of literacy, one that is populist not by virtue of condescension, but by its lack of presumptions. a vantage point from which to see, simultaneously, several shades of green in the grass There is nothing radical about this magazine. We do not see the erection of such a fence as a combative or exclusionary measure, but as a gesture of cultivation. Fence stands against the false obfuscation of the fruits of our culture’s labor, that which has been framed and sentenced to inaccessibility. We seek, above all, to increase the reader’s pleasure. a midpoint between the acquisition and distribution of stolen goods There is nothing impenetrable about the work being done today; it is in response to what has come before, that which has been previously allowed; it is now allowed. Within the context of each issue of Fence we reinforce the realm of possibility and contextualize our contributors within it. Fence intentionally blurs the distinction between ‘difficulty’ and ‘accessibility,’ preferring instead to address a continuum of utterance.
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a dashing exercise, a good humoured parry-and-thrust Our editorial strategy is a balancing act, undertaken in a spirit of inquiry rather than critique. From John Ashbery’s poem “Soonest Mended”: But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal Taken entirely out of context, these lines refer to our own aim and fantasy: to support poetry and fiction that is written without the safety of received theory or streamlined tradition but wholly out of impulse, knowledge, and the experience of necessity. a dissemination point We wish to preach dually to the converted and to the curious. Our criticism is immediate and intimate, attempting an explicit address. We hope to break down the wall which we feel has been interposed between the reading public and the material of our individualities—our poems, our fiction—and to build in its place a fence.
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© 2009 Rebecca Wolff. All rights reserved Detail of watercolor drawing by Elliott Green Cover design by Rebecca Wolff Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A Best of Fence Volume I/ Edited by Rebecca Wolff. —1st ed. Library of Congress Control Number: 2009902550 isbn 1-934200-04-2 isbn 13: 978-1-934200-04-9 Printed in Canada by Printcrafters Distributed by University Press of New England (upne.com) We are grateful to have been granted permission to reprint the following copyrighted material: “The Artist’s Voice: Hearing is Believing” copyright 2005 by Manuel Gonzales. Reprinted by arrangement of Mary Evans Inc. All other 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 Books Permissions Science Library 320 University at Albany 1400 Washington Avenue Albany, NY 12222 [email protected] Fence Books are published in affiliation 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 Endowment for the Arts.
"
/0Sab]T4S\QSD]Zc[S77(4WQbW]\O\R<]\¿QbW]\ B/0:3=41=
Young and Green 21
AVSZZSg8OQYa]\ Cancer 27
9SZZg:W\Y Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose 38
8cZWOAZOdW\ The Woman Who Cut Off Her Leg
at the Maidstone Club 53 /ZO\2S\W`] Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead 63
03<;/@1CA D]Zc[Sa" ³$ The Fence Years 87
;ObbVSe2S`Pg The Father Helmet 92
5O`g:cbh Her Dear Only Father’s Lone Wife’s Solitudinized,
Peaceless Son 108 8O\SC\`cS Seven Favorite Dog Stories 123 ESZZaB]eS` Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned 134 /W[SS0S\RS` The Meeting 153 AO[:W^agbS Feeling Is Not Quite the Word 156
/
2O\WSZZS2cbb]\ Nine Attempts at a Life 169
9W`O6S\SVO\ The Investigation (Asher & Cabal) 174
DWSb2W\V Delenda 180
;O\cSZ5]\hOZSa The Artist’s Voice: Hearing is Believing 193
;W`O\RO8cZg The Man on the Stairs 175
/0=4 #
:G<<3B7::;/< D]Zc[S$ ³]\ Doing Laps Without A Pool 217
:gRWO2OdWa Kafka Cooks Dinner 224
9ObVS`W\<]ZbS Things Penguins Do 234
1V`Wab]^VS`A]``S\bW\] Misapprehensions 241
@SPSQQO0SSUZS This is How Life is Created 259
/ZWQS0`ORZSg The Panty Thief 267
;O`YAeO`bh Three Places to Stay 278
DcB`O\ The Gift of Years 282
8O[SaEOU\S` The Angel of Truth and Decency 308
8/A=<HCH5/ D]Zc[S' ³]\ Nonfiction: A Frying Pan 319
0`OR1`O\ Cinéma Vérité and the Collected Works of
Ronald Reagan: A History of Propaganda in Motion Pictures 329 @30311/E=:44 D]Zc[S ³]\ 369
AO`O:SdW\S Sleep Approaches 371
:WaODOOa I Love to Write 381
AVS``g;Oa]\ Tooth and Bag 389
>VWZW^^S/`]\a]\ I Have Something Important to Tell You 395
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I was there at the beginning. In fact, I was sort of there before the beginning of Fence. In the following way. I had a gig teaching in Houston. This was twelve or thirteen years ago. They were going to put me up in a hotel, I was going to read some student work, and then I was going to meet with the students individually. In this case, the disconcerting feature of the post was as follows: No one from the English department ever called me or came to see me or take me out to dinner—not until the last night. I think whoever had suggested me for the position had moved on, which is often how things go in writing programs. So I was on my own in Houston. Where I’d never been before. There was a live butterfly exhibit just up the block from the hotel—it was the first time I’d ever seen one. I’d collected butterflies as a kid, and thus a live butterfly exhibit called out to me. I spent an excellent couple of hours there. There was also the Rothko Chapel to see. Rothko, for me, runs in second place, right after John Cage, among my enduring heroes. Who can complain about being paid to fly down to Houston to see the Rothko Chapel? Despite these welcome distractions (and the hours of CNN), I found the gig in Houston really painfully alienating, and I would probably go to great lengths to wipe the whole thing from memory, were it not for one of the students there, one Rebecca Wolff. Despite the fact that I think she already had an MFA from some other program, Iowa maybe, she was in Houston getting a second graduate degree. And here’s another factoid. In the moment that I was reading her work, she was writing prose, though she was better known as a poet. All of which is to say that this student was ambitious and unlikely to proceed in the usual fashion. And as further befits the editrix of Fence, Wolff’s prose, which I was reading in my lonely hotel room, between fits of CNN, didn’t exactly feel like prose, nor did its structure exactly feel like
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short fiction. It seemed to stand astride the genre question, refusing to make up its mind. For these reasons, I hit it off with the student in question—she was an easy person to like—and it wasn’t long after (back in civilization)—that I got a note from her saying she was thinking of starting a magazine, and did I want to be involved. I did not want to be involved! Not at all! And I could think of no less good idea for this Rebecca Wolff. She should have been, in my view, off writing her poems, or her genre-busting prose works. And I knew this because of my own experience, which for some years had included attempting to edit and write at the same time. The two couldn’t be done at the same time! They created a terminal bifurcation in the personality from which one never entirely recovered! Bad idea! And anyway the road to hell was littered with literary magazines. There were too many of them, and most of them were irresolute, half-hearted, or excessively parochial. Nor could I, heading into the season in which The Ice Storm movie came out, with all of that attendant excess, and in which I was trying to finish a novel and edit a book of essays on the New Testament, really find any time to work on this project. No way! Bad idea all around! But I was bad at saying no, am still, and so I said yes. Later, before I convinced Rebecca Wolff that I really couldn’t be fiction editor, though I was more than honored to be asked, before I realized I would be crushed beneath the weight of that responsibility, I did manage to be involved with the first iteration of Fence, the first few issues. Here’s what I thought: I thought that in a magazine that was doing an impossible thing—creating a vision of American poetry that didn’t get into the partisan and pusillanimous bickering that so afflicted that form, the autophagic poetry world rampages—the fiction should also range far and wide and steer just as clear of conventional wisdom. For example, it should avoid the formula of New Yorker–style realism, and it should avoid the deliberate and self-satisfied obscurantism that was associated with some experimental presses, at the other extreme. In short, I felt like
Fence fiction should do, more or less, what Fence poetry was trying to do. It should create its own history and momentum and point of view. Because if the poetry world had its own distractions, American fiction was not out of the woods either, not with the myopic literary publishing efforts at the larger publishing houses. Not with the cookie cutter realism of the larger writing programs. We needed some vision in fiction, just the way American poetry did. Fence has gone on to exhibit that very thing, vision. And it has done a fine job of it. Since I have been enjoined from hortatory language here, I’m not going to belabor my feelings on the success of the fiction department at Fence. But I will note that this volume gathers together fiction from the three administrations that have presided over fiction at Fence, each of them, it seems to me, more than successful at finding prose work that digs deeper and goes farther, taking the American narrative work to a place it rarely goes these days. I was proud to be associated with the magazine at the beginning, I’m still proud to be associated with it, and this is a really excellent place at which to begin, if you are wanting to get acquainted with Fence. Behold what a decade or more of commitment, taste, and style can do. There are stories here to challenge, confront, arrest, and to send you off in search of the later work of these many excellent prose stylists, most of them now rather well known. And if you like this volume, you should definitely investigate the volume of Fence poetry as well.
/0=4
@SPSQQOE]ZTT E37@27A/<3;=B7=<
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 effort. 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. TK). 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-off place, and saw the magazine take off or unfold within the context of his or her own aesthetic and practical affiliations, prejudices, and ethics. Each poetry and fiction and nonfiction editor has had her own particular 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
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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 language and its narratives, given repeated exposure. Something Fence has never done: Published ourselves. With the exception of those who came onto our staff 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 efforts 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 different effort 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.
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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, assimilated, 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 off-the-cuff, 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 scuffles 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
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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 writing 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.
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the skeleton of a wall, the embodiment of a line . . . a pause between fields and a conduit for pleasure . . . a structure at once transparent and definitive . . . Fence is a new journal of poetry, fiction, criticism, and art. Its editors are writers, artists, participants in the cultural throng who are dissatisfied with the stratified, self-consuming body of literary journals available. Our contributors are those whose work sits resolutely on the fence, resisting easy definition. We are convinced that mystery, as it is manifested in the subjective voice, is a legitimate and pleasurable by-product of the agency of the author. We have devised a journal with an explicit mission: if not to erase the lines as they are drawn, at least to expose, defy, and recontextualize them for a new readership: the converted reunited with the curious. a marker of territory Fence is a response to a perceived need. We wish to provide a reliable home for the fence-sitters: those writers who are intent on following the lead of what they truly hear as opposed to what they have heard before or what they have read about and with which they hope to align themselves. a willful ambiguity, an informed non-commitment Fence is a resting place for work that we recognize by its singularity, its reluctance to take a seat in any established camp, its insistence on the reader’s close attention to what is not already understood, digested,
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judged. Readers will be surprised and refreshed upon encountering in our pages an editorial presence that is unusually self-conscious in its attempts to contextualize, inform, and reciprocally reveal our contributors to our readers—to expose the skeletal cross-purpose of our document. a shared boundary We intend to be literally didactic, to enclose territory for an unhindered, unburdened encounter with the discussion of theories, styles, histories, movements, and tastes. Fence offers its readers a richesse of literacy, one that is populist not by virtue of condescension, but by its lack of presumptions. a vantage point from which to see, simultaneously, several shades of green in the grass There is nothing radical about this magazine. We do not see the erection of such a fence as a combative or exclusionary measure, but as a gesture of cultivation. Fence stands against the false obfuscation of the fruits of our culture’s labor, that which has been framed and sentenced to inaccessibility. We seek, above all, to increase the reader’s pleasure. a midpoint between the acquisition and distribution of stolen goods There is nothing impenetrable about the work being done today; it is in response to what has come before, that which has been previously allowed; it is now allowed. Within the context of each issue of Fence we reinforce the realm of possibility and contextualize our contributors within it. Fence intentionally blurs the distinction between ‘difficulty’ and ‘accessibility,’ preferring instead to address a continuum of utterance.
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a dashing exercise, a good humoured parry-and-thrust Our editorial strategy is a balancing act, undertaken in a spirit of inquiry rather than critique. From John Ashbery’s poem “Soonest Mended”: But the fantasy makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal Taken entirely out of context, these lines refer to our own aim and fantasy: to support poetry and fiction that is written without the safety of received theory or streamlined tradition but wholly out of impulse, knowledge, and the experience of necessity. a dissemination point We wish to preach dually to the converted and to the curious. Our criticism is immediate and intimate, attempting an explicit address. We hope to break down the wall which we feel has been interposed between the reading public and the material of our individualities—our poems, our fiction—and to build in its place a fence.
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