WOLVEN
After they made love the first time, things got strange. He peeped out
through the window blinds, shook himself like a dog, and muttered something
about the moon. Then he said, “You must chain me in the closet. Whatever
happens, don’t let me out. Lock the door. There’s a deadbolt.” She was drunk
and naked and limbic, not thinking with her forebrain. “Then what?” she asked
flirtatiously. (Douglas Glover)
After some five years of hoping and trying, I
finally managed to get some work into an issue of New York State journal Fence magazine, newly arrived in my
mailbox. It’s quite thrilling to have a poem alongside new work by Douglas
Glover, Rusty Morrison, Noah Eli Gordon, Karen Garthe, Natalie Shapiro,
Catherine Wagner, Sarah Fox, Graham Foust, Stephanie Ford and so many others.
As well as the issue itself, this issue also features a “Fiction ebook
supplement,” with new writing from Chanelle Benz, Alfred Brown, Lydia Davis,
David Gordon, Gabriel Heller, Jay Caspian Kang and Rachel Levy (that
admittedly, I haven’t had a chance to get into). Generally, I’ve been impressed
by the breadth and the quality of each issue of Fence, and every issue contains a surprise, and there are more than
a couple within. I’m intrigued by Graham Foust’s poem “Collected Poems,” that
begins:
Names for poems—why do I, on Earth, bother?
Some untitled verse is out there just waiting
to be used, like a life vest or a rifle
or an almost impossibly large number,
my noise-only memory’s noise-only ghost.
Emily Pettit, with her poem “Water I Have Seen A
Duck,” is slowly becoming a favourite, and there is some remarkable work by a
number of other poets, both familiar and unfamiliar to me. I’m attracted to the
oddness of Brandon Downing’s poem “DICK CARLA ASTRO,” a four part sequence that
begins: “Her breasts shot right out her shirt. / I have one of the things
instantly // In my jaw. Both her hands drop / Down—[…].” I’ve seen fragments of
Noah Eli Gordon’s work-in-progress “The Problem” in a few places now, and the
ten pieces included in this issue of Fence
are just stunning. I’m amazed by these prose-poems, each with the same title.
I’m amazed by their sharpness, and variety. I’m envious, even. When is this
finally to appear in book form? Part of the strength of this work comes from
the accumulation of short pieces, each a stand-alone problem.
The Problem
The video she wants to watch takes an exorbitantly long time to load, so
she opens a new window to watch a different video while waiting, which also
takes an exorbitantly long time to load, so she opens a new window to watch a
different video while waiting. As though stuck forever between Dante and
Beatrice, sometimes the problem is this transparent.
Through Gordon’s work so far, some half dozen
trade collections or so, each work exists as a stand-alone project, something I’ve
long been attracted to, and with each title, his work becomes sharper. Already I’ve
seen a notice for a new title of his to appear in 2013; but what, I ask again,
about this one?
The Problem
The entry for fetus in the dictionary given to her by her mother reads,
simply: see embryo. Because there is no entry for embryo, the problem refuses
further development. It just sits there expectantly, sort of moving, but not
really. Well, maybe a little.
The issue also includes a selection of poems in
translation, as Kevin M. F. Platt describes in his introduction to the short
section, “Poetry as Global Project,” writing:
The five poems assembled below illustrate how poetry, aided by an
internet infrastructure, is crossing borders as never before—not only geographical
but also linguistic ones. In March, 2011 twenty or so Russian and American poets,
scholars, and translators assembled virtually—via document cloud—to work on new
translations from across the Eastern seaboard of the US and from locations in
Russia stretching from Kaliningrad, Russia’s outpost in Eastern Europe, to
Novosibirsk in Russia’s Asian expanses.
Two months later, with
drafts of some fifty poems in our virtual hands, this group gathered physically
in Philadelphia to polish translations at a symposium sponsored by CEC Artslink
and the University of Philadelphia entitled “Your Language—My Ear." The results are
far more extensive than anything that could have come about without the
internet run-up to the symposium, and they are far more refined than what could
have been produced by translators working in isolation.
Here is the opening to Polina Barskova’s “BATTLE
/ (CLEMENT JANEQUIN, LA GUERRE, 1528) / FREE TRANSLATION & WILLFUL
REARRANGEMENT,” translated by Stephanie Sandler and Polina Barskova:
Escoutez escoutez
Listen listen
My comrades in these adventures
Bons compaignons!
What do you hear when nothing is heard
Not a tram not a truck not the bark of a dog
Not a child crying out for its toy
Not gossip not whining
Not the smell of blood
Not the barest shifting of phlegm
In the dark
Nothing we hear nothing
Nothing we can’t we don’t want to hear
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