FENCE #39 (Vol. 21 #2): 39 WIN-SPR 2022

 

Isabelle Huppert

Vengeance is as dignified

an option as any, less lightning
than thunder, less timbre

than quake. Collared encore,
blank applause, trains stalled

for towns at a time. what good can
come of bad handsomes? What god

would hum through a hurricane? (Eileen G’sell)

As you most likely know by now, one of my favourite literary journals (a list that includes The Capilano Review, Canthius, Tripwire and filling Station, among a handful of others) is FENCE magazine [see my reviews of issues #20 here, #21 here, #26 here, #27 here, #28 here, #29 here, #30 here, #32 here, #34 here]. This latest issue is also the first to include Emily Wallis Hughes and Jason Zuzga in the shared position of Editorial Directors. As Hughes writes as part of an introduction to the issue:

When, in the early fall of 2021 Rebecca [Wolff] offered us this shared position, the history of my way to Fence flooded my mind, and I imagined a 21-year-old who might stumble upon this issue in a bookstore, like I did in 2006, when I urgently needed to find all of the differing language-people one reliably finds in Fence, which I don’t need to describe – you can see for yourself. If you have come across this online, or if you found this in a Barnes & Noble in a town very far from New York City, welcome, I’m glad you’re here with us. I know and remember what it is like to pick up a literary magazine and say: where was this before? Why didn’t my teachers give us this to read?

This new issues offers, as is standard for this particular venture, a wealth of material, and I’ve a list of names a kilometre long (0.621 miles, for American readers) of contributors to this volume with stellar work (most of whom I hadn’t heard of prior), including Eileen G’sell, Trey Moody, Ben Jahn (whom I contacted since to solicit work for periodicities), Hazel White, Kirstin Allio, Jen Frantz, Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Cate Marvin, Peter Myers, Jesi Bender, Jennifer Kronovet, Alyssa Perry and Samuel Amadon, among many, multiple others. As Nick Flynn’s poem “sacred trash” opens: “I cut a picture of a stranger // out of a newspaper, my daughter / took a pen to the man’s face // & scribbled it out—it is // a black cloud now. I saved it, / I have it here—whatever // a hand touches could be // the word of God.” Or the infectious rhythms of Annelyse Gelman’s “The Story,” that begins: “He has killed, the man, a doe. / To be sure, it was an accident, but there was / one private moment, just before / he slammed on the brakes, when / he hit the gas. Just to see. / It is dusk. It will be years before he makes his confession. / The eyes of things that shine in the dark / have started to shine.” The strength of FENCE emerges from the range of styles and the sheer among of work included, but most of all, just how damned strong the material included is.

The issue also includes a hefty folio towards the end, some fifty pages of “A portfolio of writing by nurses,” produced in large part to acknowledge the period of time we’ve been in, as well as their ongoing work and experiences throughout. The section floats through an assemblage of poetry, fiction, non-fiction and memoir, working through the multiple facets of a period of health crisis, from what can easily be seen as the front lines. In Shirley Stephenson’s “COVID & Locusts & Protests & Love—A Community Nursing Perspective,” she writes: “In the first weeks of COVID, I often wondered, Is this the way I will get the virus, and will it kill me? It wasn’t an ambush of panic, but a slow recurring thought, like fireflies drifting and flickering around the exam room.” For all the talk of crisis and anxiety around those initial months, it was easy to feel overwhelmed, for those of us who remained home, as well as those unable to make that choice, even beyond the fraction of the population who insisted on minimizing the entire situation. How does one maintain composure, maintain living, even while attempting to attend to the uncertainty of health? As Sarah Cluff’s short poem “Santa Monica” ends:

The sign at your dentist’s office says
“We cannot undo what you will not do.”

FENCE magazine, Vol. 18, No. 2 (summer 2017)

Sonnet 12: A Dialogue

“Do you know that it really could be cool

and hot, if we two could cross-pollinate,

could hug and dance and not be home too late

we could forget the past and start anew.”
“I don’t mind if youth lead the movement, and

let us steep our old riffs in their new sounds

never as new as they might think, and round

us, to glow a soul we can understand.”

“You lost me with youth,” “I bet I could be

a kickass step-dad,” “You know you must drum

a goofy & humble tune to win me.”
“I’ll listen and follow.” “As long as some

room’s left for deep clean oceans, I can come

back I always will.” “I love when you hum.” (Chris Stroffolino)

I’m always pleased to see a copy of FENCE magazine, a biannual journal of poetry and fiction produced out of the University of Albany. The latest issue, Vol. 18, No. 2 (summer 2017), includes an editorial by Rav Grewal-Kök speaks of the difficulty of the tasks of reading, editing and writing since the American federal election:

            Not that you have to be an immigrant. Anyone who is at all concerned about racial justice, women’s rights, reproductive rights, queer rights, indigenous rights, the labor movement, anti-Muslim bigotry, the prison-industrial complex, public schools, clean air and water, the climate catastrophe, health care, child care, poverty, hunger, student debt, foreign wars, torture, scientific research, arts funding, or a hundred other causes must recognize that we are living through an emergency. The bad news doesn’t stop. Of course, some tens of millions of my fellow citizens may view the present situation differently—just enough of them certainly voted differently—but I don’t know anyone who hasn’t felt, at various times since the inauguration, soiled, exhausted, and overwhelmed.

He ends his introduction by writing:

            In rereading the fiction printed in this issue, I’m not consoled. I just feel more like myself. Aren’t all these gestures—reading, writing, editing—also reminders that another life, an intimate life, still exists? I don’t think it’s escapism to reserve a space for gratitude. I will forget that truth, perhaps as soon as I finish writing this note and look at the day’s headlines. So I will have to find a way back to remembering again.

            It has been worse. It will get worse. Let’s go on.

Editorials such as this remind me of the multiple ways in which I am buffered from certain parts of Grewal-Kök’s concerns (I live north of the border, for example, but I know I am not entirely unaffected). I too, am troubled, and have lost sleep and work. What choice have we but to continue, and to resist, and to voice those anxieties, in part to better learn ways in which to resist, and to remain both healthy and sane? And even during periods of madness, can’t one take comfort from seeing those who have persevered through and even despite the madness, providing an example of how it is the rest of us can continue as well? Something I’ve been appreciating about the editorials of FENCE magazine [see my review of the previous issue here] is in how they have been attempting to engage with certain of the anxieties and conflicts surrounding culture, both abstractly and very specifically, and I applaud how they voice their concerns as part of a larger dialogue.

FENCE has long been one of my favourite North American literary journals, not just for the variety but the strength of the material they include, and part of the highlights of this issue includes my introduction to the works of incredible writers such as poets Tom Haviv, Aaron Coleman and Katie Fowley, and fiction writer Noy Holland. Brooklyn poet Tom Haviv’s “Didactic Poem” appears to be part of his first trade collection, A Flag of No Nation, a book newly out and one that engages with documentary and narrative poetics and performance through a sequence of inventive lyric sequences. Aaron Coleman’s prose sequence “Shadows Uplifted,” subtitled “A TRANSGRESSIVE TRANSLATIONOF FRANCIS HARPER’S 1892 NOVEL IOLA LEROY, OR, SHADOWS UPLIFTED,” moves across the page in a curious combination of collage and absence, shifting sections in a compelling use of white space and very specific, seemingly erratic, movement. Katie Fowley’s two poems included in this issue engage an accumulative precision that is really quite breathtaking, and quite compelling. Fiction writer Nov Holland, the more established writer of this quartet, has three very short stories included in this issue, and I am curious to see what else she has produced; as part of his introduction, Grewal-Kök writes: “What I would still give for an ear like Noy Holland’s, who sings of beauty and love right at the edge of the abyss.”

Bitty Cessna

Bluebird day, a fine day to fly. They taxi out, no radio, roiling dust, the airport bleak and uncontrolled. A vulture stands on the head of a cactus and displays its wings to dry. “What’s he waiting for?” the instructor jokes. Of course he’s flirting. Horny, disappointed man, too tall to fly the fighters and color blind besides. He calls her Sunshine. A face like sunshine. First the climb, full on, the big blue he can’t see. She’s to stall, spin, recover. Pretty, a lay, college girl. She lives behind the hangars in a school bus. She turns the plane upside down. Everything in the cockpit is a missile now, launched, flying at their heads. Wallowing, sloppy, sickening plunge—the altimeter sweep, the stick clutched in her hands. “IT’S MY PLANE,” he shouts, meaning, let go, fool. That we may live. May we seem to have lived. He sees again the spines of the cactus, the meaty face of the vulture, ravenous, a dream. Bitty Cessna, yellow as the dress his mother wore. Mother war. Mary. Gone to God. Mine. (Noy Holland)

Over the one hundred and fifty-plus pages of the current issue, there are certainly more highlights, even if I choose but to begin with four from writers I hadn’t been previously been aware of (there isn’t space to discuss everything). I would certainly point out new poems by Jasmine Dreame Wagner, Carmen Giménez Smith, Rusty Morrison, Daniel Borzutzky, Kelli Anne Rufle, Marty Cain and Hazel White, as well as fiction by Hilary Plum and Yanara Friedland, as well as the striking artwork both within and on the cover by Buzz Slutzky. The real question becomes: exactly why aren’t you already reading this journal? And then there’s this short poem by Jason Mitchell, included towards the back of the issue:

good sign

I found two aubergine

Amethysts tucked inside a crushed

                        •

Velvet pouch on one of the trails while

Hiking in the rain, and took it as a

Love charm and good sign, and the one

                        •

Tinier stone almost jumped out of my

Hand when I first took it out I

Bobbled it a few times before securing it

                        •

In the palm of my hand, and read into

The event as the small stone being you

And took that as a good sign too.

Jasmine Dreame Wagner, On a clear day

I stay up all night listening to you; I listen for you; I stay up all night to make sure the morning will still be there. It is.

A better world begins in the snow of the old one; a better television begins in the snow of the old one; a city under snow is an unauthored work of public art. Snow falls on the pyramids for the first time in 112 years. Celan writes: “Blessed art thou, No One.”

Celan is a work of public art. I stand in the snow and think Celan. Then I think of Sufjan Stevens. I think of Sufjan’s unsung States: possibilities? I feel violence in them, the violence of theft, as things that are possible—but kept from us—are stolen.

As there is theft in snow, in poetry. A new snow begins in the theft of the old one. A new poetry begins in the theft of the old one. To move toward poetry as a question itself is a promise of snow: I am compelled to continue beneath it, within it, above it; I am compelled to produce and continue producing tunnels encased in tunnels until I, only a source, am exhausted, am snow. (“Snow”)

American poet, artist and musician Jasmine Dreame Wagner’s second full-length collection is the absolutely remarkable On a clear day (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2017), a collection of what are described as nine lyric essays. There is something quite fascinating with the way she blends poetry and prose in such a way that her work belongs equally to both forms, and her work invites comparisons to prose works by Maggie Nelson, Sarah Manguso and Claudia Rankine for their stunning interplay, intellectual curiosity and interest in an unsentimental, straightforward confessional. Rich, meditative and multi-directional, there’s almost the feeling that if Maggie Nelson composed poems, they might look like Jasmine Dreame Wagner’s On a clear day. In a recent interview for Speaking of Marvels, Wagner references the new collection:

I have a book coming out next year called On a Clear Day. One of my blurb writers wrote that I’d undertaken the project of loneliness. Am I lonely? It’s something I’ve wondered and truthfully, I don’t know if I’m lonely or if my wire is tuned to a solitary channel. I like being alone, taking walks alone, reading Twitter as though it were a divining practice in another century. When I’m with friends or witnessing art, I’m completely present, but I feel absolutely alive when I’m gorging myself on solitude.

Wagner’s inquiries move through a wide array of subjects, ideas and references, each wrapped around a particular idea, writing “Snow,” “Sunsets,” “Snow,” “Small True Things,” “Snow,” “Deserts,” “Snow,” “Aughts,” “Snow” and “On a Clear Day.” Wagner’s multiple inquiries are far-ranging, linking references across incredible distances, musing lyric and hard facts, contradictions, quoted material and the details of silence. Her work is gorgeous, thoughtful and sprawling, held together through a process that connects to itself constantly; no matter how far she might appear to stray, she never does, composing a series of perfectly executed theses in incredibly tight prose. By writing on snow, she describes the essential snowness of everything else. By writing on noise, she articulates silence. She writes: “For a moment, I forgot how I relish privacy. I want to share this.”

Jacques Attali writes of Brueghel’s painting Carnival’s Quarrel with Lent: “his angst is audible.” In Brueghel’s paintings, the clatter of human noise prefigures silence as power, specifically, the silencing of social order, of religious morality. The church’s policing of festival and carnival, of pagan joy, willed silence on the people and on their landscape. This was long before industry replaced festival and carnival as noise, before the air roared with turbines and silence split into two different ends: silence as luxury, silence as torture.

Silence as luxury: John Cage in Harvard’s anechoic chamber.

Silence as torture: Unknown unknown in solitary. Guantanamo Bay. Water drip. Electricity down the back. Ray Bradbury’s Margot in All Summer in a Day, the girl whose peers lock her away for knowing the sun, “how like a lemon it was, and how hot.” Her punishment: a closet. On the only day in seven years when the Venusian inhabitants would witness the rising and falling of their lifeblood.

At the end of the story: “They walked over to the closet door slowly and stood by it. Behind the closet door was only silence. They unlocked the door, even more slowly, and let Margot out.” (“Sunsets”)