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.”

Jennifer Kronovet, The Wug Test

CRITICAL PERIOD HYPOTHESIS

There is a window of time to make language how the mind works. Words are milk so the mind survives on language.

Prove it. Take a boy who left the forest and became evidence. Victor, until twelve, knew only the sounds of rain on leaves, on rock, on dirt—no voices down the hall. No voice in his head. He entered the languaged world late and learned: to be pleasant, to remember remembering, and two phrases.

He loved milk but couldn’t request it. The word was uttered only in the joy of seeing it. Milk! The word contained the feeling. Oh, God! his horrified nanny said at him until it became his song of self.

Victor is used to draw the timeline of the mind, saying we must keep one another inside our words—a boy just asking without asking for milk, making the world a glass we fill by speaking.

Given I’ve published a good amount of this book via Touch the Donkey (where I also interviewed her) and an above/ground press chapbook and broadside (as well as subsequently, through Drunken Boat and Dusie), I’m delighted to finally see the second poetry collection by American poet Jennifer Kronovet, The Wug Test (Ecco, 2016), produced as part of the National Poetry Series (with this particular manuscript selected by Eliza Griswold). As part of her interview for Touch the Donkey, she speaks to some of the content of the current collection when it was still in-progress, writing: “I thought it would be sensible and interesting to write little essays about the factoids and personalities I came across in linguistics, but just like my other sensible plans, the project morphed, became entwined with poetry, the language I think with on the page. These poems—they are and aren’t essays, they are experiments and research and reportage.” Further in the interview, she speaks more on her work-in-progress Loan Words (the manuscript that eventually became The Wug Test):

I recently did complete a manuscript of poems that all dance around in the field of linguistics; it’s called Loan Words. Or, at least, I think the pieces in Loan Words might be poems. In it, there are also case studies, semantic analyses, dialogues, reinvented definitions, and many other forms that are also in the form of a poem. Some of the poems have real facts, some are vehicles to do new research without the constraints of science, and in some, I am the subject of study. One of my professors, when I was studying linguistics, off-handedly mentioned that many of the most important applied linguists were mothers who studied their children. I was lucky to have that seed, to suddenly be able to observe with purpose when my son was born. The manuscript started then, in some ways, and then moved further from home as he grew.

What is interesting in The Wug Test is seeing how those two elements she discusses have come together, from the poems composed as more scientific case studies, against the poems composed around “the boy,” from poems such as “WITH THE BOY, WITH MYSELF,” “WITH THE BOY, WITH THE BOOK,” “WITH THE BOY, WITH MY FATHER” and “WITH THE BOY, IN THE GARDEN.” The two ideas swirl around each other throughout the collection, existing in conversation, overlapping and even blending occasionally, writing out a series of studies on linguistics and offspring, writing the domestic of language and individual words, and the study of the her new self against this small human she’d helped create, becoming himself even as he remains an extension, and even a furthering, of his parents. “Now it is the time of the boy,” she writes, in the poem “WITH THE BOY, NOW,” “and I say things / to see what I mean in a voice I don’t.”

When I create my alphabet. That is not a thought I should have but I do. I’m married. To this script. The way you can’t say wife and husband simultaneously with one tongue.

When I can’t sleep, I say, in my head, the alphabet forward and backward at the same time. Cancelling out what can be said to bring me into No Saying.

The letter A/a in English was probably once an ox. The shape is many sounds—sometimes horned, sometimes innocuous as boneless flesh. I don’t wish the ox into my speech. I can only go back so far. But now: ox and ox.

I search out where sound squirms against script as proof of failure. That is my resistance to myself as speech. Instead: thinking, not thinking. (“LETTER”)

The core of the poems that make up The Wug Test exist as a series of studies in linguistics through a parental lens, allowing the study of linguistics to be but a means to an end, studying both the being of her child and the bond between them. How does one change when one becomes a parent? How does the language shift? As she writes in “WITH THE BOY, ON A WALK”: “The rubber of thinking / solo so much. The primer // of your hand being / affectionate.” Through her son, the solo does indeed extend, becoming both extension and coupling. Part of the strength of Kronovet’s work is the fact of its simplicity, composing straightforward, unadorned lines that strike with such subtlety and force that one barely registers at first, but the effects might last and linger for some time. As she writes in “Q&A”: “I make a space, a room of thought-muscle. Here I train / myself to un-logic and then re-logic. To make answers that aren’t.” There is something in her tone that make me think that if Lisa Robertson wrote like Anne Carson (specifically, her Short Talks), they would be the poems of Jennifer Kronovet’s The Wug Test.

Drunken Boat blog "spotlight" series #5: Jennifer Kronovet

The fifth in my monthly "spotlight" series over at the Drunken Boat blog, each featuring a different poet with a short statement and a new poem or two, is now online: American poet Jennifer Kronovet. The first four in the series feature Ottawa poet Jason Christie, Montreal poet and performer Kaie Kellough, Ottawa poet Amanda Earl, and American poet Elizabeth Robinson. A new post is scheduled for the first Monday of every month.

Touch the Donkey supplement: new interviews with Tostevin, Tucker, Czaga, Christie, Kronovet, Abel and Poe.

Anticipating the release next week of the seventh issue of Touch the Donkey (a small poetry journal), why not check out the interviews that have appeared over the past few weeks with contributors to the sixth issue: Lola Lemire Tostevin, Aaron Tucker, Kayla Czaga, Jason Christie, Jennifer Kronovet, Jordan Abel and Deborah Poe.

Interviews with contributors to the first six issues, as well, remain online: Edward Smallfield, ryan fitzpatrick, Elizabeth Robinson, nathan dueck, Paige Taggart, Christine McNair, Stan Rogal, Jessica Smith, Nikki Sheppy, Kirsten Kaschock, Lise Downe, Lisa Jarnot, Chris Turnbull, Gary Barwin, Susan Briante, derek beaulieu, Megan Kaminski, Roland Prevost, Emily Ursuliak, j/j hastain, Catherine Wagner, Susanne Dyckman, Susan Holbrook, Julie Carr, David Peter Clark, Pearl Pirie, Eric Baus, Pattie McCarthy, Camille Martin and Gil McElroy.

The forthcoming seventh issue features new writing by: Stan Rogal, Helen Hajnoczky, Kathryn MacLeod, Shannon Maguire, Sarah Mangold, Amish Trivedi and Suzanne Zelazo. And, once the new issue appears, watch the blog over the subsequent weeks and months for interviews with a variety of the issue's contributors!

And of course, copies of the first six issues are still very much available. Why not subscribe?

We even have our own Facebook group. We are minutes away from anything.

new from above/ground press: Trivedi, lopes, Bradley, Kronovet, Forty-five + The Peter F Yacht Club!

The Destructions
Amish Trivedi
$4
See link here for more information

yasser arafat is dead
damian lopes
$4
See link here for more information

Happens Is The Sun
Jamie Bradley
$4
See link here for more information

CASE STUDY: WITH
Jennifer Kronovet
$4
See link here for more information

Forty Five
Poems by derek beaulieu, Jason Christie, Amanda Earl, Helen Hajnoczky, Chris Johnson, Gil McElroy, rob mclennan, Christine McNair, Pearl Pirie and Stan Rogal.
$4
See link here for more information

The Peter F. Yacht Club #22
VERSeFest 2015 special!
With new writing by a host of Peter F Yacht Club regulars, irregulars and VERSeFest 2014 participants, including Cameron Anstee, Dennis Cooley, dalton derksen, Anita Dolman, Stan Dragland, Amanda Earl, Laurie Fuhr, Daphne Marlatt, rob mclennan, Pearl Pirie, Roland Prevost, Monty Reid, Armand Garnet Ruffo, Janice Tokar, Tom Walmsley and Gillian Wigmore.
$6
See link here for more information

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
January-March 2015
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy of each

and don’t forget about the 2014 above/ground press subscriptions; still available!

To order, send cheques (add $1 for postage; outside Canada, add $2) to: rob mclennan, 2423 Alta Vista Drive, Ottawa ON K1H 7M9 or paypal (above)

Review copies of any title (while supplies last) also available, upon request.

With forthcoming chapbooks by Katie L. Price, Nicole Markotić and ryan fitzpatrick!

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jennifer Kronovet

Jennifer Kronovet is the author of the poetry collection Awayward. She co-translated The Acrobat, the selected poems of Yiddish writer Celia Dropkin. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, Aufgabe, Best Experimental Writing 2014 (Omnidawn), Bomb, Boston Review, Fence, the PEN Poetry Series, Privacy Policy: The Anthology of Surveillance Poetics (Black Ocean), and elsewhere. She has taught at Beijing Normal University, Columbia University, and Washington University in St. Louis. A native New Yorker, she currently lives in Guangzhou, China.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The first book changed my life in lots of little ways. The two best: because Jean Valentine picked my book to be published, I got the chance to meet her. Woohoo!

Another good one: Having the book gave me the chance to teach at a university—there’s nothing I like more than picking books of poetry I love, then getting students to read these books and talk about them with me.

My most recent work feels exactly opposite from my previous work, but it’s not. I can’t escape my head, my head which is continually banging against the same issues of language in different ways. My first book tried to find language to match what happened to my thinking when I was a foreigner. My new manuscript, Loan Words, starts some place different—with facts and theories and quotes about language from the field linguistics, and tries to take those ideas and bring them out into the realm of the lyric.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
My parents were very into this parenting method that proposed it was the parents’ role to reflect their children’s feelings back to them in language. “It seems like you are feeling sad.” “I get that sense that you are very frustrated right now.” “Wow, I can tell you feel proud of what you did today.”

I can’t tell you how annoying I found this practice as a child. My experiences did coincide with the words that my parents put onto them, and yet, the words seemed hollow in comparison, narrower, drained of heat and multi-valence and how a feeling can be itself and its opposite.

The first time I read poetry, in high school, I finally felt like language had the capacity for the complexity of thoughts that are feelings that are nameless. So I guess, thanks mom & dad.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Awayward came out of notes from when I first lived in China, in Beijing. I wanted to try to see this new place without pinning it down into my relationship to it. Then I worked with those notes for years. The linguistics poems, in Loan Words, came fast, I think because I’d been thinking about them for so long before I gave myself permission to write them, to approach my obsession directly, to have facts in poems that are also essays.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I feel, when I start a new project, like I don’t even know what a poem is, what a book is, how anyone ever understands anything anyone writes or says. Writing usually begins in feeling a kind of driven lost-ness that is mostly unpleasant.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I like readings, whether I’m reading or not, mainly because I like having space and time that’s set aside for poetry and socializing, together. And drinking! Damn, I miss a good poetry reading.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
Always: How does the language you speak shape the way you think? What falls into the distance between what you think and what you say? I wonder how we are and are not the language we use, the way language uses us.

Recently, I’ve been trying to write about kung fu, which I’ve practiced on and off for a decade. I don’t understand how I can love its violence so much. It’s a question I’m finally writing about.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Now that I’m living in China again, I can’t see this question without thinking about how it might be answered differently in different countries. I’d like to learn how to be an American poet from many of the Chinese poets here and close by in Hong Kong.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
With an editor, you get someone who has to care about your work and treat it with care. That’s essentially all I want, in general.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
When I was in college, I went to hear Lyn Hejinian read at another university, and after asked her to sign my book. She invited everyone who talked to her out for drinks. At the bar, at one point, she said, “If you’re going to write a poem, then write a poem.” Mind blown. I think about what she said often and how if the stress in that sentence is placed on a different word, it changes the meaning entirely. I try to remember what it meant to me then, and compare it to what it means to me now.

I will also say that I will blindly follow any advice Mary Jo Bang gives me, and I’m always glad I did.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to translation)? What do you see as the appeal?
I’m grateful that I’ve had the chance to translate the Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin, and work with my co-translators Faith Jones and Samuel Solomon. Dropkin was an iconoclastic, sexual, secular poet writing sometimes grotesque and often brutal poems, taking love to its disturbing limits. In Yiddish. As an immigrant in America. I don’t write like her, and yet, I’ve learned so much from her. That is one of the many appeals of translation—it allows you to apprentice with the dead as you collaborate with the living.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
This is the first time in my life when I have time set aside just for writing, four hours, four times a week. It’s also the first time in about fifteen years I’m not working. (I’m not really allowed to work in China this go around.) I’m nagged by my inner worker bee with the worry that at the end of this time, I might have nothing to show for it, meaning I won’t have money to show for it, so I’m trying to think of different currencies with which to value my time.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I’m learning to just ride those periods out and not push it. Not look for inspiration and wait until I have something to say or something I want to figure out. Or maybe I’m too lazy to look.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
My kids’ hair.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Is it totally embarrassing to say that I am often inspired by NPR?

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
I’ll stick to living poets who are important to my life and work: Mary Jo Bang, Elaine Bleakney, Jennifer Chang, Stefania Heim, Brett Fletcher Lauer, Idra Novey, Carl Phillips, and Jeffrey Yang.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done yet?
Learn to sail. Have a long conversation in Mandarin in which I make a joke that actually gets a native speaker to laugh. Learn the knife form in the style of kung fu that I do.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Speech therapist. Women’s self-defense instructor.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Who says I don’t do something else? Or do you mean other arts. I am the worst at other arts. I can’t draw a stick figure, carry a tune, etc. etc. I am interested in words, only, as a vehicle for everything humans are and care about.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I admit to having awful taste in movies. I can’t call them films. I will only watch action adventures. Yup, I’m not going to mention names.

I just started a book I can’t believe I haven’t read before. My friend Greg Purcell recommended it to me.  I think I’m going to love it, because I already do and I’m on the 20th page: Samuel R. Delany’s Babel 17.

20 - What are you currently working on?
I just finished the first draft of a kung fu, sci-fi, mystery novel. I wish I were joking.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Jennifer Kronovet, Awayward

THEY PLANTED

a wall of trees

to protect us

from the desert—

protect the same

thoughts again

and again from leaving.

Clattering forge

of the place-mind:

today today.

Girls cry publicly

to penetrate

the specific.

Community air

creates an event:

his hat!

Leaving is not the word.

We lost leaving last

winter. (Hid it.)

Here is without the desert-

stance: earth so

flat I’m a person.

Every so often a book strikes with a force that I have to catch my breath, a feeling I had when I first opened Jennifer Kronovet’s first poetry collection, Awayward (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2009). Admittedly, I might be a few years behind on this one (unrelatedly: this is the first poetry collection the baby has heard read aloud to her, during our weekdays at home), but there is something about the precision and cadence of her work that is reminiscent of the poetry of D.G. Jones, or even the precision and explorations of dark and light in Sarah Manguso’s poems. Produced as the winner of the 2008 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, as selected by Jean Valentine, Awayward includes a short “Foreword” by the judge that includes:

            The poetry invites you in. When I came across Jennifer Kronovet’s manuscript, I thought of Rilke who says we do not want to live in an interpreted world. Her poetry does not interpret, but lightly touches the right brain, the part of us that can enjoy without necessarily understanding, without, as Keats says, “any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” The kind of poetry that you would not need to paraphrase or defend, but that will change you.

            Another wonderful quality of Kronovet’s poetry is that it is interesting: without having plot, or even a fixed persona, it has suspense. And complexity, and humor.

While I’m pleased that Valentine chose this manuscript for the prize, her introduction doesn’t give Kronovet’s work nearly enough credit, almost as though she doesn’t entirely understand what it is that Kronovet’s is doing. Awayward is a book of densely-packed lyrics that bounce from point to point through inquiry over narrative, and reference travel, speak of ideas of being and identity, struggle with comprehension, and question even those things that make the most sense. This is a book of precision, wisdoms both deliberate and accidental, and deep clarity. While everything that Valentine writes about Kronovet’s Awayward might be true, the suggestion that her poems don’t need to be understood to be enjoyed is a bit confusing (and possibly, even, missing the point entirely). Kronovet’s directness makes the work entirely approachable, and “understanding” is as much a matter of approach and style as a red herring. How can one claim not to understand? I’m looking forward to what she publishes next. And, I hope: soon.

TOGETHER

HERE, AT EIGHTEEN ONE MUST CHOOSE to have a bed for dreaming in or a bed for making love in. You think that this would be an easy choice. The sun has set but there is light that makes the country classically itself. If this were before, you would have longed for someone unknown to you. But this person is here, telling you about the first time he realized someone might not like him. She was a nun, and he was a child.

The first years without dreams, you don’t know if you’ve slept. And then you know you have. And then you know you haven’t.

One summer you purposefully stay awake together to imagine the forest inhabited by animals drawn by everyone in the country. You choose your words to make it more real, irritated by slips into the easily known. Be specific about how the deer run. How much of it is graceful and how much of it the violent jerk of fear, or of thoughtlessness.