SECOND
LANGUAGE INTERFERENCE
When learning a third
language, one often accidentally uses the second tongue, even if it’s barely
rooted. In that moment of interference—there is a box in the mind that springs
open. occupied. Two spiders per web. The dark matter of conflict. There is a
shifting, making space for the stranger getting onto your subway car. You are a
subway car. Or the language is in you like a mind. (Jennifer Kronovet)
By
now, you’ve most likely figured out that one of my favourite American literary
journals is Fence magazine, and their
most recent issue recently arrived at my door: Fence magazine #29 (spring-summer 2014). I have to say I was
charmed by Trey Sager’s editor’s note at the opening of the issue, titled only “EDITOR,”
in which he discusses the process of a small handful of editors with varied
tastes and biases, working together to produce various issues. The piece ends with:
Our conversations about
what we want to publish have included shared enthusiasms and interests in work
from different categories spanning (at minimum) race, age, sexuality, gender,
class, level of artistic success, languages, and aesthetics, and how to find
stories therein that are challenging and new and explosive and relevant. But I’ve
also come to a temporary conclusion that a roster of diverse stories is what’s
most important to me. Why? Because that means we’re reading stories on their
own terms, that we’re not beholden to a reductive or singular idea of what “high
quality” is. I also believe that a diverse group of stories necessarily results
in a diverse group of authors. As a democracy, the give Fence fiction editors are each other’s fail-safes. We help check
each other’s underlying motives. The subconscious is some deep shit.
Probably ours is not a
perfect system, but the latest result is the fiction in this issue, a diamond
of a gamut. More or less I’m still following the same Sherpa as before, only
now he’s wearing an Iron Maiden tee and quotes Charles Olson, “Limits / are
what any of us / are inside of.” Where’s he taking us? Up the mountain, of
course.
Everybody carries some
water.
Part
of that broad scopes includes the caveat that, once published in an issue of the
semi-annual Fence, that same author
can’t submit again for two years, providing any reader the opportunity to
discover at least a couple of very interesting authors previously unknown in
every issue. I’m always happy to see new work by Brian Kim Stefans, Jenny Zhang, Evie Shockley, Cara Benson, Jacob Wren, John Pluecker, Sampson Starkweather, Barry Schwabsky, Katie L. Price and Laura Mullen, for example, but
was also quite pleased to be able to discover the works of writers such as Dawn Marie Knopf, Jennifer Kronovet and Sandra Simonds; Simonds’ sequence, “The Lake
Ella Variations” is worth the price of admission alone. A fragment of the
thirteen part sequence reads: “The song of the lake and the song of the human /
make / the electric chair. // The song of the hand and the syringe / make / the
bread-maker. // The song of the wheat flour and sticker-book / make / the bed.”
Sager makes the case for a strong array of fiction in each issue, but it is
always the poetry that strikes me first (perhaps my own bias is simply coming
through). It is through journals such as Fence
that make me optimistic of the state of literary culture, and some of the
possibilities of the poem, opening every issue to a series of striking short
lyric poems and/or sequences, such as this, the opening of Dawn Marie Knopf’s
sequence, “selections from THE ARIAL CRITIQUES”:
The boundary gathers
all along the length of the same. If I recollect with any
accuracy I felt it just
after we passed the Interstate Shield but you likely dumbed
down the controls for
my sake, my simple mind. One side is on this side
and one side is on the
other side. To cross Stateline is to re-establish
our conversation. Over our
second course in the third town in the great land
Perpetua I continue
with what I saw.
