A Best of

The First Nine Years

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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: 2009902549
isbn 1-934200-06-9
isbn 13: 978-1-934200-06-3

Printed in Canada by Printcrafters

Distributed by University Press of New England (upne.com)

All 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
fence.fencebooks@gmail.com

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 Endow-
ment for the Arts.

"
/0Sab]T4S\QSD]Zc[S(>]Sb`gO\R<]\¿QbW]\
B/0:3=41=<B3<BA

AbS^VS\0c`b Fence, or the Happy Return of the

Modernist Alligator 15
@SPSQQOE]ZTT Introduction: Weird Is An Emotion 21
4S\QS3RWb]`a Fence Manifesto of 1997 25

1/@=:7<31@C;>/193@ D]Zc[Sa³$ Distinguishing Areas:

One Experience Editing Fence 29
 0O`PO`O3W\hWU “I Can Control the Car But I Can’t Control
the Road” 40
 1V`WabW\S6c[S Nobody: A Homunculus 44
The Hummed Space Between Marooned and Migration 45
Various Readings of an Illegible Postcard 46
 :SS/\\0`]e\ 333-2451 Susie Asado Break-Down 47
Poison of Gold’s Fly-by-Night Signatures 49
Villanelle on Being Alone 51
 6]O<UcgS\ [Cold black little puddle stops] 52
[Let’s see if she’ll run away] 53
 AbOQg2]`Wa Duet 56
 6O``gSbbS;cZZS\ Denigration 000
 3ZS\WAWYSZWO\]a Essay: Histories III (Early Greece) 57
Essay: Who Thinking on Her Legs (Manifesto) 58
 3cUS\S=abOaVSdaYg Ballad 60
The Consolation of Philosophy 62

4@/<13A@716/@2 D]Zc[Sa³% Guest + Host = Ghost:

Fence Nonfiction 1998–2004 67
 /\\S1O`a]\ Ordinary Time: Virginia Woolf and
Thucydides on War 77

/0=4 #
 Eight Statements From: “Where Lyric Tradition Meets Language Poetry:
Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry by Women” 84
  0`S\RO6WZZ[O\ Twelve Writings Toward A Poetics of Alchemy,
Dread, Inconsistency, Betweenness, and California
Geographical Syntax 84
  @OS/`[O\b`]cb Cheshire Poetics 92
  6O``gSbbS;cZZS\ Poetics Statement 100
  /\\:OcbS`POQV As It Is: Toward A Poetics of the
Whole Fragment 104
  :g\6SXW\WO\ Some Notes Toward A Poetics 108
  :cQWS0`]QY0`]WR] Myself A Kangaroo Among the Beauties 118
  0O`PO`O5cSab Remarks 122
  /ZZWa]\1c[[W\Ua1ZOcRWO@O\YW\S Afterword & Conception 126
 0ZOQYB]]Y1]ZZSQbWdS A Call for Dissonance 131
  2c`WSZ36O``Wa “Pourmoreformore PoMoFunk dunk,
dun paramour” or Duriel E. Harris’ Bootybone Scattergram
scatty pas de quatre in one act 135
  2Oe\:c\Rg;O`bW\ Poetic Statement 1–10 136
  @]\OZR]DEWZa]\ Construction of a Black Poetic Self in
Four Narratives 139
  8]V\9SS\S From Jersey City (Dub Version) 142
Tu No Le Recuerdas 143
Double Agents 144
  UW]dO\\WaW\UZSb]\ Defensive Driving 145
  G]ZO\ROEWaVS` Jo Seraph F(iend)eign 146
Black Took Collective’s Call for Dissonance 150
Fence 1998-2007: Nonfiction, Prose, & Other—A Bibliography 152

;/BB63E@=6@3@ D]Zc[Sa³% Fence 157

 8STT`Sg5cabOda]\ Calypso Illogics 168
 B][Oh à OZO[c\ The Letter 170
àA

$
 1VOaSBeWQVSZZ Bees 171
 0`S\RO6WZZ[O\ Styrofoam Cup 172
 12E`WUVb from Deepstep Come Shining 173
 B]`g2S\b Birth of a Masochist 181
 3WZSS\;gZSa The Red Planet 183
 5WZZWO\1]\]ZSg Alcibiades 190
Socrates 190
 /\bZS` So Now You Know 192
 3cUS\8SPSZSO\c Flower Day 193
The Most 193
 @OS/`[O\b`]cb Counter 194
Currency 195
In Time 196
 4O\\g6]eS Unday at Glenstal Abbey 198
 0`WO\G]c\U Disposable Chinese Camera 24 Shots 202
Recollection 207
 >`OUSSbOAVO`[O Deliverance 212
Miraculous Food for Once 214
Value 215
 <]SZZS9]Q]b Rushing Through the House I Behold the
Numinous Dark of Forks, the Light-Bearing
Phenomenology of Sunrise 216
The Raving Fortune 218
 1VSZaSg;W\\Wa Sternum 220
 1ObVS`W\SEOU\S` Macular Hole 224
She May 225
 5S]TT`Sg<cbbS` 2:53 226
9:02 226
 9`WabW\>`SdOZZSb A Dream of Financial Ruin 227
 AO[B`cWbb from FALLTIME 229
 8O[Sa5OZdW\ Bad Samaritans 231

/0=4 %
 /ZWQS<]bZSg And Who is Crying 232
 8WPORS9VOZWZ6cTT[O\ “The whole cast of them in
hands passing . . .” 235
In An Uncurling Game 237
 8SO\DOZS\bW\S Little House 240
 1O`]ZW\S9\]f Glassworks 241
 9AWZS[;]VO[[SR Summer Breeze 244
Unobstructed 245
 8cZWO\\S0cQVaPOc[ Critique of the Metaphysics of Bees 246
 >OcZ9WZZSP`Se John Fucking Ashberry 248

;/FE7<B3@ D]Zc[Sa ³]\ Being An Oral History of My Work

With and for Fence, 1998 to the Present 253
 ;O`g@cSÀS Among the Musk Ox People 266
 B][2SdO\Sg At the End of the Famous Catalogue of the Ships 267
 1V`WabW\S6c[S Comprehension Questions 269
 :WaO0SaYW\ The Annunciation 270

16@7AB=>63@AB/196=CA3 D]Zc[Sa%³' On Being An Editor

for Fence 273
 B`SgAOUS` Ghosts (2) 286
 8S\\WTS`9\]f The Freezer Works Hardest in the
Middle of the Night 288
 1V`WabWO\>SSb from “The Nines” 289
 @]R`WU]B]aQO\] Postcard to Horace 291
Postcard to Lucretius 292
 5W\O4`O\Q] The Box 294
 5S]TT`Sg2Sb`O\W Semaphore Land 295
 8]\ObVO\2OdWR8OQYa]\ John Singleton Copley’s Favorite 296
 3R@]PS`a]\ Note in a Bottle 299

&
/<B6=<G6/E:3G D]Zc[Sa$ ³' 303
 /[g1ObO\hO\] Chromatica 305
 >OcZ4ObbO`ca] St. Paul in St. Paul 307
 2SP]`OV;SOR]ea from Involutia 308
 9WaVA]\U0SO` Attempted Autobiography 312
 5WZZWO\9WZSg And When 313

9/BG:323@3@ D]Zc[S&³]\ What’s Good? 317

 1O`ZO6O``g[O\ from “Open Box” 328
 /ZZWa]\1O`bS` Razor Sharp Penny Candy 335
 AO`OV5O[PWb] Immigration: Rapprochement 345

8/A=<HCH5/ D]Zc[S' ³]\ Nonfiction: A Frying Pan 347

 :gbZSAVOe A Blackwater Tour of Upper Manhattan
(with Jimbo Blachly) 358

@30311/E=:44 D]Zc[S³]\ 371

 4O\\g6]eS Related 373
 1ZO`S\QS;OX]` Hazy Day in the Composition 376
 BVgZWOa;]aa Tremendous Vehicles 377
 0`WO\G]c\U Sympathetic Magic 379
 >OcZ;cZR]]\ A Half-Door Near Cluny 382
 1VO`ZSa0S`\abSW\ Thinking I Think I Think 383
 AO\Rg0`]e\ Alcoholism 386
Stadia After All 387
 8O\S;WZZS` Two Shops Dealing in Tie-Dyed Fabrics 388
 EWZZ/ZSfO\RS` The Bedouin Ark 391
 5S]TT`Sg=¸0`WS\ What’s American About
American Subject Matter? 398
 8]V\BOUUO`b Two Words Two 401

/0=4 '
 0Sbag/\R`Sea She-Devil 402
 ;WQVOSZ0c`YO`R Black Horses in White Envelopes 403
 1ZO`Y1]]ZWRUS from “Ghosts” 407
 /\bV]\g;Q1O\\ Book of Love 412
My Relationship with Jesus 414
 @SUW\OZRAVS^VS`R Three Songs About Snow 414
 1]ZSAeS\aS\ Viarme 416
1000 Ghost Stories About My Grandfather 416
 9SdW\G]c\U The Props 417
Rhapsody 419
 >SbS`5WhhW Masters of the Cante Jondo 421
 B]];O\gAbO`aAO[EWbbASO\2c`YW\ Excerpts from a Long
Interview with D. A. Powell 426
 :Oc`O2WRgY Friend 431
 5OP`WSZ5cRRW\U Bird 432
 2]\OZR@SdSZZ The Government of Heaven 433
 ;O`Y;Q;]``Wa The Blaze of the Poui: An Epithalamion 439
 5S]TT`Sg1`cWQYaVO\Y6OUS\PcQYZS Shocking Me With
Only Ease 444
Snow Angel 445
 0`O\R]\2]e\W\U 4 Quotes 446
 9O`S\5O`bVS Charter 448
The Azalea Bowmen 449
 /O`]\9c\W\ No Word No Sign 450
 :O\QS>VWZZW^a Seeing As 452
 5`SU>c`QSZZ The Lilting Heavy 456
 2SO\G]c\U Floating Gardenia 458
With Hidden Noise 459
 8]`RO\2OdWa Memoir Distrait 461
 >SbS`5WhhW The Deep End 462


 ;O`X]`WSESZWaV Norths 463
The Breaks 465
Wakes, Possibly Leaves 466
 AO`OV5O[PWb] Fear 467
How to Make Your Daughter an American (Again) 467
 8WPORS9VOZWZ6cTT[O\ Framework 468
 BSR;ObVga [Meanwhile the grove tree…] 470
[Nor the artist…] 470
[Then the synesthetes…] 470
 3ZWhOPSbV@]PW\a]\ Whose Monster’s Noise and Weather 471
 8Oa]\HchUO from 100 Clews 475
 ;O`g@cSÀS The Great Loneliness 477
A Picture of Christ 478
 EOg\SAcZZW\a The Right to Buy 479
Vial 479
 2O\WSZ0]`hcbhYg Sexual Pressure 480
 2O\WSZ9O\S Seven 482
 9ObVZSS\=aaW^ Document (2003) 486
 ;OQU`SU]`1O`R Duties of an English Foreign Secretary 495
 EOg\S9]SabS\POc[ Investigation 499

/0=4 

/0Sab]T4S\QS(BVS4W`ab<W\SGSO`a
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As far as I know, none of the people who shaped Fence expected or

hoped to start a self-conscious movement. More like the reverse: the
early 1990s—especially in poetry, but in fiction too—seemed thick with
schools and movements, manifestos and charismatic teachers, who
mapped out the routes they encouraged young writers to follow. Some
of those routes looked far too much like plans of attack: New writing,
during those years, defined itself too often, and too earnestly, by divi-
sions and by taken sides. Who did you represent? who did you attack?
whose work, and what program, had your work “come out of”? whose
work would you come out against? Were you a Post-Language Poet? a
New Formalist? an Identity Writer? a Confessional? An Apostle of Craft,
or a Poet of Witness? A Minimalist, or a Maximalist? A Big-Ender or a
Little-Ender?
The first editors of Fence knew those sides up close: All of them
lived in New York, and most had come from graduate programs in writ-
ing (Iowa, Columbia, NYU). Those editors (principally Rebecca Wolff,
Caroline Crumpacker, Matthew Rohrer, Frances Richard, Jonathan Let-
hem, and, slightly later, Max Winter) recognized (as the magazine’s title
implied) that there might be fertile ground on both sides of a fence, fun
to be found, and aesthetic profit to be had, in conducting a quasi-covert
trade (“fence” as in “fenced goods”), despite the embargos that kept older
writers apart. Fence wanted to see new writing that felt new, and Fence
knew that such writing would more likely arise the less we felt restrained
by inherited rules; would more likely arise the more we felt able, not
to shrug off, but to combine, to play off against one another (as a fence
might “play” rival buyers, or rival sellers) supposedly incompatible aes-
thetic goals. Like any set of intelligent readers, the editors favored some

/0=4 #
kinds of work, some effects, some tones over others, and you could see
which ones (that is, you could say something about the editors’ tastes)
by seeing, even after the first issue, what work—especially what work by
not-very-famous writers—they chose.
In not becoming a movement, Fence became, as very few literary jour-
nals become, a moment. The late-comers’ interests in hearing all “sides,”
the supposedly immature refusal to choose among competing rules of
thumb, the “fence-sitting/ Raised to the level of an aesthetic ideal” (John
Ashbery), the eclecticism as a goal, the defiance of anything that looked
like a set of rules, turned out to be, not quite a new set of rules, but a
description of where the arts that used words seemed, to the builders of
Fence, to be headed—and, ten years on, of where those arts have been.
Fence was expansive, inclusive, eclectic by temperament and by con-
scious declaration, happy (like Ashbery) to let everything in; careless of
hierarchy; unafraid of frivolity; attracted (like Ashbery) to surface dif-
ficulty, to unresolved dissonance, fragments, and loose threads. Fence
preferred questions to answers—Fence liked questions so much that it
even liked questionnaires: witness the reprinting of Wallace Stevens’
“Response to Twentieth Century Verse Questionnaire,” the contributors’
notes that answered the question “What are you reading?,” and the sym-
posia (live and then on paper) on such questions as “What Makes Ameri-
can Poetry American?,” later satirized in a poem itself published in Fence.
The magazine later played host to manifestos (note, especially, the Black
Took Collective), but the manifestos—manifesti? manifests?—themselves
defended ambiguity, open-endedness, puzzlingness, ambitious attempts
to become and remain multiple, on the part of the artist and on the part
of the art.
That attraction to open-endedness, to pieces of puzzles (but not to the
puzzles as wholes), extended to the wide, even comically overstretched,
range of reference within the stories and poems. Fence works referred to
many, many things, sometimes without explaining any of them: a nine-

$
teenth-century painter who died in a Vermont insane asylum, “maxillo-
facial kisses” that somehow presaged “total emasculation,” old-time radio
(“Don’t touch that dial”), a never-built “ocean front temple substantially
resembling the Pan Am terminal at Kennedy,” the decadent Roman
emperor Heliogabalus, Gertrude Stein’s non-character “Susie Asado,”
Robert Coles’ work on the moral lives of children, Ashbery himself, the
Beach Boys, the Pretenders, and some purely figurative personages who
might feel at home in the verse of Wallace Stevens, e.g. “in the case of
Miss. Fleur vs. The State.” All those references come from the last half
of the same issue (Volume 2, Number 1); Miss Fleur joins us courtesy
of a poem entitled “How All Things Vestigial Gained Prestige”—long
titles, at once winsome and ungainly, became another Fence hallmark
(see, here, especially, Lutz and Kocot). You weren’t supposed to know, or
even to look up, all the bits of culture (high or low or middle), all the
references, in the poems; rather, you were supposed to notice their range,
to say to yourself (I paraphrase): “This world is more various and weirder
than I had expected, and, at least in principle, a work of art can be made
from any subset of its parts.”
The risk in such an approach involved callow irony, a superior skim-
ming over the surface of all things, and an attitude that therefore treated
all things alike. The reward—which, often enough, proved worth the
risk—was a space that seemed to welcome experiments in tone, in scope,
in “voice,” without committing itself to one clear goal. (Fence became
more “experimental” in this sense than the magazines of the self-declared
avant-garde: It’s not an experiment if you already know the results.) Fine
as a venue for new poems and stories (especially for those stories that
would not fit well in commercial venues—too open-ended, too caustic,
too weird), Fence may have had its greatest success in encouraging the cre-
ation, the completion, the discussion, and the dissemination of works of
art that were neither prose narrative nor yet lyric poems: “new essays” and
quasi-journals in verse and prose (see, here, Rankine, Truitt, Wenderoth),

/0=4 %
multi-page explorations of personal-but-not-merely-personal experience,
organized so as to parody kinds of nonfiction, or else shot through with
verifiable fact.
Fashion-forward, eclectic, friendly to irony, unapologetic about the
chaos in some (but only some) of its parts, a place for the young, but
a place for the famous too: that clutch of descriptors fit the magazine,
but it also fit the city from which the magazine came. Though it’s pub-
lished from a campus in Albany now, the look and feel of the journal still
reflects—as the first Fences certainly reflected—the lives of fairly young,
fairly optimistic writers in New York City during (till late ’01) fairly opti-
mistic years: Its melange of qualities, its difficulties and its eclectic fri-
volities, its busy surfaces and its obvious ambitions, its eagerness and its
hypersexuality, characterized the city at that time too. No wonder the
dead writers who looked to the living writers of Fence like appropriate
models were, with one exception, cityphiles themselves: Ashbery, John
Berryman, the Gertrude Stein who spoke to the art-world of Paris, the
Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde, the Frank O’Hara whose post-
humous collection of verse received the appropriately paradoxical title
Standing Still and Walking in New York.
The exception was Emily Dickinson, whose influence on the pres-
ent generation of writers—the ones who placed poems from their first
books in Fence, the ones who “grew up” reading it (if we can say that any
young writer now does grow up)—exceeds her influence on any genera-
tion of writers before. You will find in Fence-ish poems, and even in some
Fence-esque fiction, some characteristics straight from Dickinson: the
whimsy, the oddball stanzaic construction, the tolerance of ambiguities
and privacies, the sense that a clear public declarative voice is for others,
but never for me. At their best these writers channel both Dickinson’s
frivolity and her seriousness: literature is a kind of private game in which
each move may change all the rules, but it is also a way in which we react

&
to the parts of life, the truths of life, that we would otherwise find our-
selves unable to face, unable to say.
There are dangers in trying to separate yourself from the supposed
battles that slightly older, or less attentive, writers want to fight. One
risk: You might seem to cast aside not just those older writers’ combat-
ive rhetoric, but also their accomplishments, leaving the next generation
with little to build on. That danger Fence did well to avoid: It solicited
work from those older writers, and ran some of the best things that those
writers did, at times alongside their own explanations as to how they did
them (see here, especially, Revell, C. D. Wright, Hejinian, Lydia Davis).
Litmags that are all youth, all the time, find it very hard to get atten-
tion; new litmags that are all Names have no reason for being, since the
Names have other places to publish good work. The trick is to combine
the first with the second: Fence, more than any other new mag in its
decade, did the trick.
It’s important not to make, about this or any magazine, claims that no
magazine’s print run could support. Considered under the aspect of eter-
nity, set beside “Lycidas” or Mrs. Dalloway, most of the work in any issue
of Fence—most of the work in A Best of Fence, even—might not look so
good: but that has been true of almost every issue of every literary jour-
nal that has ever been. The good magazines are the ones that can find
some good work; the best are the ones where even the less impressive
works can either entertain an alert reader, or else say something notable
about the state of the language, the state of the age. When we look back
(sometimes not very far back), we find that such magazines defined a
moment. The moment of Fence, it may be, is not over yet.
The turn of the century blessed or cursed Fence with the sincerest
form of flattery: Like woodears on treetrunks, literary journals turned up
in sudden clusters in Brooklyn and Manhattan, in Buffalo and Oakland
and Internetland, with one-syllable titles, sans-serif fonts, post-surrealism

/0=4 '
in their tables of contents, declared policies of youth and eclecticism,
and obvious admiration for some of Fence’s most prominent contributors
(Wright, and Davis, and Dean Young, and Anne Carson). Popularity, as
always, attracts ressentiment: Poets and critics committed to avant-garde
programs said Fence had sold out the avant-garde on which it drew, whose
tricks—like an unscrupulous TV magician—Fence had exposed for gain.
Old-school defenders of High Culture As Such disdained the journal, as
their forebears once disdained William Carlos Williams; at best, those
defenders instead noticed (with some justice) that the range of reference
for most Fence writers extended back confidently to Williams’ genera-
tion, to Spring and All and Tender Buttons and a pack of firecats let loose
in the 1910s, but came to a halt right there.
Williams, twenty years afterwards, wrote that The Waste Land—the
poem that turned Modernism into an Authority, that made collage
techniques, speedy juxtapositions and unstable speakers connote not so
much Brave Experiment as All-Knowing Gloom—had “wiped out our
world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it and our brave
sallies into the unknown were turned to dust.” The springy, deciduous,
gaudy, unscholarly, optimistic immediacies of the New York modernism
that Williams and his allies hoped to create was, Williams had reason to
fear, gone for good.
It wasn’t gone; it was just sleeping, fitfully, somewhere under the
Hudson River, where the metal walls of its tunnel eventually echoed
with old sitcoms, indie-rock practices, twelve-tone recitals, and the stray
jokes of insult comics, where the ducts got clogged with disposable cam-
eras, soggy road maps and high school alumni newsletters (see Lipsyte),
with the detritus of the recent past, which we had mocked but could still
make into art. An optimist about literary magazines in general, a reader
who enjoyed the 1990s, a sometime subscriber—and I have been all those
things—might say that with Fence that modernism awoke.


@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. 277).
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 particu-
lar 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

/0=4 
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 lan-
guage 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.
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, assimi-
lated, 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 writ-
ing 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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