Jason Zuzga

Jason Zuzga

NONFICTION: A FRYING PAN

One summer night after work in 2001, I attended my second Fence sponsored event, a fundraiser for the journal held both onboard and in proximity to "The Frying Pan," a former lightship then anchored at Pier 63 in the Hudson River off Manhattan. I stepped through a gate: breezes off the river played across the mingling hierarchy of literati, the glitter of fairy lights, the brassy scent of the old metal boat. My recollection is hazy, I had white wine—I found my friend Brian Blanchfield (who would eventually also have a span of time as a Poetry Editor of Fence), who was then, like me, a 20-something editorial assistant for a corporate literary publisher and aspiring poet. Brian introduced me to his friend Caroline Crumpacker, one of the Fence poetry editors. We clambered onboard to poke around the ship and find the embedded DJ.

The above paragraph is "nonfiction." This essay is an attempt to discuss my relationship thus far in my life to Fence as I was requested to do for this anthology. As well, I'll try to explain my understanding of the term “Nonfiction/Other.” I asked that the “Other” be added to my title when I accepted the position. Nonfiction is a term that is the only definition by negation. Nonfiction is linked to the world but is no arbiter of some objective truth. I think of Francis Ponge's prose poems as an attempt to define "nonfiction" through action, wrestling between subject, language, and object that gives words as temporary holds. The words can be trimmed, edited, crafted into something that becomes something other than a document but instead something documentary, a record of craft as the negotiation with encounter and a place of encounter for the reader.

Back to the boat. I actually don't remember if we looked for the DJ or if we just came upon him spinning.

By the time of the Frying Pan event, I knew about Fence: a journal with significant publishing-world buzz, a journal whose self-proclaimed mission was to put mainstream and avant-garde poetry in communication through juxtaposition, or at least rub them together to create pleasure, discomfort, productive confusion of assumed divisions and productive thwarting of willful ignorance. I had submitted poem s to Fence, poems that had been met with a form rejection. (Later, in 2001, I would have a few sections of my poem 100 Clews accepted and published in its pages.)

A form rejection is perhaps a kind of nonfiction—a trace of a moment of a reader's lack of enthusiasm, a stock sequence of words marking a lack of increased pulse rate or hormone rush. A form rejection creates a physical reaction in a particular reader; tear ducts well with salty water, a fist meets the wall, a mere sigh perhaps. Nonfiction/Other, from one angle, might be a record of open encounter rather than stock response, an exquisite trace of words pointing to a place perceived and the place of the perceiver in time and space. But I’m interested in the form rejection, other forms, as well, as an instance of this genre.

The first Fence-sponsored event I was in the audience for had been held a few months before the Frying Pan event. That first event I had attended officially in my job-capacity as editor and roving ersatz documentarist for the Knopf website in order to videotape the Fence benefit performance of Anne Carson's opera, Decreation.' If not actually sung words-in-melody, the opera's musicality was composed of the chanting, the variable timbre of voices. Come cherries come. Come quickly. The video files are no longer accessible from the main Knopf webpage, but the bytes of memory holding these video files—as of this writing (I just checked )—have not yet been set free. You can still just barely see and hear the performance as primitive internet video, starring Anne Carson, Susan Minot, Wallace Shawn, Larry Pine—remember, this is long before YouTube—at http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/carson/performance.html.[1]

Words have their own qualities, engaging the senses in a different way than video images. Words' austerities can result in detachment. I'm interested in words of attachments, that loop the reader in.

Research reveals: the Frying Pan had lain half sunk underwater in Baltimore for years, then been raised. The exterior was refurbished, the interior less so, some rust and barnacle crust left intact to provoke a certain frisson of authenticity and shipwreck. The boat's original intended purpose, as "lightship," or "light vessel;' was to remain permanently anchored above the southern tip of the Frying Pan shoals off Cape Fear, North Carolina; a ship with nowhere to go. The Frying Pan was itself the message indicating the presence of something unseen beneath the water. All U.S. light vessels were decommissioned in 1985, replaced with "Texas Towers" resembling oil rigs.[2] Several obsolescent lightships, including the Frying Pan, have been repurposed as hireable environments.[3]

I think that part of Fence's mission (at least as I understood it then to be) has begun to be realized to the chagrin and/or delight of different readers—now, for example, that a writer claimed to belong to the avant-garde, such as Rae Armantrout, has been published in The New Yorker[4]4 Those who like shibboleths of exclusive community might feel the greatest chagrin as Rae Armantrout makes such a public and recontextualized appearance. I believe that the more people who have access to Rae Armantrout's work, the more contexts in which it appears, so much the richer becomes the ongoing life of the poem, a life in which the writer may be only a small, initiating part.

In 2002, I printed out the comment storm instigated by Steve Evans's essay "T he Resistible Rise of Fence Enterprises" and read all the provocation and response with witness-to-history-in-the-making amusement as spectator but also already as Fence partisan.

The mingling of document, fact, and art can be the grounds for further productive friction in Fence, as it has already been in such pieces as the one by Lytle Shaw and Jimbo Blachly which follows this essay. In the case of the comment storm, I was reading "documents" as "entertainment." I was recontextualizing them by reading practice. I think at the time I was more interested in the dynamic formal aspects of the arguments than in their particular academic/passionate data content. Yet I learned some facts in the process, facts under negotiation. Any gulf between writers committed to fact and writers suspicious of fact is one I hope Fence may now wholeheartedly work to bridge.

Caroline, whom I 'd first met at the Frying Pan event, called me in late 2006 to ask me if I'd be interested in taking her place as nonfiction editor, a position she assumed for a period of time after Frances. Since originally meeting Caroline, I had finished an MFA in poetry in Tucson in poetry and creative nonfiction, spending a year driving around in a 1990 Toyota Corolla Canadian-kilometer station wagon writing my manuscript of "creative nonfiction"—accounts of travels to and from with meditations on various earthworks in the southwest. One of these essays, on the death of Robert Sm Smithson, has been published in the Seneca Review under the category of "lyric essay.' This phrase "lyric essay," as discussed by John D'Agata in The Next American Essay and elsewhere, gets at what l hope to massage and smack around in my own capacity as editor. I like the label "lyric essay;" I like it better than "creative nonfiction." Still, I fret over the effects of any guiding genre-label as a perceptible or imperceptible constraint that risks filtering g out a curious and perhaps not very " lyric" noise that may lead a writer somewhere unexpected.

" Nonfiction/Other" hopefully suggests something that would not exactly be either, and not even be exactly itself. Here is an example of text that might fall under " Nonfiction/Other," a list, a working definition:

transcript, testimony, description, textual derive, found text, text collage, letter, chart, essay, index, co mmentary, caption, confession, reci pe, diary, minut es, to-do list, commandment, l aw, signature, memo, manual, contract, bill, advertisement, notice, receipt, birth announcement, obituary, address, speech, reportage, declaration, case history, diagnosis, prescription, directions, invitation, itinerary, schedule, catalogue, encyclopedia, profile, memoir , autobiography, biography, preface, rant, polemic, manifesto, abstract, complaint, weather forecast, observations, measurements, code, hagiography, history, ethnography, stage directions, blurbs, blogs, headline, byline, nutrition facts, prophecy, horoscope, spell, curse, hex, epitaph, axiom , maxim, proverb, adage , evaluation, proclamation, postulate, hypoth esis, aphorism, riddle , brainteaser, prognosis, travelogue, ple dge, exegesis, toast, appreciation, directory, guide, commendation, recommendation, menu, almanac, natural history, statute, synopsis, syllabus, summary, prayer, ship's log, review, wish list, want ad, lexicon, editorial, spoil e r, bulletin , press release, herbal, commonplace, manifest , arcade project, pillow book, georgic, alhambra, address, play-by-play, introduction, interview, conversatio n, Spalding Gray monologue, intersong cabaret chi tchat , consolation, sub title, bestiary, kamasutra, rebu ttal, resu me, cv, verdic t, register, greeting, charter, license, deed, bond, signage, indenture, treaty, pact, convention, survey, slogan, sound bite, password, proposal, decree, threat, warning, dedication, summons, newsfeed, hint, query, saga, afterword, credits, bibliography, footnote, endnote, annotation, request, plea, warrant , stay-of-execution, scrawl, pardon, sentence, dissertation, digest, deposition, monograph, newsletter, squib, etymology , definition

Hopefully, the presence of "Other" keeps the above list provisional. The frame of the journal recontextualizes any of the above.[5]

In the case of a real spell, articulation in mind or aloud regardless of context might turn the reader into, say, a hawk or pink penguin.

The spell of "Nonfiction" creates expectations of and attentions to places and things in space and time, allowing us to maneuver through the world as good situationists, to exchange, and manipulate ourselves and world. For example, consider the following quote from Gerald of Wales's 1188 work The History and Topography of Ireland:

There are many birds here that are called barnacles ... I have seen many times and with my own eyes more than a thousand of these small bird like creatures hanging from a single log upon the sea-shore ... They hang by their beaks ... having put on a stout covering of feathers, the y either slip into the water, or take themselves in flight to the freedom of the air.

For centuries, the presence of such text made obvious the avian nature of the barnacle; the presence of other texts in our lives right now makes other things, for us, equally obvious as the goose barnacle's life cycle was to Gerald.

The reader 's movement through nonfiction I think might be different than through differently self-identified texts. The reader must assent to the plausibility of each statement; if assent is withheld, the work morphs into fiction. The nightclub / lightship / shipwreck Frying Pan was once anchored in place above the nautical hazards of the shoal, held in place by a two-ton mushroom anchor.[6] The Frying Pan sat at the bottom of Baltimore Harbor; now it is tethered at the end of the pier. It moves and stands and sinks as one learns its history, as one reads the indexical marks of its passage on its very own hull, perceiver touching the hull.

“Since the early 19th century, lightships have used mushroom anchors, named from their shape, which typically weigh 3-4 tons…The effectiveness of these anchors improved dramatically in the 1820s, when cast iron anchor chains were introduced (the rule of thumb being 6 feet of chain for every foot depth of water). [7] The lightships used the structure of a boat to anchor permanently a signal that could be tended but not move, confusing the category of boat. The boat's ability to roam above a hazard and shine a warning to other ships was limited to the six feet of chain for every foot depth of water. To break that constraint, that chain, would be to float free, a floating signifier, the hazard no longer signaled.

Three nonfiction excerpts:

There was little in the appearance of fallen bricks and stacks of chimneys to allure the imagination into soothing melancholy reveries; nothing to attract the eye of taste, but much to afflict the benevolent heart. The depredations of time have always something in them to employ the fancy or lead to musing on subjects which, withdrawing the mind from objects of sense, seem to give it new dignity: but here I was treading on live ashes.

—Mary Wollstonecraft

Like the eye, the ear has only a very limited power of separation. The eye must have recourse to a slowing down . . . Similarly, the ear needs sound to be enlarged in time, i.e., sonic slow motion, in order to discover, for instance, that the confused howling of a tempest is, in a subtler reality, a manifold of distinct noises hitherto alien to the human ear, an apocalypse of shouts, coos, gurgles, squalls, detonations, timbres, and accents for the most part as yet unnamed.

—Jean Epstein

Alert: Right whales arc active off NC. Station FPSN7- Frying Pan Shoals. NOAA recommends vessels reduce speeds below 10 knots, when consistent with safe navigation. For the latest sightings, go to http://www.ndbc. noaa.gov/station_page.php?station::FPSN7. .

—'NOAA's National Data Buoy Center

The first piece I selected as an editor for Fence, excerpts from Brad Cran's manuscript "Cinema Verite and the Collected Works of Ronald Reagan: A History of Propaganda in Motion Pictures" is, among other things, a gesture toward the pleasures, tensions, and limits of nonfiction. I choose it to appear along with one of my favorite pieces of nonfiction published in Fence, a collaboration between Lytle Shaw and Jimbo Blach ly, which pokes brilliant fun in its own way at its own limits, attempting to document the sites of the disappear ed springs of New York City.

At the same time, the reader sees/seeks the missing water. The water is missed.

[1] Decreation was performed Monday, Apri 30, 2001 at 7:30 p.m. at the Culture Project in New York City.

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20091002064011/http://www.nantucketlightship.com:80/nlshome.html

[3] http://search.boatshop24.eo.uk/5422069-LIGHT-SHIP-RESTAURANT-r38.htlm

[4] Tuesday, May 16, 2006

" Rae Armantrout in The New Yorker"

Are others as surprised as I am? Really, have we slipped into a parallel universe? It isn't online, but the contents are ...

http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2006/05/rae-armantrout-in-new-yorker.html

Saturday, May 20, 2006

"Rae Armantrout in The New Yorker"

Startling occurrence: Rae Armantrout has a poem in The New Yorker! It is entitled"The Ether" and is on page 74 of the May 22, 2006 issue. It is a sensitive and mercurial piece. Can we now ho pe for a more varied presentation of American poetry from the magazine? Since so many "general" readers get their idea of poetry from the poems published in The New Yorker, it would be nice if it was more democratic, actually representative of the "scene ."

http://elephantwirl.blogspot.com/2006/05/rae-armantrout-in-new-yorker.html

But I don't think that's how we read it all. Armantrout is that most curious of language writers- the post-avant whose work has been accepted in such pre- or even anti-avant venues as The New Yorker without sacrificing its fundamentally radical nature.

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2008/03/early-this-evening-i-will-wend-my-way.html

[5] From the OED,"other" definition A.2.c.:

every (also (dag|each) other (emem): every second (emem), every alternate (emem). c1460 (?c1400 ) Tale of Beryn 1256, I woll no lengir suffir this aray, To clothe the al new ech othir day. a1475 Bk Hawking in T. Wright & J. O. Halliwell Reliquiæ Amiqua: (1845 ) I.

296 Loke that thy hawke tire every other day while she is fleyng, for nothing woll dense a hawkes hedde as tyryng. 1588 R. GREENE Perimedes sig. Diii , Spending euery other day in such sporte. 1607 E. TO PSELL Hist. Fovre- fooced Beastes 397 Euery other day clense both

the woundcs and rowels. ar688 J. WALLACE Descr. Orkney (1693) 94 Umboth, the great Tiend of either half of the Parish: so called because every other year it was changed with the Minister for his half: for the word Umboth signifieth time about. 1713 SWI FT Let. 25 Jan . (17 66 ) I. lxxxiii. 147 We now resolve to .... have a com mitt ee every other week. 1777 F. BURNEY Early Diary (1889) II. 196 He...made his horse dance in and out by every other tree, Hay fashion. 18n J. AUSTEN Sense & Sensibility II. i.ii. Though they met at least every other evening... they could not be supposed to meet for the sake of conversation. 1840 R. H. DANA Two Years before Mast iii. 18 They divide the time between them, being on and off duty,...every other four hour s. 1877 M. OLIPHANT Makers of Florence (ed. 2 ) lntrod. 13 Every other year there was a revolution. 1946 Proc. Soc. Exper. Biol. & Med. 63189/2, 210 mice were sensitized...by 4 consecutive intraperitoneal injections of l ml each of undiluted horse serum every other day.1981 G. BOYCOTT In Fast Lane viii. 42 Reading Joseph was like missing out every other page ...one right, miss one; one right, miss one.

[6] “Understand that they set their automatic pilot to home in on our signal: if someone on watch on the other ship failed to change over to manual steering we would be goners. For the finale of this story, we rode out Hurricane Donna. I was on the bridge with the Executive officer, Boatswain Mate Chief Eugene Pond (now Deceased ). We were watching the anemometer (wind measuring device) when at 100 mph, the needle went to zero. We thought it had twisted the cable off but later we saw that it simply was blown away. We had what we esti mated at 50 foot waves.”— Captain David Melvin

https://web.archive.org/web/20080817222844/http://www.fryingpan.com:80/lifeframe.html

[7] h ttp://en.wikip cdia.org/wiki/ Lightvessel