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February 11, 2022
Dear readers,
Fence is made for you. If this is the first literary magazine you are holding in your hands, and especially if you do not identify as a writer, we know you are there, looking for something other than whatever is currently being advertised to you within your sphere among the algorithms and vast monopolizing systems. Hello fellow free-thinking weirdo. Please know you are welcome to join longtime Fence readers and self-identifying writers here.
Fence re-contextualizes current trends, cliques, and establishment-approved experimentation, never shying away from potential controversy when it comes to. publishing idiosyncratic works of literary art that deserve to be found by as many readers as possible. You don’t need to know the secret word to say at the door to be let into this party.
Jason Zuzga and I are hard at work in our new roles as Editorial Directors, talking on the phone and over zoom nearly every day, google docs aflame, digging into what Fence has been and will be as an independent nonprofit publisher of this literary magazine — as well as print books, The Constant Critic, Elecment, Fence Digital, Fence Sounds, and Steaming. I think of Fence as a long serial poem, and we are co-writing in collaboration with all the editors, extending the Sagittarian fires that Rebecca Wolff lit and has kept alight with the generous work of many friends and brilliant writers along the way.
When, in the early fall of 2021 Rebecca 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?
Fence has made it into many classrooms since the late 1990s, so maybe you’re reading this as part of a class. I found Fence when I was a student in Davis, California as a college sophomore. Joe Wenderoth, a mentor and professor, said casually one day in office hours, as we discussed edits he was making in my poems: hey, check out Fence when you get a chance — it’s one of the only literary magazines worth reading these days. He didn't tell me what I would find, but he was sharing something he knew I was ready for.
UC Davis had its own literary divides at that time in 2006, which was confusing, frustrating, and nearly stifling to me as a 21-year-old writer who was just falling in love with poetry, thinking deeply about it, and trying to gather the courage to practice it seriously. So, when I stopped into Newsbeat (an independent fixture in Davis, selling newspapers from all over the world, candy, cigarettes, and an impressive array of magazines and journals) I simultaneously almost cried, almost laughed, and held my breath as I began to read. I must have stood there for three hours before realizing I was bending all the pages, and that I could buy it and go home to read it for as long as I wanted. (The owners didn't mind that I was hanging out there so long.) After that, I immediately looked for previous issues. I think I found some in a library. And I'm about to tell you another piece of the story, which I have debated whether I "should" share — but I realize it is necessary to this narrative.
In that autumn of 2006 I was in remission from Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, now more commonly referred to by western medicine doctors as Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (RSD/CRPS). It was hard for me to walk, and I was gaining back strength and mobility after a number of difficult months. My illness and recovery process had made me even more skeptical of conformity, standardization, cliques, and homogenous "like-minded communities.” No longer a contributor to the winning product of collegiate Division 1 NCAA swimming, a highly conforming, curated group of performers — a self-sacrificing culture that had driven me to injure and reinjure myself in competition — I was discarded. And I yearned for friends and community, to find others who would understand what it was like to be neither/nor and both/and. Although I had felt this way for as long as I could remember, I could no longer hide it — my lyric ‘I’ was placed firmly in this space of “a yes and a no at the same time” as Paul Celan challenges poets to enact in every poem they write.
It was during this first season of unassociation that I came upon Fence and the beautifully various writers gathered in its pages. Reading it cover to cover, a new radical symphony began — one of individuals in loose community who admired one another ’s idiosyncrasies, who held multiple truths in sensuous simultaneity, thus contributing to the joyful detox of patriarchal infestations in literary bodies.
Now Fence is at the center of my mind, and I am arriving at a meeting of my past and present bodies colliding in renewing transition. I grapple with whether to identify my body as "disabled" in grant applications and elsewhere. According to US government definitions, I can, since I have a "history of disability" and PTSD as a result of that disability — I will be classified as “in remission” from RSD/CRPS for the rest of my life, unless there is a change in the medical literature as a result of new research. I am also healing from all of that, slowly, nonlinearly; I don't want to primarily frame myself as a writer with a disability who writes disability-themed poems. At the same time, I remember what it was like to be ignored, or looked at awkwardly when I was on crutches, with messy hair, basic clothes, no makeup, and huge dark circles under my eyes since I could barely sleep with RSD/CRPS’s constant nerve pain. One finds one’s own path, if listening in — if you're feeling a little bit lost and unhinged but want to find your own way through it — not someone's else's — you'll find friends and invitations for free and open thinking/being in these pages.
Yours, in reading,
EMILY WALLIS HUGHES
P.S. Many thanks to Rebecca Wolff for inviting Jason Zuzga and me to co-write this Editors' Note. I have learned so much about the art of editing from Rebecca, and I am in awe of her courage, resilience, and strength as a woman, writer, and publisher. She is a mother-poet, an intersectional feminist goddess; a patriarchal influencer 's worst nightmare.
P.P.S. I offer thanks to Matthew Rohrer, Editor of Fence Past, whom I first encountered through his work as Poetry Editor. I later sought him out as a mentor in graduate school. I am grateful in all ways for our serendipitous friendship in poetry and in the arts of teaching and editing.
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Moment Noted
4:29am Feb 13 2022
The whirlpool is full of . . . fluorescent prophesies. — Daniel Brenner, June, Fence Books
Dear Fence readers,
I have always been fascinated with media and how they shape a subject's world. Mr. Rogers and my Dad entered the house at the same time each day; I’d greet whomever arrived first in the TV room, calling out “Dad!” Every Sunday, a bit older, I would memorize the prime-time grids in our local newspaper ’s TV guide, reveling in the smell of the pages, in knowing the precise space-time location of Dynasty and Cheers. My dad transferred 8mm rolls of silent mid-1970’s home movies to VHS, using a large machine on the kitchen table. An odd doubled time was captured: on the image track my brother and I are infants or toddlers; on the sound track you can hear our 8- and 10-year-old voices, my mother talking to us, and the transfer machine’s whirring. My mom is a former high school English teacher of Siddhartha and Julius Caesar; those two books were lying on the same kitchen table every year.
The medium via which literature travels is part of the meaning that occurs. A book beholds you, is very patient and really there with you on a hill or under a blanket or in the tub. The book itself is not trying to absorb and reflect and grab you.
Recently I managed to dig through digital layers, excavating one of several short video files I uploaded into the internet in 2001 when helping to build a major publisher’s first website: a recording of a Fence benefit performance of Anne Carson’s opera Decreation. I’ve uploaded it to https://fenceportal.org/about-fence/; scroll all the way to the bottom, where you’ll also find a little essay I wrote describing those early years of Fence, how I looked on as Fence transformed and ultimately bridged real deep divisions among poets at that time through its elevation of fence-sitting, as Rebecca calls it in her Editor ’s Note in the first issue, a sidewink at the line by John Ashbery. She felt an imperative to open up and make available — for herself and others — a publishing space unaligned with the experimental language poetry team or the lyric confessional poetry team. Rebecca deconstructed the rules of 1998. I believe that, as a direct result, idiosyncratic voices are able to be heard.
I want you to know that Rebecca, Emily, myself, and all Fence editors did actively discuss whether at this juncture Fence should shift to digital-only. In the end we have resolved to explore the digital and to continue anchored in the physical — the tangible, no-charger-necessary print copies crafted for you with human labor and our real and now-alive eye-hand-minds. Fundraising can be daunting, but it is a dire necessity as our costs are not met by any endowed institution. We are dependent on the community which receives us. We offer our work in trade for your support through purchases and contributions. Remaining in print requires extensive fundraising labor. We will be 1) trying to convince humans to become or remain subscribers, members, and donors; 2) applying alongside so many other nonprofits for the few grants available; 3) experimenting: email Emily and me with suggestions at membershipfence@gmail.com. We offer many levels of membership (described at fenceportal.org/support), benefit reading/performance events, and an art auction we will be holding just weeks after this very issue is first released.
Help Emily and myself remain resolute media fence-sitters, playing across multiple channels braided in relation and possibility. Imagine the street full of horses with wide open eyes observing you gazing lovingly into your phone. What was lost when those everywhere-animal-eyes were lost in time, those eyes a sea of headlights?
We are captivated by the unique potentials of all media. Emily edits the platform Elecment, “electing creative-critical engagements with poetry and poetry adjacent arts,” at fencedigital.com/elecment. I started the podcast Fence Sounds, teaching myself Audacity to make an audiobook of each issue available for free. And I can’t stop playing with apps on my phone and making little videos for my nephews.
Mediums have their unique potentials. The printed book isn’t as liquid hot as Marshall McLuhan’s electronically transmitted media; the TV screens he described are now screens glowing crowded with media modes, a beguiling mesh of inputting and outflowing information, attention and surveillance, coded data configured to manifest for the receivers. We are fusing with our technologies. I miss the books-and-records of my childhood, I miss my Fisher-Price record player, a voice reading the story as I simultaneously read the book, words at the gateways of eardrums and retinas.
Fence Sounds: fenceportal.org/podcast.
Go to your nearest grocery store or bodega. Buy some canisters of whipped cream. Lay down newspaper or aluminum foil on your bedroom floor. Press the canister's plastic tip and cream spray out ten words you read in the first 50 pages of this issue, or Lenny Bruce’s seven bad words. Then crawl around and eat them. Explore what that does in your brain. This exercise can be done anywhere; it works well in a classroom.
Once I was sitting in my mom’s backyard with a pile of poetry proof pages. Caught by a gust of wind, the loose pages whipped up and over the fence required by local law to prevent anyone from falling into our pool. Uncle Al, who lived next door, knocked on the gate about an hour later. He held the papers out to me and asked, “What is this, I’ve never read anything like it, are there more words?” Protect this object from moisture and throw this copy of Fence if you are holding it now into someone’s yard. Be a medium, advocate for Fence to circulate. The words of the nurses and the poets and the writers of fiction blaze unprecedented paths and channels of connection — the words will jump into the light.
Language is material; language is action. Eat, smoke, soak, and lick these pages. We’re sitting across from you on a big, velvety-comfy couch, caffeinating and dripping eye drops into our editing eyes in preparation for a new era, for what’s next in reading cultures. We will make those cultures together.
Yours et cetera,
Jason Zuzga
