Fence, Fall/Winter 2002-2003

I begin my reviews with a magazine I bought at a poetry reading. And let me tell you, you are so lucky that I'm here. If you had picked up this magazine yourself, you probably would have gotten nothing out of it. In fact, if I were not obligated to review it, I would have gotten nothing out of it myself! But in my forced march through the book, I discovered a few things.

But let's start with first impressions. The first poet in Fence gives you the impression that she's writing perfectly reasonable poems, but you just don't get them. After that it gets worse. You start to think that these people don't like you. They don't want you to understand their poems. They are laughing at you, mocking you. Each poem can be boiled down to one message: "Fuck you." Indeed, your suspicions about poetry have been confirmed! A bunch of elitists pretending to understand each other. The Naked Emperors Club.

But surely there must be more to this. It's a lot of work to make a magazine, isn't it? Maybe there's a clue in the Editor's Note. Ach, no. These are just notes specific to this issue, and all those two-dollar words where nickel words would do fine. She writes "the more things change, the more they remain the same" in French. Does it really lose anything by translating it to English? Yet again, someone is making things difficult for us. Why would we pay eight dollars for such treatment?

Sigh. We are left to guess at editorial intention, which I will now proceed to do. Oh, and I should mention that a poetry editor from the magazine was at the aforementioned poetry reading, and he gave me a clue when he introduced one of the poets. He mentioned something about her being in the Romantic tradition, and implied that his magazine was part of that tradition as well, or was at least interested in it.

So, a moment to define Romanticism. It's a word that can mean many things, but it's somewhat specific in the context of poetry. It does not mean candlelight and wine and furtive glances. Nor is it a genre, like the movies called "Romantic Comedies." To define Romanticism in poetry, I need to start with the British Romantic movement that began at the end of the eighteenth century. Coleridge and Wordsworth professed that their poems "were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure." In other words, they were going to write poems in plain speech. And with that plain speech, came plain subjects. As long as a poem is about "a natural delineation of human passions, human characters, and human incidents," then it is justified.

Skip ahead a hundred or so years. Over in Hartford, Connecticut we have an insurance VP named Wallace Stevens. He too is interested in a poetry of everyday things. But he wants something purer. Because for all their talk of "language of conversation" those Romantics were still pretty high-falutin' in their verses. The way they worked everyday things into poems was by exalting them, by using them as metaphors for More Important Stuff. Clearly, that's cheating. Let's write about an everyday thing without adding any of our own gloss to it. And that's what Wallace Stevens tried to do. Well, actually no. He wrote about trying to do it. And often, he wrote about failing to do it. Often he wrote that such a thing is impossible to achieve. Why is it impossible? Well, if there were a simple answer to that question, he wouldn't have had to write all those poems. But think about it a moment. Let's say you want to write a poem about a blackbird, and as a neo-Romantic or super-Romantic, you want it to really be about the blackbird. What do you write? Do you describe the blackbird? Well, it's black. Hmm... how do you decide which things to describe? Consider this:

Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

This tells you where the blackbird is and decides to describe one aspect of the blackbird: its eye is moving. What more could you ask for? And yet, this is so clearly not about the blackbird. It's much more striking to note that nothing else is moving among all these mountains. That seems to be the point of this. But no, the point of this is that no matter what you write about the blackbird, it won't be about the blackbird. The blackbird exists in our mind and it is only this blackbird that we can write poetry about:

I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

These blackbirds don't exist at all. They are only part of a figurative expression. Such is the fate of any poetic subject. I have just shared with you the first two sections of Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Not everyone agrees that Wallace Stevens was part of the Romantic tradition, and there is plenty of dispute about just what the Romantic tradition is, but the definition I'm working on will fit Fence magazine in some way, and that's what this article is about, isn't it? Well, isn't it?

Like Wallace Stevens, Fence seems to believe that conventional poetry fails to see things as they really are. In fact, they seem to take a step beyond this (and in my opinion, so does Wallace Stevens) and purport that language itself fails to convey things. (The potential here is tragic. After all, we're not just talking about blackbirds. We're talking about other people, how it may be impossible to truly understand someone else.) And so what does Fence publish? Experiments in language. Attempts to make language say new things. Where else can this be achieved but in poetry? It's the one place where language is not constrained to dutifully report messages and describe facts and work out logic.

So what should it do instead? Spout gibberish? Well, sometimes. But some of these poems are meaningless in ways that can be analyzed and talked about. We can even care about them. Their escape from meaning becomes the adventure itself. Oy, what a claim to make. I better find an example. How about Norths by Marjorie Welish? It is an example of a poem that, the closer you look, the more frustrating it becomes. Look at these strophes:

A limit apropos of paper transiting
to disturb the economic factor

accomplishes it. And it accomplished
an astonishingly light foam.

What the Hell does that mean? Why is it so awkward? You can try to figure out what these sentences mean, but why should you? Shouldn't poetry be graceful? Well, no. Poetry doesn't have to be graceful. Poetry can work its magic in any number of ways. In this case, the awkward language is trying to create a context. By that I mean she is evoking the way certain people use language. Specifically, an academic or technical sort of language. She indulges so much in this context that the style obliterates the meaning. That is why the tenses shift from present to past. That is why she uses awkward passive verbs made from nouns (transiting). That is why you shouldn't spend too much time trying to figure out what that "foam" is. Think of it as a softening of "form" as all meaning is softened by language (another way of saying what I said above about Stevens).

Uh oh. I'm starting to lose you, I can feel it. The important thing to learn here is that you shouldn't read poems the same way you read everything else. When you read a memo, you're worried that it might be about something important that concerns you, so you try to get to the meaning as quickly as possible. Basically, you're looking through the words to find the meaning behind them. When you read a poem, you should stay in the words. This takes some practice, but it is very rewarding.

One way to do this is to look for contexts, as I stated above. What or whom is the poet trying to sound like? If I do a quick survey of the magazine, I find the speech of a child, a test question, a word game, two interrogations and the whispers of conspirators. Among the prose entries, we have the instructions to a game, letters to an alumni magazine, letters to the president, and reports on people's dreams.

The obvious question here is, how can a test question (or whatever else) be a poem? Indeed, that is the question to ask. But not to condemn the poem, rather, as a way to begin to understand the poem. If you actually look for an answer to your question, you'll notice that the test question (which is in the form of an analogy) suggests a story:

This is then followed by a list of 14 other analogies, multiple choice. Now, if this were a test you would have to pick one. But because it's not a test, you don't read through it trying to find the right answer. You look at each answer and see how it resonates with the story up top, and you also look at how the answers resonate with each other. And, yes, there will be a certain amount of frustration, because none of the answers quite fit. But might this not mirror the frustration of being in such a tragic situation? Can't you imagine that no answer would seem to fit if you were trying to make sense of it? By creating an unanswerable test question, the poet has used (or misused) a context metaphorically. The unanswerable test question is a metaphor for the reality of losing someone and feeling guilty about it.

But please don't think that I've just "figured out" this poem (which by the way, is Elegy Analogy I by Ander Monson). I've only just begun. There are more layers. Poetry at its best is a small amount of text with many layers of meaning.

But remember what I said at the beginning. These poems are experiments. So they are not necessarily poetry at its best. Experiments, by definition, are risky things. Sometimes you end up with a poem that is meaningless in its meaninglessness. Some poets have simply gone too far with their disjunctions and we are left with hopelessly confusing poems.

But if you are brave and buy this magazine, the least I can do is make some recommendations:

• Gregory Brender — In The Ostrich-Woman's Heart of Saint Louis, I was touched by the impossibility of what he wants combined with the simplicity and sincerity of his requests. In The Lake Shore Drive Tiger, listen to the rhythm of him going in and out of anger. Maybe that rhythm of feeling is familiar to you.
• Steve Healey — The context of a child's voice. It's exciting to search for the reality of what he's saying, knowing you may never find it.
• Monica Ferrell — Listen to the beauty of this language! That's hard to find in this collection. Remember what I said about blackbirds? Notice how hard she works to not just describe an antelope, but actually make you feel like you are the antelope. In her second poem, instead of hurting your head figuring out what this is about, just listen to the attitudes being expressed here, the feelings, and see if they resonate with anything in your own experience.
• Susan Maxwell — Accept the fact that there are stories here, but she's not telling them. You get a snapshot of the story. It's like you're looking through a window at a family but you can't hear what they're saying and you only have a few moments.
• David Rosenthal — It's good to see someone making good use of line breaks. Check out what each line means before you wrap your eye down to the next line. I also like the repetitions, and the tension between the dialog and the narrative.
• Julia Holmes — Maybe this is about autism, or maybe just about the loss of individuality, or about never having it.
• Joe Wenderoth — A classic case of allegory. Does this game remind you of anything? I know it won't match up as neatly as Pilgrim's Progress, but that's what makes it interesting.

In general, I recommend all of the prose pieces as worth reading. But can I recommend the magazine? No, but I'm not telling you not to buy it either. Not all of these Emperors are naked. Some of them even have ice cream. I commend Fence on its adventurous ideals. I wish I could have reprinted some of these poems for you, but that might be considered copyright infringement. You can find a handful at http://www.fencemag.com. You can also find information there on how to obtain your own copy.