A review of Brandon Downing’s Lake Antiquity in Eye Magazine
& of Cathy Wagner’s My New Job at The Rumpus
& Fence Books’ author Macgregor Card, guest-blogging for/at the Poetry Project
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Also, how about this deal?!
Subscribe for two years and get a free copy of A Best of Fence, volume of choice. Select the volume you want from the pull-down menu. A classic!
Good morning. Fence has over the past recent years been implicated, or included, in a number of references to some kind of idea of “hybrid” form in poetry or of a “third way,” for example here (post dated 3/22, toward the end of it). The problem with relating these notions to Fence lies in that they are prescriptive, and proscriptive, and Fence is never that, is none of that, will have no part in that. A hard thing to articulate about Fence–but it is done in slow motion throughout our under-read collection A Best of Fence, if you’re interested–is that while Fence has functionally represented writing from the proposed two-party system, acting as a kind of vessel of containment–or more obviously as a fence upon which it all can sit together–really the positivist support Fence wishes to give is not to some new “third” or hybrid kind of writing but rather to the continuous impulse that has been there all along and has shown itself throughout centuries, in various landscapes and cultural productions, to write however the F**K one feels like writing, free from overdetermining forces. Of course, the way one feels is determined by all sorts of forces, including the personally historical, the socially ideological, how late one stayed up, and the poetry one read. But remains inviolable for all that. Not to be denied. And that’s how the beautiful subjectivity lives on, holding hands with the stunningly tumescent cultural materiality.
Just back from AWP, and dealing with the strong desire to continue putting books in people’s hands that way forever. Subscribe for two years and get a free copy of A Best of Fence, volume of choice. Just select the volume you want from the pull-down menu. If you want both volumes, email us at fencesubscriptions at gmail.com and we’ll talk.
REVIEWS of FENCE BOOKS!
Laura Sims’s Stranger reviewed by Jacqueline Davis at Bookslut
Douglas Kearney’s The Black Automaton reviewed by Ed Skoog on www.ronslate.com
(I’ll save you the scrolling; it’s pretty far down.)
Douglas Kearney culture-jams his pages to a visceral, wild life in The Black Automaton, which, through its typographical mapping of mumble and shout, seems as much a book of graphic design as a collection of poems, but what great poems they make, engaging the reader’s eyes, ears, and understanding. These visually signaling poems, destinations themselves, serve in the book as transitions between more conventional-seeming poems and sequences, like graffiti between storefronts perhaps (graffiti by many hands, full of allusion and call-backs) (these poems are almost 3-D; one might need crazy glasses to read them). These intervening poems are built-to-last desolations and joys. Joy at making poetry & music & art is ever-present in The Black Automaton; the desolation is a city desolation, cities of “searchlights and dead cats” and cruelty that are at times Los Angeles and New Orleans, at other times more conceptual cities, including the community of “washed offices” where cover letters declare “I should like to publish in your little magazines.” It’s a wild book, a direct challenge to contemporary poets to speak up and not succumb to merely over and over doing the robot.
Brandon Downing’s Lake Antiquity reviewed by John Olson on his blog, Tillalala Chronicles
& a review of A Best of Fence: The First 9 Years, by Ann Dewitt at The Faster Times
READING!
Macgregor Card, Karen Weiser, and Lucy Ives TOMORROW, April 1st, at Bar 82 (136 2nd Ave, right between St. Mark’s Place and 9th Street) as part of the St. Mark’s Bookshop Reading Series
AWP!
FENCE will be stationed at Table J26 in Hall A at the Hyatt Regency, so you’ll find us (and our miraculous book & subscription deals) there, from Thursday morning through Saturday afternoon.
FENCE BOOKS & 1913: a journal of forms are hosting a happy hour, Saturday from 5-7, at Mario’s Double Daughter’s Salotto, 1632 Market Street. Readers include: Macgregor Card, Bruce Covey, Ben Doller, Brandon Downing, Adrian Kien, Aaron Kunin, Richard Meier, Josie Sigler, Edwin Torres, Cathy Wagner and Lynn Xu.
said Macgregor/Brandon after this party/screening/reading
hosted by .our friend. Sarah Lariviere
with inspiration by .our friend. Brandon Shimoda
Check out our events page to find Magregor/Brandon in a West Coast town near you.
We’re only accepting applications through tomorrow. If you’re interested, send a letter (of interest of course), a resume or CV, and a 6-page writing sample to iwannabeyourpoetryeditor@gmail.com
Fence and SLS have joined forces again: the 2010 literary contest could win you a trip to Montreal, Lithuania, or Kenya!
We are excited to have Mary Gaitskill judging fiction submissions and Mary Jo Bang judging poetry.
Contest winners in the categories of fiction and poetry will have their work published in Fence, as well as the participating literary journals in Canada, Lithuania and Kenya. Additionally, they will have the choice of attending (airfare, tuition, and housing included) any of the SLS-2010 programs – in Montreal, Quebec (June 13 – 27); Vilnius, Lithuania (August 1 – 14); or Nairobi-Lamu, Kenya (December).
Second-place winners will receive a full tuition waiver for the program of their choice, and third-place winners will receive a 50% tuition discount.
A number of select contest participants, based on the overall strength of their work, will be offered tuition scholarships, as well, applicable to the SLS-2010 programs.
Contest Deadline: February 28, 2010.
Click here for guidelines & to submit.
Fence is looking for a new poetry editor to join its current three editors (Katy Lederer, Charles Valle, Max Winter), who all report to editor Rebecca Wolff. Responsibilities include: Vetting approximately 500 submissions per year through an electronic submissions manager; participating in group editorial meetings (online and/or in person); sporadic soliciting; correspondence with accepted poets and with Fence management. This position is unpaid. A two-year commitment is required. Interested parties should send a six-page writing sample, resume, and letter of interest to associate editor Colie Collen at: iwannabeyourpoetryeditor@gmail.com. Women and persons of color are strongly encouraged to apply.
>>> The new Constant Critic, edited by Karla Kelsey, is up and beautiful! With new (and now ongoing) reviews from Karla, Jordan Davis, Vanessa Place, Ray McDaniel, and Christina Mengert.
& >>> Our new issue is up online! With work from Catherine Wagner, Philip Jenks, Gillian Conoley, Alice Notley, Lara Glenum, Rilke, Noah Eli Gordon & MORE. Order a subscription here, or single issue here.
& >>> Brandon Downing’s Lake Antiquity received a starred review from Publishers Weekly:
Lake Antquity Brandon Downing. Fence (UPNE, dist), $40 (189p) ISBN 978-1-934200-27-8
In this heavily illustrated collection of hyperkinetic text and image collages, Downing—poet, visual and video artist—presents a wild array of unexpected juxtapositions. Found text is cut and pasted atop images culled from flea market crates of various paper ephemera, and these pages are brimming with chance-operational meditations on innocence, experience, and empire; readers will be left stunned by the “highly colored evening scene,” for example. With hallucinatory intensity, Downing depicts an America under miraculous spell: “If you could see a picture of what has happened in the last thousand years in the United States, you would probably be surprised” are among the words superimposed on a print of urns, kettles, trunks, and saddles. This is an America obsessed with illusion—with taxidermy, film, and theme parks—and always lusting after the next frontier. While impossible to summarize in words—the poems at times feel secondary to the images—Downing’s collages create a bizarre and incredible universe.
Order Lake Antiquity (at a discounted rate) here.
& >>> Douglas Kearney (author of NPS winner The Black Automaton) on the radio: the Moe Green Poetry Discussion, w/ Rafael F J Alvarado & Brett Candance
& >>> An interview with Laura Sims, author of Stranger, here at Coldfront. New reviews of Stranger here and here.
& >>> Our Fence Modern Poets Series contest is open through the month of February. Past winners include Prageeta Sharma, Geraldine Kim, Christopher Janke, James Shea, Macgregor Card, and Nick Demske. The winning manuscript will be published by Fence Books in 2011. Guidelines and entry forms are here.
