On April 24, from 2:30-3:00 pm on KRCW in Los Angeles, FENCE poet Ariana Reines will discuss the importance of recovering the “I” of the poet with Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt. 

Hear her live, if you’re in LA, or in perpetuity thereafter on the KRCW Bookworm website: http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw  (downloads and podcast available)

And see her in Berkeley that night, 6:30 pm, as part of the Holloway Series in Poetry. 

Details at: http://holloway.english.berkeley.edu/Upcoming/page36.html

Two great events on the Fence horizon:

1. Spring Books Preview Reading

at the New School in NYC, Tuesday April 22 (that’s next Tuesday!) at 6:30 pm

Like a big horseshoe magnet, this reading will pull Fence authors from California, Colorado, Carolina, and New York. And not unlike a big horseshoe magnet, it could concentrate the field. (Note: the magnetic field from a horseshoe magnet continues in whatever it touches, and that could be you.)

Readers include:

Kaisa Ulsvik Miller, author of the Motherwell-winning Unspoiled Air

Jibade-Khalil Huffman, author of 19 Names for Our Band

Carl Martin, author of Rogue Hemlocks

and Aaron Kunin, with his novel The Mandarin

2. Issue 19 Launch Reading

at the University at Albany, Thursday May 1st, 6:30 pm

Come hear the latest of the latest of Fence Magazine. With readings from Michael Comstock, Karen Garthe, Vivian Heller and Douglas A. Martin.

See the Events page for more information about both of these happenings.

And don’t forget - the end of the month is also the END of Fence in Rainbows. Issue 19 hits the world on May 1st, so donate whatever you can and get a year of FENCE! After April 30, it’s back to normalcy.

Hurrah for 2008, the year we hop on board the social network train! Mayhaps we’re the caboose, but we’re whooping it up in back.

Come be Fence’s “friend” (and really, we don’t think of the quotation marks when we think of you)

on MySpace and Facebook: our group is called “Fence / Fence Books”

This will keep you even MORE up-to-date on events, announcements, releases, and our “current mood”. (Because maybe, maybe you want to know!)

Some of you may have received an email last Thursday introducing this our latest brainstorm: we have embarked on a month-long mission toward intricacy. You see, we realize that each reader has a different capacity for monetary devotion to Fence, and we want to make our pages available to anyone who sets their devotion at one dollar or more. Just like Radiohead.

So, if you follow this link www.fenceportal.org/support and click on the word “donate”, you can become a subscriber to Fence for one year, for whatever your increment may be. Payments are processed by PayPal (it’s free and easy to set up an account if you don’t already have one: www.paypal.com). Any gracious and lucky soul who chooses to pay $300 or more will become a lifetime subscriber, and will receive a receipt for your tax-deductible donation.

Fine print: This offer only good until the end of April, 2008. The new issue of Fence will hit your mailbox in early May, so jump on it!

by Colie Collen

The air in Boulder is thin; the town, you see, is a mile in the air. This can (and does) lead to: feelings of lightheaded ease,spontaneous over-caffeination, and the gathering of fabulous poet-communities. So many writers and otherwise far-out persons live and teach and study in the area that it seems they drive the clouds away — 300 days of sun a year!? Friday night (March 14) was a veritable smorgasbord of Fence, and as Fence is itself a smorgasbord, you can only imagine our delight. The readers: Tina Celona, whose new prose poems are a testament toher line, “when my writing goes well I attribute it to God”; Kaisa (rhymes with Rice-a) Ulsvik Miller, winner of the 2007 Motherwell Prize for the new release Unspoiled Air, who voiced her scrambled syntax in melodic tones, echoing the room’s general sentiment, “we is doing what we love”; Chelsey Minnis, her work always spot-on enough forthe cringe/giggle/emphatic nod reaction, read a series of untitled poems, a list of titles, and from the prefaces to Bad Bad; Elizabeth Robinson, at the halfway-in mark, read her Ars Poetica, “grant[ing] the interchangeable quality of beginning and ending”; Sasha Steensen, reading from The Method(forthcoming from Fence this spring) and A Magic Book,taunted all nay-sayers with perfectly (in)complete sentences;Catherine Wagner, singing and kissing and blasting her way through a “series about fucking” (which means it’s really about everything). This from her new chapbook, Hole in the Ground (Slack Buddha Press); and Rebecca Wolff, who closed the night with a series about recognizing knowledge in its simplest forms. “I guess I never thought much about baking cookies / Well think about it”. The read-to left the room with contented smiles or lingered with the same. The night was balmy, to us Albanians. We ate chocolate and overslept. What more can a girl ask for?

This book won our Fence Modern Poets Series back in, oh, 2005 I guess it was (published in 2006), and by my calculations probably only about 300 people have ever actually held it in their hands (including shippers and handlers). One hundred fifty copies have been sold by our distributor as of the most recent sales report, and probably about twenty directly from our office. Several copies sold way back in 2005 at the first reading for the book, which took place at the KGB bar in NYC. Daniel Brenner, the book’s author, read with the wonderful Tracey McTague, and I well remember several audience members, there for Tracey, approaching me after the reading saying things like “Where did you find this guy? He’s amazing!” and then buying the book. I had hoped that this was a harbinger, that a kind of slow burn of discovery would spread across the poetry reading population, and I would have the pleasure of saying to many, as I said to those audience members, that “I found this guy in the pile of entries to the Fence Modern Poets Series,” but so far this has not happened. There’s been quite a lot of silence around this book. So I would instead urge many of you who are entering the Fence Modern Poets Series this year to pick up a copy of The Stupefying Flashbulbs, if not in curiosity then in solidarity with one who was in your position of hopefulness just three years ago. He won the contest and his book was published. Ta da!

AWP was fine and fun. You’ve probably already heard about the relatively low-sales experience of many small presses there, and it was no different for us. With the exception of our two newest books, Flet and Infamous Landscapes, and of Not for Mothers Only (more on that later) it seemed from my side of the table that everyone felt that they had already heard everything that Fence Books had to say. It was pretty overwhelming, all the millions of cool books on tables, so after I finally, on the third day, took a walk around the second and THIRD floors of bookfair, I felt I completely understood the impassive reactions to our treasured offerings.

But I must report on our amazing Saturday night reading and party down at Deborah Landau’s comfy NYU Creative Writers House. Honestly I didn’t have high expectations of turn-out, given how spent and over it I was feeling; I imagined that each of the thirty poets on the list would be reading to the other 29, and that afterwards we would toast one another with our feet up on the comfy chairs, exhausted mothers and/or poets all. But instead we packed out the rooms at more than 130 people, and everyone sat for more than two hours in rapt, I tell you rapt attention to the variegated and stormin’ line-up (from Rae Armantrout with her deservedly famous pinching nipples poem to Zhang Er reading “Ma Ma/Mao Mao”–mama/cat in lush original tongue–to Anne Waldman literally storming the podium shouting “Patriarchy?! Patriarchy?!”) It was completely hot and fun and not for mothers only. Really nice to see lots of young, presumably childless cats and kittens there grooving on the mothership.

Back in Albany now I am working on the sleep deficit, happy to have voted last night, mostly happy to be easing back into the grind of book/mag publishing. The previously blogged-about six-months-in-advance publishing schedule means that I am lurching into our Fall 2008 pre-production season and that Colie Collen, invaluable and savvy and heaven-sent Associate Editor of Fence and Fence Books, who many of you may have met or spied womaning the Fence table last week, is working intently on getting things (permissions, files, bios, etc) for the forthcoming summer publication of A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years, wherein all Fence editors will select their favorites from their moments with Fence and in addition will contribute essays discussing their experiences as editors of Fence. A bit of history for you. I don’t think I can say “Fence” any more than I already have so I’ll sign off now till next time.

because there will be so many nice people there that I only get to see once a year, now that AWP has become this unlikely small-press/poetry reunion landscape; but why is it making me so nervous? We’ve got our fortune cookies with cryptic messages and book deals inside; we’ve got our books, of course; got our signage mostly; got new little book stands to hold up the books so everyone can see them amongst the sea of books. Interns are in place in case I want to creep off to hear a panel or two. I dunno. Come by and see me to see if I’m still nervous. And even if I am still nervous, come to our reception and our reading and our party (visit Events page for details).

My intern Bob is counting books, moving books around, making my office look pretty. He’s tired of reading manuscripts, screening out the wholly inappropriate ones, which has been his job the last few weeks. I entrust him with this extremely important task even though he’s twenty years old because I’ve given him a mandate and I feel that folks always do great when given mandates. The mandate is to leave in anything that absolutely anyone at all would think was even slightly interesting. Maybe that’s just a command, not a mandate.

Look! Heartening tabulatory news about Not For Mothers Only from Clay Banes at Eyeball Hatred and Pegasus Books. When Cathy and I ushered this book into the world last spring we did so with a certain amount of guilt and dread about the possibility of its being really backward, despite its outward appearance of progressivity: It is, after all, a gender-based anthology. We were urged to, and considered, including fathers’ poems about having children in there too, but pretty swiftly decided against it based partially on the urgency we felt for getting it out there and the ease with which we could collect the names of mother-poets: many of the younger poets in the anthology were/are members of a listserv, founded and moderated by Arielle Greenberg, of poet-mothers.

Additionally, Cathy and I both felt that there was something going on in poetry-land we needed to correct: It seemed to us–and this seeming was laughably upheld by this dopey review in the Washington Post , which claimed that in fact the book really WAS for mothers only–that poems by women about this quite universal experience, something without which the population would rapidly dwindle, were relegated, in a way. “Baby poems” just don’t get as much play as poems about almost anything else. And this seemed ridiculous to us.

Now comes Jennifer Ashton’s cry of essentialism, especially as it manifests in anthology-making, which makes me think about wombs. What, after all, is the claim of NFMO?: that giving birth is an essential or radical experience? Almost all of the contributors to NFMO gave birth to their children (there are a few adoptive mothers, and a few who decided against giving birth). That women’s experiences of becoming a mother–a literal or figurative giving birth, but definitively ending up in literal parenthood–are constructed by the related constructs of gender? Hmmm, maybe. This is certainly the case.

It’s certainly the case that women’s bodies really are the bodies that give birth. It’s not the case that all mothers give birth. It’s not the case that only women write poems about having children. It is the case that lots of women do, and that these poems have a kind of tarnish on them and don’t get seen or discussed a lot in the general critical atmosphere.

It is the case that folks like to look for definitive statements that they can then argue for or against. It is also the case that gendered divisions require more qualifiers than ever, as cultural and social assumptions about gender continue to break down in public: Did anyone else watch the final episode of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila! My God! She so wanted to go with Dani!

I’m thinking that above all the categories of “woman” and “man” will basically linger as long as they are convenient, which they certainly were in narrowing down contributors to Not for Mothers Only.