Lydia Mead : NOTES FROM A SMALL PUBLISHER: FENCE MAGAZINE & BOOKS (PART 1)

by Lydia Mead (Managing Editor & Publicist)

 

 

 

Over the first pandemic summer, between my second and third years at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, my creative writing professor, Sara Jaffe, connected me with Rebecca Wolff, who founded FENCE magazine in 1997 (manifesto written) / 1998 (first issue published), and Fence Books in 2001, for a virtual summer internship. I lived in the attic of a small blue house, & for Fence, I archived poetry reviews from The Constant Critic’s near-expired old website into a document for future upload onto Fence’s newer digital imprint, Fence Digital. I copied over and proofread some number of reviews per day (Ray McDaniel, Joyelle McSweeney, Tyrone Williams), & talked weekly with Fence’s now-Editorial Director & Fence Books Editor, Emily Wallis Hughes, about this process.

Over these near-six years since, I’ve dipped into and out of responsibilities and rhythms with Fence, as my commitments to college and other jobs variously shifted my capacity to engage with them. Now, I find near-every variety of task I’ve completed for Fence across those years represented in my current, consistent position: I support Fence Books through outreach and publicity efforts (I submit our books to book awards and reviewers/review outlets, & reach out to bookstores), post on Fence’s social media, write and respond to emails (of course!), & publish poetry reviews—new, and from the archive—on The Constant Critic.

When I describe Fence, I usually say some words like, “Fence was founded at a time in which the poetry world was really polarized between traditional, lyric poets and experimental, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets to offer poets whose writing does not so clearly fall within a delineated camp or aesthetic—the “fence-sitters”—space to publish their work and enter into conversation with each other.” Fence resists binaries to embrace variousness and nuance. Fence creates and advocates for a “multi-minded” community.

I appreciate that I joined Fence through The Constant Critic, a project so palpably dialogic: poets writing about other poets’ writing. & I appreciate the variousness of my responsibilities throughout my time at Fence—an experience so shared between all of us who work for small, not-for-profit presses—& the ways in which they contribute, in shifting ways, to an ever-shifting ecosystem.

& I’ll note that I use so many ampersands in my writing because, six years ago, I read Karla Kelsey’s 2013 review of The Invention of Glass by Emmanuel Hocquard, trans. Cole Swensen and Rod Smith for The Constant Critic, in which she quotes Hocquard on his own use of “&” and “and”:

Here, the ampersand (&) is not a replacement for and. Rather, it denotes a tautological aim. Which is to say that it tends to mark, between two terms, a relationship (but can we still speak of relationship?) of identity: “Table & hands” (p. 10), “Person & path” (p. 86), or indifferentiation, closer to or. You could also say an augmentation. “The painting shows Alvina’s photographed arm augmented by a shoulder as if it’s a birth…” (p. 55) is less the description of an image than the development of a formula such as “Alvina’s arm & shoulder” while the other formula “Alvina’s arm and shoulder” denotes an addition. (82)

I internalized and remembered this distinction as something like, “and” designates an addition to a list or sequence in which the items remain relatively discrete, & the ampersand designates or indicates the relationship between two items, in which each changes the other. The ampersand articulates an interaction; a reciprocal exchange. At Fence, we believe and invest in literary conversation: in the “&”s that we generate when we collect and arrange nonconforming poetry, fiction, translation, and other in our magazine, & when our titles land on bookshelves and in readers’ hands.

…look forward to Editorial Director & Fence Books Editor Emily Wallis Hughes’ feature this summer!

 

 

 

 

Lydia Mead lives in Portland, Oregon, where she works remotely as the Managing Editor & Publicist for Fence Magazine & Books. She collaborated with Barb Tetenbaum, a visual artist interested in the act of reading, to publish her prose poem thesis, [some sentences & phrases I wrote once], with Barb's artist book imprint, Triangular Press, in 2024.

Susanne Dyckman : Elizabeth Robinson’s Apprehend: A Reflection

from Report from the Robinson Society, Vol. 1, No. 1

 

 

 

 

This is not a review.  This is about an experience.  This is about what happens when I read Elizabeth Robinson’s poetry.

I want to talk about the writing, but first note my close and enduring friendship with Elizabeth.  We have read our work together and written collaboratively over many years. We know one another’s families and have community in common. That said, I want to put those significant truths aside as I think of her writing and how I engage with it.  

Elizabeth is a prolific writer.  Choosing a favorite book of hers is much like choosing a favorite child, which, of course, can’t be done. So it is easiest to focus on a single book, Apprehend (2003), a volume based on fairy tales. It is one I pull from my bookshelf often.

I do not memorize much, have never been very good at reciting by heart.  But Elizabeth’s line “a small thing fits into a small hand” (Treasure Chest, pg. 50) is a phrase I carry with me.  A tender line, that small thing and small hand, a moment of softness to keep. 

Yet in this volume it is not a small thing that fits, but everything.  Immediately following that line, continuing it, is the word “clutched.”  A harder sounding word, a holding tight.  And in these poems, everything is clutched, turned over and inside out and examined. “Things sent down seep from one conclusion to the next” (Treasure Chest, pg. 49).  The spirit, the environment, the body, beauty, and disfigurement are all equal inhabitants of her poetic world.  I am as likely to find who she, the poet, calls God high in a nest in a tree, or in lowly vermin, or detached fingers, or in a tentative kiss, as in that word itself.  And wonder how they can all be so equally embraced. 

Wonder, a result of being enthralled by the leaps that, within the context of the work, all make sense.  The underlying spirit of the language propels me forward.  What is next?  I am not always quite certain, on first reading, what that will be, but it doesn’t matter. I quickly learn to trust. The surprises, the displacement, and, after being temporarily in a wilderness, the resettling.    

Even with repeated readings, the work holds me. The “small hand” of Elizabeth is a generous one.  I am with the spirit of her words as they hover, making a place for me to linger.  “Here we are moved toward battle and warped glass/but moved by/our Lady, the ship, who prefers delicacy.” (Asea, pg. 36). As I travel through the quiet intensity of this poetry, I am always astonished.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

Susanne Dyckman is the author of two full length volumes of poetry (equilibrium’s form, Shearsman Books, and A Dark Ordinary, Furniture Press Books) as well as number of chapbooks, including two published by above/ground press.  Her work (both collaborative and individual) has been published in a number of journals, the latest being Fence, Denver Quarterly, and parentheses. She has taught undergraduate and graduate level writing courses, and for five years hosted a summer poetry reading series. She lives in Albany, California.