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Fence – Winter 2011

Volume 13 Number 2

Winter 2011

Biannual

Barbara Ellen Baldwin

This handsome journal is clothed in Lee Etheredge IV’s type on photograph cover. Readers are directed to “Some Words About the Images,” where they encounter his shape poem, declaring: “i am not a poet.” Etheredge is a visual artist, who utilizes drawings produced by a standard typewriter. The final piece featured is utterly unique. This artist succeeds easily in engaging brain, eye, and heart.

This handsome journal is clothed in Lee Etheredge IV’s type on photograph cover. Readers are directed to “Some Words About the Images,” where they encounter his shape poem, declaring: “i am not a poet.” Etheredge is a visual artist, who utilizes drawings produced by a standard typewriter. The final piece featured is utterly unique. This artist succeeds easily in engaging brain, eye, and heart.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lindsey Baggette’s “Leader Ghazal.” This poem shatters the classical ghazal’s expectations. The late Agha Shahid Ali introduced America to the classical ghazal, the reliance on form, theme, rhyme and refrain. However, Baggette cleverly accedes to the rules, while showcasing dark wit in this piece. She plays with musings on North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, “Dear Leader,” as his subjects must always call him:

While we were dancing, we thought Kim Jong-il
should know we think only of Kim Jong-il

We keep our elbows on our stomachs and
frown in the springtime sun like Kim Jong-il.

There are two rainbows in a circle.
Perhaps it’s a birthday for Kim Jong-il.

The rest of the piece seems playful, and quirky. In the end, though maybe not so light-hearted once re-read. One thing is certain: The poem could not be written by anyone in North Korea. Ever.

I was struck with the dense inventiveness of K. Silem Mohammad’s selections from The Sonnagrams, in which the author works with Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In an author’s note, Mohammad explains that each Sonnagram is an anagram of a modern version of one of the Sonnets “containing exactly the same letters in the same distribution as the original.” The author writes the title last, using “whatever letters are left over once I’ve assembled a working sonnet in iambic pentameter with an English rhyme scheme.” So, in this vision of Sonnet 29, readers find a mid-poem clip of humor as the author dreams Johnny Mathis as Korean:

I asked him if molasses wasn’t shiny,
To see if he would answer like a star:
He booted Herbert Hoover in the heinie,
And then commenced to singing “Chances Are.”

I was completely charmed by James Hannaham’s “The Broke Period” and didn’t recall previously reading anything quite like it. The reader is put directly into an altered world. The citizen here evinces only mild surprise when:

At first when there was no more money, we tried to ignore the fact. Most of us still had some cash left, and our last paychecks wouldn’t arrive for a couple of weeks. Generally, we felt things could go on as they had. The banking industry’s debt had become a colossal vacuum cleaner hose shoved between the sofa cushions of the market, sucking up every last bit of loose change and sending it to oblivion. We got used to the sucking; then it suddenly stopped. The computers and even the bankers went silent.

It was strange to pay for our coffee on those first mornings, thinking in the back of our minds that no income would arrive to replace the $1.79 we’d just delicately pressed into our friendly barista’s palm, and that we might as well have thrown the bills and coins into the nearest sewer.

Ah…that last line, which leads into the heart of this winsome tale! Isn’t it something we’ve all thought after purchases? The entire piece is hinged on the reader’s belief in that perfectly selected word: “oblivion.” As the story blooms, characters evolve and accept. The entire piece flourishes.

I was immediately fond of the mood and the ease of identification in “The Moon” by Lydia Davis. This piece of flash fiction is merely a dreamy trek in the dark at first: “I get up out of bed in the night to go to the bathroom. The room I am in is large and dark but for the white dog on the floor. The hallway is wide and long, and filled with an underwater sort of twilight.”

The sojourn to the bathroom is touched with varieties of illumination: “There is a full moon far above, overhead.” This slice of night seems to place us all in our flannel pajamas, as half-asleep, one-by-one, we walk through shadows finding something unusual…or not. Here, the author exhibits wry wit, and portrays beauty in the mundane. Her prose is crisp, poignant and curiously, evokes nostalgia.

John Kinsella’s “Graphology Holograph Series: 4” is experimental and lovely, and I particularly appreciated:

God is the heartwood, the leaves and the roots of that protected but almost extinct
                      tree species.

Ants like best where we walk, dropping tiny flakes of skin.

They practice tai chi outside the Anglican Church. Saying: there’s something in this
                      configuration, for sure.

These fragments of the whole are observational and daring. I am fascinated by the world beneath our feet, there to savor. Few bother in their rushing pell-mell to simply look where they’re walking. Little civilizations are crushed. Kinsella reminds me that dust mites survive on human’s cast off bits of skin and nail parings. I never step on ant colonies and have known since I was five how perilous the life of the minute can be. Kinsella stops to remind readers of what is “almost extinct,” and what will go on. It’s rewarding to pay attention, always.

In “Drinking Money,” Michael Klein’s offering tells us:

In 1939, when my mother was seven years old, the lyricist Lorenz Hart gave her a photograph of himself on which he had inscribed in midnight blue ink: For Kathryn Jacqueline, from Lorenz Hart, whose name will probably be forgotten by the time she is able to read this.

A rather extraordinary gift from the lyric master, who wrote the iconic lines to “My Funny Valentine” and a host of other Broadway tunes. Still, Klein seems perplexed that such lines were penned for a child: “as if childhood had in it the same kind of unpredictability and loneliness that fame did.” However, the Hart quote was spot on. Childhood is often unpredictable and “lonely,” despite family, status, or balanced emotions. The photograph ends up being useful, but not prized. In the end, historic value, nostalgia, and need collide. Hart wrote: “Isn’t It Romantic?” for another time. “Drinking Money” is thoughtful and memorable on several levels.

This edition of Fence is exquisitely produced, and presents readers with poetry, prose, recipes, and delightful creations from all sorts of artists. The pages here are perfect for reading on the cusp of season change.
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