Good Neighbors

Many contributors to the winter 2008-2009 issue of Fence go in for prose poetry--or flash fiction, or whaddaya call it...

In"The President Awakes", Ira Sher speaks of the isolation of power, and he does it well. He writes, "Months ago the President had realized that the Challenger reminded him of someone dear to him--an earliest friend from childhood, someone who was probably waking up to quiet and sanity, in whatever ordinary life he owned..." 

John D'Agata works in a similar vein, highlighting the foibles of Ancient Greece. Translating Theophrastus, he writes of the archetypical Hapless Man, "This is a guy who'll give a toast at a wedding by talking bitterly about his ex-girlfriend. He'll approach a man who's already badly in debt to ask him if he'll be a reference. He comes to court to offer his testimony a day after the case has closed."

Sounds like the guy I see in the mirror every day--love it when a translator humanizes the Old World. But D'Agata also charts the superhuman, writing in "Some Information About the Spartans" (a Plutarch translation), "It is said that when another woman's son arrived home from a battle with his left arm missing and the stump bleeding terribly in a long trail behind him, she said: ‘Turn around and follow that back to your courage.'"

D'Agata challenges two paradigms: Athenians as uniformly introspective, and Spartans utterly bereft of a muse. All the prose hybrids take the reader to unexpected places, and it's generally a fun ride.

The straight poetry in this issue is more hit or miss. Among the hits, check out the excerpt from Ted Mathy's "A Soccer Ball for Dr. Kissinger." He writes, "4 weeks. A dozen stadia. 32 squads. Twelve hundred meters of turf...Skills analogous to ballet...Structure and bounce. Airborne. Aerial slice. Magnus force. State of nature. Kissinger at the stadium suggests Kissinger in the war-room, watching his air-fleet move with precision over villages, admiring the beauty of its formation ("analogous to ballet") and taking a cold assessment of its brutality ("State of nature.").

The best poems in this issue offer equally compelling images. But the weaker ones turn inward, to a fault. Take "I Did" by Daniel Kane: "I went ahead and got a cat. I named him/ Kim Chi, because he suggested hot-cabbage." These lines signal a domestic-angst poem--we'll hear about furniture, kids and maybe (wait for it) a crisis of the self. But to Kane's credit, he rebounds nicely with "Suggestions": "The way is dark so set yourself/ on fire make yourself a torch make/of yourself a torch in the distance/eternal amorous hilarity."

A surprising tonal shift in that final line--the poetry in Fence plays this trick time and again. Does it work? Often enough to keep you reading.

Meanwhile the stories are expansive. Many of them cover government absurdities (or worse). The standout piece, Ranbir Sidhu's "The Good Poet of Africa," tracks the life of a low-level Indian diplomat mistaken for a poet. He gains a transfer to a San Francisco Consulate, as well as a depressive fuck-buddy named Double Love. The diplomat takes us into a kinky office setting: "Our sex was hurried and anxious, performed standing up, her body pinned to the wall under the portrait of Singh." Of course the man represents Prime Minister Singh, so this strikes me as a cynical take on "diplomatic outreach." Amid renewed calls for global partnerships on MSN, I appreciate writers who've maintained a sense of humor.

At times that humor takes a dark turn in Fence. Edward Schwarzchild imagines a world where habeas corpus--indeed, common decency--gets obliterated by a sadistic state. He writes in "Police Reports from the Provinces," "At the juvenile detention center downtown, Mr. Hadwright was placed in a metal box...A well-trained dog came over to urinate on the side of Mr. Hadwright's box (incidentally, just last week, this well-trained dog had helped a blind woman cross a busy street)."Schrwarzchild nails the speech patterns of your standard-issue goon squad--the repetition, the non sequiturs, the hollow good deed--without losing sight of the terror that sustains everything. He's funny and frightening, like most of the fiction writers here.

As for contributors, Fence has assembled an eclectic bunch, from pubas like Michael Harper (not his best offering here) to filmmakers and ex-journalists. If you haven't published elsewhere, you may want to look elsewhere--though some authors only mention what they're reading.