Editor's Note

Years ago at the Museum of Science in Chicago I saw a permanent exhibit which is indeed on display permanently in my memory, in a way that not many poems or stories or otherwise crafted images have been. Some years before my visit a team of necrologists had sliced a woman's body vertically - you understand, lengthwise - into fifty very thin slabs of herself. The slices ranged in area as her body had ranged (round slices of hip and shoulder; the tallest slice, from head to toe; a long strip of arm) and were preserved in fluid between plates of glass, upright, scattered throughout the museum. So that you might encounter a vision, a version of this woman - who I think was called Lucy - consisting of a centimeter of her innermost parts between shoulder and foot, on the staircase between the second and third floors of the museum. You saw veins, cartilage, bone, organ, fatty layers, dermal layers, and even little hairs standing up on her outside layer. Every once in a while a section was identifiable by virtue of an outstanding feature, such as a nipple or eyelid. Fence is a literary magazine, not a scientific exhibit. But it is a similar demonstration of individuality in cross-section: the work we showcase in this, our brand-new entry into what some would say is a glutted field, is work which we feel is under-represented - not necessarily on a by-author basis, as many of the contributors to this inaugural issue are well-established, even familiar voices to the regular reader of the literary magazine. These are voices which in themselves are deeply idiosyncratic, even eccentric, and which when grouped together and side-by-side serve to redeem a much-maligned demographic from semantic iniquity: to say that these writers are fence-sitters is to say that each of them occupies a distinguished grey area in the literary field. They are writers who challenge their readers by means of density and complexity, but who exclude no one from that readership in the name of an academic purity, or a pre-ordained set of obscurities. These are writers who adhere to the particular sound of their own voices in collision with the sounds of the world. Most of all, and most importantly, they provide pleasure. With features like the essay "Language Poetry," by Joshua Clover, and the Symposium on Narrative offered here, Fence intends to confront head-on the divisionary tactics that our literary community applies to itself, and with which we confound ourselves. Also in this issue is reprinted an early poem by Weldon Kees; by bringing to light work which may have fallen out of the public consciousness - if not into public domain - we reconstruct a context and historical precedent for the new work set alongside it. I want to thank everyone who has helped make Fence come true -especially our tireless staff, whose great reward is the satisfaction of a job very well done. I hope that Fence will provide its readers with a sustained impression of the - shocking, reassuring - variousness accessible to us.

Rebecca Wolff