though they worked, and still work, as property managers, for their money and live ... of whether I, Rebecca Wolff, am p
Rebecca Wolff
publishing is personal Once an editor rejected a poem of mine from a small but influential magazine with a page-long typed note suggesting I rid the poem of the pronoun “I” and try again. I got really mad at him and started a magazine instead in which I made room for all the personal pronouns and their endless efficacy: “I” is a metaphor for “you.” That’s how I get by. I can’t talk about anything without talking about myself. Lately money is all anyone talks about. I’ve been waiting a long time to talk about money. Money is a metaphor for ectoplasm. So how do you like my titular riff on that old saw about how the personal is political? From this it follows logically that since publishing is personal, and the personal, political, then publishing is political. The imagined opposition to such airtightness would say no, publishing is impersonal. Publishing is business, is industry, is making books and books are, ultimately, for sale. Publishing is making things to sell. Making things to sell is impersonal. The impersonal is. We here all know what it means to read. It is the opposite of writing. It is an agreeable hole we throw ourselves down to make contact with the Others. When we read we read alone but in the activity of neurologically forgetting where we are and who we are we become intertextually riven, hatched, attached. I lose consciousness when I read, except for that intramural publishing consciousness which is acquisitiveness. I explain my son’s autism to my son by metaphor: I tell him we are each traveling in a bubble—consciousness, selfhood, fortunate or unfortunate—and that our efforts as humans are all to roll our bubbles up to others’ bubbles and bounce against them. But we are each fixed in our centrality inside our bubble by mysterious forces no one can satisfactorily explain no matter how hard they try.1 It’s a bit like bumper cars but more concentric—like a hamster in a see-through plastic ball, whose perpetual motion fixes itself. I tell my son that people with autism have bigger bubbles than most other people—those with severe autism have huge bubbles, daunting distances 1. Unless it’s capitalism.
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to navigate, while someone like him has a bubble that is just a bit larger than the average—and that there is more space between “him” inside his bubble and the outside of his own bubble, more space that he has to trouble, encounter, be mediated by, be translated into, in his effort to encounter the outside of another bubble. I tell him all this while he sits in my lap in the cushy chair in the corner of my kitchen in the house I recently bought with money my parents gave me, where I live with him and his sister, my daughter, but only half the time because they live with their dad the other half. Their dad with whom I parted because I found true love, and afterward could not truthfully return to the other kind. It’s been difficult, the transition out of married life, family life, financial and partnered and living arrangements, but in the end of that story I find myself brilliantly realized and activated, and I would recommend it to anyone, the leaving and the finding. I would recommend it; I would publish it. A certain abjection, part-and-parcel with ejection from the life that I had known in which my security depended in large part on the efforts of another, was allayed by the application of a large deposit into my bank account by my parents, who are rich, though they worked, and still work, as property managers, for their money and live carefully so as to maintain that money, and though they reject the label. To someone of their generation—born in the mid 1930s—a “rich” person is one who does not, did not, work for their money; does not need to make careful decisions. The question of whether I, Rebecca Wolff, am personally “rich,” has troubled my identity as a publisher from the start. When that trouble would have started if I had never started an independent press; at what point I ought to have, would have, might have turned the inward gaze on my outer resources . . . these are luxurious questions! Over the years I have been given a lot of money by some very rich people in support of my publishing activities. I mean, Fence has been given a lot of money in support of Fence’s activities. (Fence is a metaphor for me.) Historically, those who found literary journals and literary presses are enabled to do so by the lack of limitation of the possibilities they have heretofore known. They have not been told No by the world very often, and so the financial prohibitions of literary publishing, this conundrumical situation of making invisible art objects via mass production, making art out of such prosaic things as word-objects and letter-objects and parts of speech, material everyone knows how to use just like toddlers make splatter paintings and toilets make examples and color is everywhere, are not prohibitive. They are fun obstacles to surmount with the writing of sweet, sweet checks. I would think it would be very fun to be rich in that situation in which one’s peerless passion for art is matched only by one’s ability to pay. Fun for everyone. This has never been my situation. But I once had the fortune, great good or mis-, to be paying $400 a month for a rent-stabilized apartment on Lower Fifth Avenue
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in New York City, an address so posh, ceilings so high, that sans any transparency regarding my financial details2 it signified exactly the situation in which most would expect to find a literary publisher. George Plimpton, Jean Stein, James Laughlin, Gertrude Stein, family money-money-money. My address and my publishing moxie presented a total package to those who cared to check out my package. It attracted certain fortune and I’m sure it made it harder for me to attract certain other fortunes. Money likes money, but money only likes money that knows how money lives, what it eats and what it drinks and how it talks and walks. I’m rich, but only by comparison and because I accept the label because it is closer to the truth than to say I’m not. I don’t live like a rich person—I do my own laundry and I clean my own house and I can’t afford much childcare and I must not lose my job or I will lose my health insurance (though this prohibition may soon be lifted). However my parents own seven apartments in Manhattan and a house and some land in Truro and some farmland in Tennessee and when they pass on they will leave me half of whatever remains of this and I will be rich. And before my marriage they purchased every used car I ever drove into the ground. They paid off my student loans the day I graduated. I accrue debt like a regular person but I shake it like a rich person. And that is my working definition, in this current cultural context, of a rich person: One who has certain assurances. If my bubble bursts I can go home to mom and dad. Thank the lord. I don’t know where I’d be without them. I love them madly for the care they have always taken of me. When I want to publish a book, or a poem or story or text in this magazine, Fence, it is because I am pleased by that writing in a special way that has to do with its lack of compromise with the mysterious forces.3 The writing is flagrant and defensive and provoked and responsive. Despondent and indicative.4 I am pleased by it and I want to share, to spread, to not shut up about it but to promulgate and propagate its trails and implications, make indelible the inscription of the conditions that made it possible for that writing to take place. But why do I figure myself in that place of power? Who do I think I am? Who died and left me a publishing empire? Who jokes about the word “empire” anymore? Not me. Who takes on this honor, this called-out role in the roll call: Will you be the one to identify and select and fashion a relevancy? Will you juxtapose and proximate and associate freely within a hierarchy of effort? A recent poem, “Kill List,” by a man with the name Josef Kaplan, seems to tabulate some modern poets—living ones, all within the age-range of the contemporaneous, 25 to 65 or so—and say whether 2. My parents were the building’s managers, and they rented me an apartment. I made my rent temping in offices.Eventually Wolff Management was fired and I was threatened with eviction for illegal subletting and then bought out of my lease for $30,000 in 2004. The apartment now rents for more than $4,000 per month. 3. I guess the same ones. But it is mysterious. 4. John Lennon: You can indicate anything you see—“I dig a pony.”
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they are “rich” or “comfortable.” Why he ignores the poor, the indigent poets is beyond me—or the rich or comfortable dentists—but it would seem to indicate that the poem is attempting in some super-crude way to say something about the effects of privilege on contemporary poetry. Some of the poets on the list might self-identify as members of the Avant Garde; most are well within the rims of the cocktail Fence has had a good hand in muddling. One thing this poem is really good at is gesturing wildly at a bunch of categories, or aptitudes for categorizing, or kinetic categorization—it just basically begs a whole lot of questions. And you know beggars can be choosers. Fence has never had much to say about an Avant Garde, except to posit by example that the terms of any writing are worth examining, including those of any selfdescribed avant-gardist—how fantastic and laudatory it seems to me now (when it used to seem misguided and comical) to think that with one’s attitude toward textproduction one is advancing at the forefront of indispensable dispute, furthering a cause worth dying for. I hope I understand the potentialities of an artist’s— anyone’s—commitment to an idea: it can be, or seem, worth dying for. It should be that all of us would be willing to die—to die on the page or to advance on enemy ideas with intent to kill—to make things better than they are for others. For the greater good, a poet must not feel unequipped, or helpless; must not learn more than the average helplessness. The closest I come as an editor to invoking a concept of an Avant Garde is to declare, when provoked—usually in the context of trying to explain to a lay person (and to assert that there is such a thing as a lay person when it comes to poetry is actually to include a term within a definition of that term) why publishing is so hard to fund— that Fence is constructed in part to support the continued production of writing that furthers the art form. I used to say “exigency,” by which I meant to indicate the aura around the words that Emily Dickinson saw and I see too, or I see one too. But what is that aura composed of after all but right response to material conditions? Response to oppressors, to pleasures, to impulses and sensory occasions and the precedents no one else could imagine. Fat young woman in shorts prone on an Amtrak seat, midafternoon, foot rapidly jigging—she might have left her children behind this morning in Canada. That might be why she cannot stay upright—she was up at dawn to drop them off at her mum’s. Farewell. I’ll send money home. It so happens that I have made assumptions, assumed positions, and been said “yes” to, and worked hard to put myself in a position to have the privilege to publish: to give people power. Power to the people to further the art form. It is in my power to bestow power, to share it. But first I had to get it for myself. It so happens that jobs and money and security and leverage and influence and primacy come to those who publish, the more they publish, or are published. To publish: The verb is transitive
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sometimes and I think only in academia is it not. I publish writing by writers; writers are “published”; scholars “publish.” Publishing is political, but I did not think so at first. I did not know that. I was a child. I did not know that everything was within material reality. I had not read or been exposed to Marxist thought. Or I had but I hadn’t grasped that political thought stood out in importance from any of the other thought I had been exposed to, the personal thought, the Buddhism or Existentialism or Decadence or what have you, a level playing field. I knew publishing as a business, by virtue of its producing a product. I followed a line of reasoning which one often encounters as an obstacle to efforts at finding donors to donate money to organizations whose primary purpose is publishing books, the line that is followed by those who do not see that publishers who specifically choose to publish what I call, archly and demurely and perhaps ineffectively Very Contemporary Writing, are committing themselves to an unpalatable art-form, just as surely as are those whose charitable efforts are to present video art or movement art or performance art or to the preservation of significant artifacts of those arts. One very rich person came my way a few years ago, a man who had amassed a quantity of wealth over a long period, starting very young. He was about my age. He was a trustee of a museum in London. He bought up libraries of rare editions and Philip Guston paintings and floor-through apartments. He had wanted to buy a publishing house but after meeting me at lunch one day—this is really how it happened—he shook my hand and offered to instead become Fence’s “publisher.” We had never had one before; I had always just called myself that even though usually the title implies a personal financial accountability I could never have taken on— I thought the first thing we should do with our new relationship was to publish, in Fence, a short interview between me and he in which he would speak frankly to me about what it is like to wield such an instrument as great, massive wealth. A financial instrument. What is it like to be a patron of the arts, specifically, to be in the position of materially enabling or empowering or affirming the creative work being done in the world by artists and writers? Just what on earth does that feel like? Aside from: So Much Fun. He didn’t want to talk about it. By comparison. He wanted Fence to have more subscribers, a quantifiable goal, and he wanted Fence to have a “higher profile”—an unquantifiable, yet related goal. I want Fence to have more readers. It is all for the writers. I’m a writer too. I’m a hot mess. I keep my head under water sometimes.
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To talk about Fence’s money is to speak of my money. Not exactly a power trip. Not exactly a power grab. And why I gotta be like that: for a long time I insisted on the distancing, the extraction of my personal life from that equation. I took pride in, and trumpeted, even in grant applications, my professionalism. Once or twice I’ve lost an author to another press during moments when my personal life, including my obstreperous, imperious, autistic son who cannot get along with anyone for more than forty-five minutes, was so compelling and needy that I could not get a book out when I said I would, could not spare a minute for an author on the telephone—but on the whole I have made a convincing case for my ability to depersonalize or make impersonal the hours of my days. And in fact I used to sneer at publishers who could not get with that program, who could not make the books come out on time, could not work within the structures of the larger publishing world, the deadlines and catalogs and advance promotional metadata. To publish professionally necessitates a work ethic that does not afford itself the luxury of noncompliance. As we are laborers. And even now to say that Fence c’est moi, its money-money-money my spiritual gunk rendered visible, is to collapse the fragile material structures—tents and leantos and sukkas—that allow me to seek out donations and provide tax exemptions to those who make them, the legal status as a corporation that makes it impossible for an angry contributor to sue me, personally: It’s a tax shelter, Fence. By virtue of that status I seek tax-exempt donations.
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