12/16 Note: Unfortunately, the reading has been canceled due to extreme Boston weather!

With all you’ve probably been hearing about Facebook lately, you’d think the entire world is being taken over by an evil empire, intent on sucking out our souls, wasting our time, and invading our privacy. But maybe something good has come out of everyone’s favorite social networking site.

The Facebook Review is the first literary magazine that seeks to use Facebook as its platform to publish members’ creative work. Set up as a group, users can join and then read and comment on the work. Submissions for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and reviews are all accepted and decided upon by an editorial board consisting of the last issue’s contributors, which is a pretty nifty system (called an “editorial train”). Submissions are made by sending a facebook message to the managing editor, and issues are posted as “news updates,” with new installments going up daily.

Issue 2 features a pretty amazing short story titled “The Vegan Muffin” by Tao Lin, an up and coming writer who will be reading at Fringe’s own “Dirty Water” reading on December 16 at Grub St, 160 Boylston St, Boston. Check it out!

So these days reading slush for Ploughshares and Redivider, as well as working for Fringe, I’m reading a lot of pour-water-over-my-head-to-wake-myself-back-up, clamp-jumper-cables-to-my-nipples-to-wake-me-back-up, boring-as-rust first pages. Lizzie talked about cover letters a gazillion posts ago; I thought I’d do a sequel. Here’s some thoughts on the first 300 words, because really, an editor can tell from page one whether the story is going to be good or not at least 90 percent of the time. So print this out, crumple it up, and eat it–that’s supposed to work for memory. Three simple rules:

1. do something new.
2. start the story arc.
3. write a brilliant sentence.

Why? Because (1) editors are sleepy and they’ve probably already read 20 stories by the time they get to yours, (2) the most tiring thing in the world–more tiring than Thanksgiving–is waiting for a story to begin, and (3) the editor carefully reading your opening sentences should be given a reason to continue doing so. I think if I don’t get two of these three things in the first page, the monster under my bed ends up finishing the story. He likes to eat paper too, but not for memory. He likes it because “it tastes like smart.”

I’ve written before about the U.S. Post Office’s misguided (read: guided by TimeWarner) plot to raise postage sky-high for small periodicals and simultaneously lower it for huge ones. The Postal Regulatory Commission voted to put these new rules in effect on July 15; a massive petition effort has caused them to hold hearings on the new rates. They’re scheduled for next Tuesday, October 30. Kudos if you spoke up and signed that first petition…

…now let’s all sign it again! To ensure that those hearings have the biggest possible impact, you can sign the new petition—and simultaneously have a message sent to your congressperson—to repeal the new rates. Also at freepress.net, you’ll find an excellent essay by Peter Rothberg, reprinted from the ActNow blog at The Nation. We’ve got to stop this bad idea before it’s too late and the pages of dead periodicals start fluttering from the backs of mail trucks like sad little elegies.

If supporting small journals isn’t enough to convince you that this is an issue, remember that, if those journals go out of business—which many will surely do under the new rates—that means less mail volume and, as a result, fewer decent-paying post office jobs. Also, remember love notes. Subscriptions to Ranger Rick for 4th graders. The postcard your friend sent from vacation, where she couldn’t remember your address so she just wrote the street but misspelled it, but it arrived in your mailbox anyway. The time you put stamps and an address label on a coconut and sent it to your friend—and it got there. Be warned! You know once you let TimeWarner make the rules, it’s gonna cost fifty bucks to mail that coconut.

We’re happy to present the first results from our One Year Later survey. We’ve been asking writers whose work appeared in Fringe a year ago or more to revisit that work and respond to some questions. Fittingly, our first writer’s work appeared in our first issue, back in February 2006. Here she is:

Wendy Taylor Carlisle, b. Manhattan a long time ago, currently living on the edge in the border city of Texarkana, TX, an accidental Texan and a self-defined southerner, author of one book, Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda), and one chapbook, After Happily Ever After (2River Chapbook Series). Her poems are anthologized and available online.

What are the materials you prefer for writing first drafts of poems?

A quiet mind, some other poet’s essays or poems or letters from/to anyone, some words other than my own for a jump start; one of those cheap Mead notebooks—the kind with the mottled covers, preferably black and white although I’ve been known to use a purple one when feeling juicy; a Pilot P500 pen or, occasionally, a superfine P700. Is this helpful? I can’t see how anyone could care about Mead notebooks.

We care, yes we do. What’s one of your favorite poems that has appeared in any online journal in the last year, and why?

The web is forever, so I don’t much keep up with the ‘when’ of publication, but I am always drawn to the work of certain poets, Jo McDougall (who, alas, doesn’t appear much online) and Lola Haskins, for their pith and concision and grace. These qualities are on display in Haskins’s “Six Ways,” and “Youth,” and “Why Performers Wear Black,” and “The Laws of Women”, all of which appear in the Alsop Review, and in McDougall’s “At Frog’s Trailer Court” and “The Guest”, both in Periheleon.

Any other favorite poets?

I am hopelessly in love with C D Wright, who is inimitable, although I keep trying to imitate her anyway. Her poem “Personals” tells it all without giving anything away—now that’s a skill.

And Phil Dacey, for his absolute mastery of the sonnet, his humor, his wisdom and his rogue heart. “New York Postcard Sonnet #10” is one of my fave sonnets. I am also enamored of “Letter to his Daughter,” for its sweet center, and “Form Rejection Letter,” because it is wonderfully funny. All of these appear on http://www.philipdacey.com/poems.html.

It’s been over a year since your work appeared in the first issue of Fringe. Looking back on the poems, do any new ideas about them occur to you?

In general, I keep worrying poems until they die of being overhandled. “First Labor” and “Third Labor” have not been so abused. These poems are part of a group of twelve, which I never completed—actually I got five written and lost my way in the mythological forest. This may not be the end of my labors, but they stand for now—although when I look at “Third,” I can see…But no. That way lies madness.

As for “Small Gratitudes,” this is what’s become of it:

Small GratitudesThe morning sun troubles the back fence,

translates leaves to parchment on the hill. Winter
facts are black and white.

Our own gratitudes must include that and glaciers,

although they are thinning like a smile.
It could be worse. I’m grateful for the way it is:

a freeze first, then at last, a thaw.

As you can see above, I’ve jettisoned a great many metaphors to gain the core idea—gratitude for the cycles of death and rebirth. The poem was inspired by a death in the family, but it could have been any loss that requires live through and then living with. How does one integrate that absence into one’s life? I wrote quite a long draft, then kept taking more and more away. The version in Fringe is somewhere in the last run-up to this past spring, when the poem revealed this (I hope) final form.

What would you say in a letter to the person you were when you wrote those poems?

Oh dear, I wouldn’t correspond with that person.

What prose work(s) have you enjoyed most in the last year?

I don’t know if “enjoyed” is the word, but Paul Muldoon’s The End of the Poem and Camille Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn have engaged me in close reading again and Muldoon has, as usual, both amazed and tickled me—who knew you could be a pre-pre-post modernist? (And don’t give me away but Harry Potter is what I read for pleasure most recently.)

If anybody begrudges you a little HP, we’ll take em down. Do you know any poems by heart? If so, describe how you came to know one of these, and tell us whether it’s a favorite or a least-favorite.

The poems in AA Milne’s When We were Very Young and Now We Are Six. I learned these by reading them to my boys when they were babies (in the Cretaceous period). I have those by heart still, and some Psalms (other than 23), and some Shakespeare (Hamlet’s speech, a sonnet or two, #18—the usual suspects), a bit of Yeats. But memorizing whole poems isn’t my parlor trick; I’m much more likely to absorb and remember syntactical twists or forms or ideas.

Were you forced to memorize any of these in high school?

The Shakespeare, yes, the psalms by osmosis, the Yeats for love.

Is there any form or mode of writing that you haven’t tried recently but would like to try in the next year? What is it, and why?

I occasionally write essays, but I’m pretty much committed to poetry along the lines of my mother’s ordinance, “You’ll do it ’til you get it right.”

If you could conjure up the perfect snack to be enjoyed while working on poems, what would it be?

Coffee and the cigarettes which, alas, I gave up some 17 years ago (and miss to this day). There are actual foods that I love, but I think, when writing, the less et the better.

Are there any other questions about poetry that you have been longing to be asked?

The question I continually ask and hope someday to answer is how do I get to Rilke’s “ten good lines.” If I had the answer to that one, I’d be, as we say here, in high cotton.

*

Last night Fringe, Quick Fiction, Redivider, and Black Ocean held a reading in Boston at Grub Street. The reading, hosted by Redivider, was the second in a series of seasonal readings put on by the Boston-based journals and presses.

The reading’s theme was “Spring Fever” and all four readers delivered. Elisa Gabbert went first, reading some fine love poetry on behalf of Redivider — her “Poem to KR” was a particular favorite. Next came Sarah Sweeney (work forthcoming in the August Fringe), who read several poems about Carolina, including a hilarious quadruple sonnet about lotto tickets and peach schnapps. After a short break, Megan Bedford read her short short out of the new issue of Quick Fiction, followed up by a nonfiction piece on teenagers mating in spring. Peter Jay Shippy, whose work is forthcoming in the first issue of Black Ocean’s new journal Handsome, closed out the evening with a particularly hilarious pastiche of poetry, CSI, Jackson Pollock, and country town-meeting.

Each reader was also forced to read a Shakespeare sonnet that had been Mad-libbed by the audience.

Beer, wine, soda, and those delightful marinated olives that Adam Pieroni of Quick Fiction makes were consumed, and we all went home sated with culture.

Stay tuned for the summer reading in July, hosted by Black Ocean!

By now y’all have probably heard about the nefarious plot by our Postal Service to raise rates for periodicals through a deal with Time-Warner. Here at Fringe, our thoughts usually run more to web stats than stamps. But the new rates are going to have a serious effect on our literary sisters, small print journals. This isn’t just a matter of a few cents an issue; it’s a crisis for small presses–and for the principles of free speech itself. The Postal Service is one of my favorite things about America, but right now it has me so mad I’d pontificate to a mailbox.

Some folks say we’ll soon live in an online-only literary world, but we all know they are wrong. We need the dual forces of print and online. They’re like Superwoman and Supergirl. Like Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Like ketchup and mustard, whiskey and ginger ale, peas and honey.
I need both the leisurely, tactile pleasure of print journals and the quick fix of online journals that can deliver a hot new poem any time I want one. And I don’t think I’m alone on this one.

So what’s a gal or guy to do? Well, first, you might scrape together your spare change and renew a print journal subscription or two. Who knows–your puny little subscription could be the difference between life and death for a journal. Or you might sit down on your lunch break and write a letter. Perhaps if the P.O. got a bit more business, it would be less tempted to sell its soul to corporate America. And most importantly, sign on to the petition at Free Press, and let our friends at the P.O. know how you feel. The window for public comment was ridiculously small, but maybe it’s not too late to raise a ruckus.