{"id":1101,"date":"2005-09-02T21:46:20","date_gmt":"2005-09-03T01:46:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2005\/09\/02\/i-only-read-fence-for-the-poems\/"},"modified":"2010-12-27T23:48:51","modified_gmt":"2010-12-28T03:48:51","slug":"i-only-read-fence-for-the-poems","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2005\/09\/02\/i-only-read-fence-for-the-poems\/","title":{"rendered":"I Only Read Fence for the Poems"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"v6n2.gif\"To the left: the cover of the Fall\/Winter 2003 issue of Fence<\/I>. As editor Rebecca Wolff<\/A> observes:<\/p>\n

\n

“Imagine my wry bemusement… to see that this issue, as worthy as any other, sold significantly less on the newsstand and at bookstores than any others, before or since. A typical issue of Fence<\/I> has a sell-through rate of around 60 percent. This issue, which includes work by Jean Valentine, John Taggart, Jane Miller, Hal Sirowitz, Diane Williams, Lydia Davis, and a host of alluring unknowns, sold a mere 35 percent of its allotment to our distributor. The bemusing part is that, upon noting this, I knew immediately what must be the cause of the drop.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

She’s making sure that ain’t gonna happen with the double-sized “Summer Fiction” issue this year. In addition to stories by Dawn Raffel, Frederic Tuten, Stacey Levine, Chris Offutt and Harry Matthews, a big roundtable debate on contemporary fiction, an essay by Joe Wenderoth, and all the other goodies, this latest issue sports a Suicide Girl on the cover.<\/p>\n

\"v8n1.jpg\"As part of her explanation, Wolff compares the American consumer of literature to a screaming infant, and her breasts to those of the cover girl:<\/p>\n

\n

“As a woman entering her eighth heavenly month of breastfeeding, happy as all get-out to be plumping up my Margot, an eighteen-pounder built of nothing, so far, but the milk from my own considerably smaller, considerably older tits, I am currently feeling even more especially fond of tits than usual. Margot has an entirely unconflicted relationship to my tits: When she’s hungry she wants them; she cries out; they are delivered to her. So why not, I thought, give the people what they can also be understood to want.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’d probably have a snappier closer if I didn’t agree with the last part of her analysis just a wee bit. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To the left: the cover of the Fall\/Winter 2003 issue of Fence. As editor Rebecca Wolff observes: “Imagine my wry bemusement… to see that this issue, as worthy as any other, sold significantly less on the newsstand and at bookstores than any others, before or since. A typical issue of Fence has a sell-through rate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}