Received my contributor's copies of LIT yesterday, and it appears to be packed cover-to-cover with literary goodness. Lest we at Fulcrum think we have the monopoly on genre-spanning behemoths, this healthy tome seems harbors styles from yours truly to K. Silem Mohammad to Billy Collins. While I am indeed a fan of small, specialized publications, I think that these sorts of inclusive mega-magazines are important. Like a crowded club, there's something for everyone, there is a giddy potentiality manifest in the fact that there's bound to be someone/thing that one likes. There's also a feeling of autonomy, like a big lumbering cruise-ship: bring one of these babies to the beach and you won't need anything else.

Despite reports from any number of partisan enclaves, journals like LIT prove that U.S. literature is thriving and couldn't be more alive and well and diverse. The rainforest is stronger than a field of peas (as much as one may love peas). What we need is more celebration of our multiplicity (by way of big journals like LIT and also by the proliferation of more specialized smaller ones) and less snarky infighting. The next time someone tells you that U.S. poetry has dissolved into a morass of ceaselessly bickering and impotent factions, just whack them with a copy of LIT or Fulcrum or some other journal with an interest in catholicity.