Pool – 2005
Volume 4
2005
Annual
Dan Brady
“For genius, at least where poetry is concerned, consists precisely in being faithful to freedom,” Dean Young quotes from surrealist poet Yves Bonnefoy in the latest issue of POOL. Although this quote comes from Amy Newlove Schroeder’s interview with Young in the back pages of POOL, it might as well be the magazine’s credo. From the Natasha Sajé’s prose poem “B” to Jeff Chang’s “Things to Forget”—“Under the skin is another layer. / We call this baby skin. // Under a baby’s skin, / snowflakes.”
“For genius, at least where poetry is concerned, consists precisely in being faithful to freedom,” Dean Young quotes from surrealist poet Yves Bonnefoy in the latest issue of POOL. Although this quote comes from Amy Newlove Schroeder’s interview with Young in the back pages of POOL, it might as well be the magazine’s credo. From the Natasha Sajé’s prose poem “B” to Jeff Chang’s “Things to Forget”—“Under the skin is another layer. / We call this baby skin. // Under a baby’s skin, / snowflakes.” – POOL is an experience of the freedom and diversity of poetry. Published annually out of Los Angeles, editors Patty Seyburn and Judith Taylor provide a cross-section of contemporary American poetry. With poems that are surprising and at the center of the zeitgeist, POOL reads like a snapshot of the best of poetry’s goings-on. Cate Marvin’s ode to the power of Nyquil is both funny and unsettling and Cathleen Calbert’s “Fox Wife” is sexy and haunting: “Fox trickery? / You mean grapes / and what appears / to be a pool of water? / The way the wind calls / your wife’s name? / What of your gods? / You think they don’t / litter the sky / with riddles?” Albert Goldbarth writes in his “Stepper,” “Every day… / the dust of Asia Minor caking in one’s hair. / All night, for 1700 miles of nights… the cold slopes / of the Hindu Kush against one’s cheek, / until the flesh takes on the feel of rock. Some / never returned as themselves. This / is evidently what needs to be done / if you’re going to conquer the world.” While POOL may not be climbing Hindu Kush, they seem to be on the right path for conquering the world—the poetry world, at least.
