Pool Poem

So I look at this and want to think of something profound, that jumps out and grabs me and sends me spiraling down the rabbit hole of geniusness. But I can't. It's a poem and the first few times I looked at it, it kind of bored me.

And then I saw it or I think I saw it. Poetry is often about rhythm and rhyme and meter. The Pool Poem reads more like a list, and so I assumed that there was no real rhythm here. But there it is, in the way each lines flows into the next by their placement on the page not necessarily because it's profound or deep.

Deep. Do I need to scratch my head at a poem and wonder if I'm one of the enlightened for it to be good? Or can the aesthetics of the way it is set on the page capture me as well. Obviously, most people shoot for both. Is it present here? Yeah, though it took me a while.

It is a list, of places and memories, of pools and other things that flicker through Murray's head as he's writing. It's like a freestyle pouring out of thought, just simple phrases that help him see those places and that time. And it's simple. One word. Two. Three. It doesn't take much but it still makes sense. The flow comes through because of how it's presented. Were this just a list, left indent and go!, it wouldn't work at all, any more than a grocery list would be considered art.

So then, if I can achieve rhythm not only by phrasing and words, but by placement, I have another tool to help me communicate with my audience. I can speak of rain and give the feeling through groups of words shaping raindrops. The possibilities go on, and the raindrops idea might be cliche but the idea works. Break it up. Let's let our words flow, let our sentences flow, let our thoughts flow. Then there is less lost in translation. Then my brain can spill more into yours. Maybe you don't want that, my brain is a mess. But we have options.

If anyone made a list of the places their mind travels through the course of a day and charted it on paper and arranged it in such a way that we could see all the interconnectivity and the flow and the person through the page, then we could touch consciousness within one another and come as close as possible to reading thoughts.

If we can list our memories and draw them out through words on a page and link them and color them with adjectives or any other tool we have, then we can better understand ourselves and where we come from and how and why we are what we are.

If I see this poem as just a list, if I look at it and say "Hey, a boring list of pool names," then I rob from myself and no one else. And honestly, I'm not as excited about Foghouse Nick and the Long Pool as I am about what the form can do for me.