From the Editors

Note: This text comes directly from Issue #4 of Pom2. It directly references a number of writers from that issue.

We began this magazine with the intention of provoking response...The following are certain notions...What we found is that response occurs constantly—and increasingly, in this political moment, in these most provoking times, we’ve just to put our ears to the ground. She turned into a rat, then a flowerpot, then a story. She said 'nothing shall make you afraid.'

What emerges is a "still" of response. (We freeze the film's frame. We coax the liquor out.) The stillness of the magazine, the artifact, can be clarity, like silt settling in water. Still, the magazine creates a verb: "to pom." Before anything else could happen, there had to be an attraction. Gravity. (Seriously.)

Perhaps Pom2 is a record of response to vertigo? If vertigo is falling into the accumulated language layers, as in the tomato found as paradise fruit used as rat bait. So you are involved in the methodical, well-planned, ruthless, and stubborn destruction of the very ground of Paradise. This issue is dated, in the marked sense of the word. A magazine of contemporary and predominantly United States-ian poetry. Authors respond to this particular moment of suppressed expression, when imagination can be curtailed or

 

    Not not suppressing exactly but not hesitating either and
          in this the tendency to be
    an instrument of grief less than it once was
    an expectancy’s life crisis
    so as to speak
    and not not speak of it

The editors felt a need to speak: this page. If Pom 2 isn’t deep enough, it won’t float. Don’t touch the images or symbols, they can actually hurt We’ve found our half-formed ideas about a magazine produce well-considered surprises, where myriad things are made, separate yet not separate. Goodbye tiny industrialist. Property of Many is ego and erasure of ego resting on one another? The magazine becoming an ah-ha: the way the trees smell.