[Catherine Chandler]

You asked for our opinions, not only on the "artistic merits of the piece" but also on what we consider "poetry".

I find even this (which I find ridiculous) is closer to poetry than the fish presented above.

As for the "percussive berceuse" description, I'd rather hear "real" music in a poem/lullaby than thumping and thming. The mini-essay, though it tries desperately with whimsical arguments, fails to convince me that "Fishces Nachtgesang" is poetry.

It is not music. It is not poetry. It's a drawing of a fish made from macrons and breves.

[Amit Majmudar]

The disagreement here is wonderful! Exactly how I would wish to start, Mr. Murphy: with something that gets people weighing in and posting and, hopefully, appreciating something they might not have otherwise.

I suppose I would point out one thing.... which is that there is an entire kind of writing or speech that is meant, precisely, to trigger a cascade in the listener's or reader's mind. Zen koans are like this. So are certain mantras. Or short poems by Paul Celan. Due to the vicissitudes of history and manuscript preservation, the fragments of Sappho often work this way as well, in practice.

There is "not much there" in a literal sense--only a few words, or in this case, none at all. But they serve as triggers. There are hundreds of thousands of other poems out there which contain many more words quite meaningfully sequenced--yet most would never set people contemplating the very nature of what they consider poetry, or contemplating so closely their form on the page--much less reacting so strongly as some of us have. Well done, Herr Morgenstern; well submitted, anonymous submitter!

[David Rosenthal]

Well, actually Amit, I find little about the poem or the discussion that invites me to respond. The first thing in the thread that moved me to respond was you mention of "triggers" and "koans." I don't think what the poem has to offer -- which I think is well explicated by the essay and subsequent discussion -- is all that remarkable. Maybe it was remarkable in 1905, but I actually doubt that.

The fact is it is a gimmick, which I don't think is necessarily a condemnation, but I don't think it is all that effective even as a gimmick. I think it does indeed require some translation -- not all languages have a meaningful way to decode macrons and breves, the title is necessary to establish the fishness of the otherwise abstract image -- and the musical sense I make of the arrangement of the symbols doesn't communicate much to me. The explication communicates the ideas more interestingly than the poem. In any case, my reaction to the poem and the essay was, "O.K., got it, next?" But I am utterly aware that my reaction is mine, and I understand how others find it more interesting than I do.

David R.

[Andrew Frisardi]

People who like conceptual art will probably like this, those who don't won't. I do not--or rather, I should say, conceptual art leaves me cold. I like art that leaves me moved, emotionally, in some way. This one stays (for me at least) at head level, just conceptual. When I want to think about what poetry is, I read the great poet-critics.

De gustibus etc.

That said, hats off to the critter of this one; it's an thought-provoking and observant little essay.

[Maryann Corbett]

I've been having trouble composing a response to this because my brain runs off in so many directions. So apologies if what follows is disjointed.

The writer of the kickoff essay above clearly knows the Sphere well, and I commend him or her for having the chutzpah to throw a challenge at us.

Though I haven't looked at my old books of critical theory to be sure, I think that concrete poetry hadn't even come to be included in textbooks when I was still studying. So I am ignorant; I confess my ignorance; I wait to be instructed. It's going to take more than one short essay for me to understand.

Because I don't yet understand, I'm more comfortable calling this visual art/conceptual art than poetry. My discomfort lies in the fact that any element of sound in the piece is an invention of the viewer/interpreter. It's a big leap from breves and macrons to "thump-thm." The symbols mean very different things in the poetries of different languages, and even within one type of poetry they mean different things. Syllable length in classical languages comes both from vowels and from piled-up consonants. Syllable stress in English comes from pitch and length and syntax, as well as the reader's expectation. So these macrons and breves are truly soundless by themselves. Compounding that is the fact that no natural language I know of (okay, that's a limited number) permits strings of unstressed, or of stressed, syllables as long as the strings in this piece. So I'm not only unable to decode sounds here; I'm even unable to imaging hearing them. I truly have to invent it all. The essay-writer invents a heartbeat, and I can buy that and even grant that it's a well-known metaphor for metrical effects. But it's an imagined element.

So an awful lot depends on the reader, and readers differ in their expectations of the aural and the visual in poems. We've seen this in our past discussions of going to, and giving, readings. I absolutely want to see the poem; some poets are terribly annoyed that anyone wants to read and not just to listen. For me the experience of the page is a major part of my experience of the poem and I'm likely to read without even subvocalizing at the first go. We know about such differences. So we already know that some of us can tolerate a page-only poem and some of us can't.

There's a continuum of types of poetry with a visual element, and I think this is at the extreme end. I have much less trouble with poems--and I'm happy to call them poems--in which sonics and visuals mix. Cummings of course did this long ago. A couple of right-now examples are Todd Boss (see his newest book, Pitch) and Marsha Pomerantz.

I have no good way to tie up all these tangles, but I'd like to keep thinking. I'd rather hear from others who know how to work with pieces like the one above than try to drive all such people away.

[William A. Baurle]

I think there are all kinds of different and interesting elements in this poem. The first thing I saw were the happy and sad faces, and I was thinking no-one noticed until I noticed that Janice and John noticed. Janice also remarks that it looks like a pine cone, which has scales like a fish, and which are seed-bearing, and the poem is a seed of sorts, in that it gets planted in our noodles and starts to grow into whatever we make of it. As I was looking at pictures of pine cones I clicked a link and read about "fibonacci number ratios", and I scrolled down and saw this bit: The Fibonacci sequence appears in Indian mathematics, in connection with Sanskrit prosody. In the Sanskrit oral tradition, there was much emphasis on how long (L) syllables mix with the short (S), and counting the different patterns of L and S within a given fixed length results in the Fibonacci numbers... which for some reason didn't surprise me at all. I also noticed that the macrons made me think of still water, and that the breves made me think of waves (hey does that rhyme?) and that made me think of analog versus digital, analog as wave and digital as line, or line of code, binary, on/off, zeroes and ones, and that made me think of quantum field theory and digital physics, which reminded me of Spinoza, God, Genesis, male/female, cell devision, binary fission, and fish.

[Don Jones]

Contest: Can anyone out there compose a meaningful poem using macrons and breves? Or is Morgenstern’s the only successful poem written in this un-language?

That is Amit's original question and it's one worth asking. When I read a fine sonnet I might very well be moved to read another. And another. There are good and bad sonnets but there seems to be something in the structure of the sonnet that invites re-visitation for writer and reader and while Christian Bök, mentioned previously, says the sonnet is a dead form, sonnets have been doing their thing for seven centuries and counting (pun intended!).

What of "Fish's Nightsong"? Can it be duplicated as to form (like the fourteen lines of ten syllables in English) and yet remain as individual and unique? Notice how this doesn’t apply to free verse. Every form of a fine free verse poem is a form unto itself, not regulated by prior convention such as the lattice grid of the sonnet, villanelle, canzone, pantoum, and the list goes on. Yet free verse is also “duplicable,” it can be “done again.”

That said, I’m not so sure that we would even be interested in trying out something of the same nature as "Fish's Nightsong". So, Amit’s challenge is a very telling qualification. "Fish's Nightsong" is a one-off wonder. As Janice sharply pointed out Duchamp, I will add that this poem is like his ready-mades. As with the ready-mades, who else would make "Fish's Nightsong" and make it as well after it has already been done and, in this case, 107 years ago? Duchamp’s was a supremely singular act that, to this day, arouses anger. "Fish's Nightsong" is the same. It need only be done once and that's it.

BTW: I consider pissing into the Duchamp’s ready-made urinal an act of vandalism. Irony well noted.

As Andrew points out, this is conceptual art and, as such, is not that concerned about the product but about the process or the way of thinking about and perceiving the reality we live in. Conceptual art challenges our preconceptions. That is why it aggressively confronts the reader. "Fish's Nightsong" is saying “fuck you” in a very artful way (sorry Moderators!). That is one reason why some good souls on this thread have reacted with anger towards it. It is a didactic action, meant to show you something so elemental it calls into question the very authenticity of the elements. To wit, when macrons are used in this way it is mocking their very conventionality.

Or, you could take the opposite view, appreciating the overall shape, which is captivating, and the rhythmic undulations effected on the eyes when quickly taking in each line, alternatively, from breves to macrons. It’s swimming! What is offensive to some is wonderful to another.

One thing "Fish's Nightsong" is not is literature. (I posted this sentence before I read Maryann's identical judgment above.) It is a work of visual art. As pointed out, the title is the only written part of it, and prose at that. It has a title the way a work of visual art can have a title. But visually it has you think, or at least challenges you to think, about the elements that, in this case, make up the prototype of all the grids of poetic forms, of any culture. The layout of "Fish's Nightsong" could mean, intend, any line length or metric tool. Note that the “poem” or un-poem that is this visual piece of art is very regular. It should be pleasing to the most orthodox formalists among us. Though it has an odd number of lines, which would exclude a rhyme, these 13 lines create a middle line at line 7. The un-poem begins as it ends. Breves and macrons alternate predictably. It is, in fact, highly conventional and predictable, like our expectations of form. Yet no one else thought up to “write” this piece of visual art.

Last, let’s not forget to have a sense of humor. Conceptual art does have a humble side in that it calls into question what we might take to be absolute (e.g. poems must be in strict meter) but is really a convention. Not that convention is bad, only that there are options. I don’t entirely agree with Andrew about conceptual art not having an emotional angle. For some "Fish's Nightsong" is as humorous and playful as it is naughty. You’re meant to smile. That is an emotion. As are, for that matter, disgust, fear, and loathing.

Don

[conny]

sigh. This is really crap.

[Nigel Mace]

Apparently the unhappy poet once said, "Home isn't where our house is, but wherever we are understood." I was obviously out when this one called.

[John Whitworth]

Children like this sort of thing. That's not a criticism; it's an observation. I'm a great fan of Morgenstern's nonsense poems as translated by R F C Hull. 'A knee walks lonely through the world...'

Here's one, though translated by someone else.

The Seagulls

The seagulls by their looks suggest
that Emma is their name;
they wear a white and fluffy vest
and are the hunter's game.

I never shoot a seagull dead;
their life I do not take.
I like to feed them gingerbread
and bits of raisin cake.

O human, you will never fly
the way the seagulls do;
but if your name is Emma, why,
be glad they look like you.

(Translated by Karl F. Ross)