I wish I'd written it. Sure, I've made people vomit from time to time, but to cause full-blown conniption-fits across such a wide audience is something I can only dream of.

But since I didn't write it, I'm glad it was submitted and selected, as I might never have come across it otherwise. Slight, but delightful.

Yoko Ono lacking ego? Now, that's a concept!

Well, in theory at least, ha!
These concepts are indeed protean things.

Nemo

The naysayers are taking this way too seriously; even being called "crap" is much harsher than it deserves. At worst it should be greeted by a shrug. Anyway, it's just a little jeu d'esprit. In a book that contains mostly the sort of stuff John is posting, sure, I'd pause and contemplate this for a bit. Don Paterson knows what he's doing and Rain has a poem that's just a blank page--if it bores you, or seems cliche, just ignore it, there are other good poems in the book. This one is, as Bill says, touching in its way, & a neat idea. Plus I like the way the breves shift before your eyes from smiley faces to closed eyes (/sleepy faces) and back. It seems like a happy dream. It's cute.

I don't see signs of Yoko Ono having ego. She's confident enough to do what she wants, but I've never seen her make any claims about the quality of her work other than to say that she understands its popularity, such as it is, comes from her marriage to John and not from any real connection that most people have with it. In fact, she simply claims to like the kind of stuff she does, not that other people like it or that it requires great skill.

Here's the whole article by the way.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/ma...anted=all&_r=0

Among the German people Morgenstern = play and erudition, not a common coupling. I'm a huge fan.

Here's a 1964 translation into English - the two versions were originally published on facing pages, with the German on the lefthand side.

Not bad, I think!

A shrug and a smile pretty much sums it up for me. I do not feel harshly about it at all, and have none of the programmatic objections some other posters have. But I think some of the yaysayers should be just as careful about taking it too seriously, IMO.

David R.

What David said.

And that's pretty good, Mary, although I think it's more a Lowellian "version" than a translation per se. I'd retitle it "Marinated Fish Nightsong."