Poem Appreciation #1 - Fisches Nachtgesang (Christian Morgenstern)
 

Fisches Nachtgesang
by Christian Morgenstern

I have flouted the rules a wee bit. My mini-essay is on Christian Morgenstern's "Fisches Nachtgesang". The title is in German, but the actual poem has no words and needs no translation. You will not receive another poem remotely like this one, and I hope the essay sparks a debate on not only the artistic merits of the piece, but what can be considered poetry (this one, as my essay explains, is rooted in classic Greek and Latin poetry).

I hope the formatting shows correctly on your browser. If not, the poem can be viewed here

Comments:

Christian Morgenstern’s “Fisches Nachtgesang” is a piscine paradox: a concrete poem rendered in abstract shapes, a sound poem with no discernable sounds, a foreign-language poem that needs no translation, a metrical poem consisting of nothing but metrics that many on Eratosphere will no doubt never identify as a metrical poem, or even a poem at all.

The title translates to “Fish’s Nightsong”. The poem consists of alternating lines of macrons and breves, the marks of scansion in Latin and Greek poetry, reimagined as both the shimmering scales of a sleeping fish and musical notations. How wonderful to turn something consigned to the paper oceans of Classics scholars into a watermark of whimsy. The scansion marks split the poem into one of sound and one of shape.

A song at night might be a lullaby. If the macrons go thump in the night, and the breves consign a consonantal thm to their repertoire, then we get this percussive berceuse: thump-thm-thm-thump-thump-thm-thm-thm-thm-thump-thump-thump-thm-thm-thm-thm and so on. Crescendo, diminuendo, terraced dynamics. It is the fish’s heart beating, an ambient underwater soundscape, a song hummed through puckered lips, and ultimately, with no words to anchor the symbols, no sound at all. The scansion symbols are variable; one can assign any sound or instrument to them and all that remains constant is the pattern of stress they impart. Morgenstern indicates no actual sound, and the stress marks wait for a reader to come along and give them meaning. It is similar to looking at a real fish below real water and not being able to hear the swish and bubble of its aquatic world from one’s stance on shore. The sound exists beyond the water and must be imagined.

Likewise, the shape of the fish remains just out of view. The macrons and breves cluster in a vaguely fish-shaped form. They show a fish in abstract with all its details lost in the murk. The breves look like fish scales of a child’s drawing and the macrons might be crude renderings of horizontal fins, but lines are not connected to form a solid figure. Again, the reader must fill in the blanks himself.

Morgenstern wrote “Fisches Nachtgesang” in 1905 at the beginning of a century that would upheave the definitions of literature and art. Some critics may dismiss his poem as a textual trick, nice enough, but not poetry. But consider the use of the macrons and breves. These symbols, particular to the study of prosody, root the poem in the tradition of Latin and Greek poetry from which all other literature in the Western canon blooms; and Morgenstern, confronting the enormity of the canon behind him, baits the future with a little fish dreaming its silent song, the tune yet to be invented.

Distinguished Guest Amit Majmudar's comments:

It is difficult to add anything to this remarkable poem (a poem that is its own translation) and thorough, perceptive commentary.

Morgenstern is new to me. I looked for some additional work online, but it may have lost something in translation. This Fish’s night-song, however, comes across perfectly.

I think the reason is that it is purely music. We say poetry is what is lost in translation, but it’s primarily the sound of those words in that order that can’t be replicated. It is possible for subtleties of meaning and shifts in tone to be brought across with fairly high fidelity by a skilled translator; but when the poem’s exact sequence of syllables gets disrupted, its unique musicality is lost. I’m speaking of something deeper than rhyme scheme or meter; I mean every vowel, every consonant. In this poem, that isn’t an issue because there aren’t any words.

I think that making the shape resemble a fish more accurately would have diminished the poem, ruined its streamlined symmetry. It would have been easy to add a tail fin or dorsal fin or something. That would have thrown off the mystery of this masterpiece. Likewise a no-no would have been alternating unstress-stress in some attempt to mimic a heartbeat. It’s the visual pattern and the idea of a song that dominate, not the pulse of the fish. It is a nature poem flensed of naturalism.

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?

What an auspicious start to our new event! The poem/un-poem is intriguing, and the essay is thoughtful and gracefully written. I'm normally quicker than most to dismiss things of this nature as gimmicks - but, as the essay indicates, there's much more here than a gimmick. Would I have been as appreciative of it without the essay? Absolutely not! So the Workshop has already done some good.

An admirably thought-provoking start to this exercise. I wanted to complain that a poem ought to consist of symbols that more clearly impart meaning—but then again, a word might carry a variety of clear and less-clear meanings, depending on the reader, and that's often a good thing. I wanted to complain that a poem ought to make sense when read aloud, but our interpreter has offered a suggestion of how the thing might do so. On some level, how one feels about the legitimacy of this piece may be governed by that unanswerable question of where one “draws the line”—between music and meaning, symbol and sense, experiment and enigma. Personally, I had trouble perceiving it as anything but an evocative piece of visual design.


The critique is very thoughtful; it certainly made me give this more attention than I would have otherwise. The last line makes a great point, since to some extent, anything we read is a “tune yet to be invented.” However, the notion that the poem contains “crescendo and diminuendo” doesn’t seem to have any basis. We can certainly imagine that it represents terrace dynamics, i.e., non-gradual changes in volume, but the repeated symbols are all the same, indicating no nuance, only difference.

Not my kind of poem, but a great choice for this event because it made me think carefully about why.

Best,
Jean

I've loved this poem for the forty-odd years I've known it, and I regularly use it as a way in to both concrete poetry and sound poetry for writers willing to take that leap. (There is no definitive performance of this poem, but I have heard / seen several convincing ones - and I have my own variant).

Morgenstern normally works from deep within the roots of the German Romantic tradition (poems like Klabautermann or Der Werwolf are difficult to make sense of without a solid grounding in Klopstock and C F Meyer) but his regular mode is a deeply serious whimsy, and here you don't really need to reference the centuries of German poets staring at water to get the sense of fun.

I didn't notice the ichthyform implications of the shape until I had already know the poem for several years. Noticing that the piece is called a Serenade, I at first assumed that the shape we see on the page is a patch of moonlit water (perhaps lightly phosphorescing). The fish-shape was a bonus I discovered later (it is remarkable how you go on learning such a poem for decades).

I enjoyed the response. In one way it is difficult to write about such a poem, in another way - surprisingly easy. All you can really do is shake your reader's faith in 'what a poem is'. Some readers will let go of the float readily and with confidence - from there on, this poem is not difficult. Other readers prefer to get by without this kind of poem.

I've certainly seen other poems which used non-words effectively (Gomringer's 1954 Silencio is not the masterpiece Fisches Nachtgesang is - but it is still a very fine poem); and while Fisches Nachtgesang isn't language it is close to language in a way that to me seems reminiscent of Ungaretti's Mattina.

And Morgenstern gave Germany such a strong and enduring tradition of poets who work on the very edge of what words can do: Ernst Jandl is a more modern poet who is just as extra-linguistic as Morgenstern, even Thomas Kling has learned something in this tradition.

It is very good to see something on a neo-formalist site which is all form.

Morse code, scales of a single fish, a shoal of fish, wavelets on the sea,...

It is indeed, as Jean says, an admirably thought-provoking start to this event. Though it doesn't elict profound feelings (at least not for me) about itself as itself, it does cause one to reflect on the subject of aesthetics and the fine arts.

Suppose the kickstarter title were The Pine Cone Changes its Mood ? I can see clearly see a pine cone and both frowny and smiley faces.

The title German Romantics Contemplate Water (thanks Christopher) might position it at D&A.

Suppose it were framed and enthroned alone on a blue wall at MoMa? Near a Duchamp Fountain. In one of which, incidentally, the Swedish artist Björn Kjelltoft urinated at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in 1999. Was that a poetic act?

Critics often fall back on phrases like "her paintings are small poems" or "his poem is a miniature painting". Perhaps it is all part and parcel of the same substance: figurative poetry or poetic figures.

This is, FWIW, one of the first poems in my collection of translated 20th century German Poetry. (I'm sticking my neck way out here, because I can't locate the book, but that is how I remember it.)

Well-chosen.

I have some misgivings about this type of wordless "poetry", and about the "appreciation" of it. Often, the appreciation lies in the interpretation more than in the poem. The poem acts as a catalyst for thought and a base for creative construction. Those who supply such thought and construction enjoy it. But many, who look for the meaning in the poem itself, are turned off by something which appears "meaningless". For instance, I had that reaction when listening to a very long performance of "sound poetry" by the celebrated, and undoubtedly skilled, Canadian poet, Christian Bok.

Here, however, I think the essay which forms the "appreciation" doesn't attempt to read out too much more than is written in. Rather, it elicits mainly what is already there. For me, the title, "Fish's Nightsong", is the key.

That title first presents the idea of the fish, as reflected in the scales and the shape of the overall whole. I think the essay extrapolates too much when it says "the macrons might be crude renderings of horizontal fins". The scalloped effect for scales works for me. I think the tail-less fish-shape of the poem is a failed stretch.

Then the title presents the idea of night, and with it, sleep. I'm surprised the essay doesn't explicitly mention the fact that the breves look like closed eyes.

Finally, "song" takes us to the metrical interpretation and percussive non-sound which those familiar with the scansion-marks will recognize. However, that makes it a poem for poets and academics. I generally don't like poetry that shuts out lots of people, but I think this one has enough appeal to carry it even for audiences unfamiliar with the scansion implications. That said, I think the essay overblows both the musicality and the significance of the source. Yes, the music is there, but it's hardly on a par with Dylan Thomas or Beethoven. The curiosity of its source is what elevates it above a finger-tap on a table. And the essayist goes too far for my liking in describing the poet's neat visual pun as "confronting the enormity of the canon behind him" (a curiously Janus-esque way of putting it).

Overall, I think it's a clever and gently pleasing poem, and that the essay is illuminating. But a poem like this will never grab me very strongly.

John

Ah, John B. just said everything I had intended to say about this poem, and he said it so gracefully and beautifully.

When I read the poem ("read?") and the essay earlier, I was reminded of what high school students say when we start discussing poetry. They often think poetry is what you want it to be, that interpretation is everything--forget what the poet might actually be trying to say. In fact, there is a two-way street. Inevitably, readers bring their own experiences, thoughts, feelings, and biases to a poem. But we as readers really ought give poets at least a minute of respect, since in most poems, there is likely a strong intent on the part of the poet to say something. (John Ashbery denies this, but honestly, how can we avoid ourselves, and our inner urgings, however hard we try!)

Here, though, the signs on the page are up for grabs. And the essayist notes this to some degree: "Morgenstern indicates no actual sound, and the stress marks wait for a reader to come along and give them meaning." In fact, without the title, the poem can only say, "interpret me!" The title, "Fish's Nightsong," is an integral part of the poem. You could almost say the title IS the poem, and that the little signs illustrate the poem--or possibly, like a metaphor, help the reader go more deeply into the experience of the poem, although not a huge amount, since what we see are notations, not images, that suggest (a) a fish, (b) closed eyelids (night), and (c) the music of a line, with short and long stresses. Since this is only part of a fish, as others have pointed out (no fins, etc.), perhaps we are meant to think that something is missing, that "night," in fact, is playing the usual part of something dark and scary, even misery--even mystery. We might infer that this is the dark night of the soul--since the fish is a major Christian symbol--or even perhaps that Christianity is lost or lacking in some way. And is there any actual music here? (I don't know music.) The essayist extrapolates the sound of a fish's heart. But again, the fish is really singing any tune we want to hear.

I like the essayist's conclusion, setting the poem in the context of its times (early 20th century), as a precursor of the upheavals of modernism to come. And given the assigned space, the writer does a decent job of touching bases on all this poem might be, all that might be extracted from it. [Added in>] I also loved Chris's context-setting comment above, that the poet's "regular mode is a deeply serious whimsy, and here you don't really need to reference the centuries of German poets staring at water to get the sense of fun." Of course! How many times have I listened to Schubert's lieder and thought how wonderfully he does water? [<] But the bottom-line is that this fish is anything we want it to be, and that, with his/her own language, the essayist injects the poetry into the poem with lovely phrases like this: "Morgenstern, confronting the enormity of the canon behind him, baits the future with a little fish dreaming its silent song, the tune yet to be invented." Well, we are all poets here. We love words. For me, this poem is like a poet's coloring book for all us poets to play with. Is this poetry? The essayist accepts that it is. Do I? Well, OK. But more a trigger for poetry, a prompt, a match to set the imagination on fire, a flintstone to strike the spark of poetry in others. Not such a bad thing, that.

Macrons and breves, indeed. I "say" it as any trained boy scout would say Morse Code, except that knowing Morse Code, I know it is meaningless and an insult to a tradition of elevated speech going back to the Gilgamesh poet. What a pathetic introduction to a new event! The Emperor has no clothes.

Your trogloditic poet lariat,

Timothy Murphy

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

sigh. This is really crap.

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.

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)

Re: conceptual art (which I do have a fondness for)...from an article about Yoko Ono, by Lisa Carver, in this week’s Sunday Times Magazine.


“...she is not easy, her paintings aren’t recognizable, her voice is not pretty, her films are without plot and her happenings make no sense. One of her painting you are told to sleep on. One of her paintings you are told to burn. One of her paintings isn’t a painting at all—it’s you going outside and looking at the sky. Most of her stuff is not even there. This is why I love her. This is why we need her. We have too much stuff already. It clutters our view, inward and outward.

We need more impossible in our culture. Go out and capture moonlight on water in a bucket, she commands. Her art is instructions for tasks impossible to complete. We already have a billion lovely things and a million amazing artists who have honed their talent and have lorded it above us. People wearing their roles as artist or writer or filmmaker or spokesman as a suit of armor or as an invisibility cloak or as an intimidatingly, unaquirably tasteful outfit.....

There are two schools of art. One is what is made beautiful by the artist; the other is to make way for the viewer to see or feel what is already beautiful.

The first is to make something ornate and unreachably special with skills. The viewer or listener is awed, their belief regarding the order of things is confirmed and they are reminded by this unachievable beauty of their own powerlessness. And I do love that kind of art, the beautiful kind.

The other way to make art is to tear down what’s between us and nature, us and eternity, us and the realization that everything is already perfect. In this experience of art, the viewer or listener loses respect for the current order or arrangement of civilization and thus becomes powerful, like King Kong, and outside civilization, like God—or simply like the shuffling janitor who is pleased with his own work and sleeps well....

Ono used the negative positively.....It takes an enormous lack of ego to not put your imprint on everything you do, to not employ your learning and position. To stand back, to hold back, to keep your mouth shut. To yell with your silence, when you know you very well could make soothing and welcome sounds at the drop of a hat.....It takes willpower to overpower the will to power....."


Plenty to chew on there, methinks.

Nemo

There is a sweetness to this, no doubt enhanced by the presenter, that distinguishes it from merely intellectual cleverness. The poet pretends to imagine a piscine creature's wordless, rhythmic lullaby or paean; that is touching. That said, I would prefer to draw a broad gray line between verbal and non-verbal compositions, and declare that non-verbal compositions are not poems. This is an object of visual art, as Don said, but also an imitation of a musical score (a series of non-verbal notations instructing the reader to make sounds in time) displayed as a visual object. But we don't even know what the sounds are, so it is only an abstract of a score.

From another point of view, when representational painting is abstracted into color, line, and mass, you still have color, line, and mass, with the intellectual and aesthetic suggestions the painter can make them carry. This display is not an abstraction from a poem in the same way. There are no sounds, no letters, no words, no syllables, but only signs used in prosodic analysis that are applied to syllables -- as if you marked a canvas with partial formulae for the chemical compositions of pigments or with partial verbal or mathematical descriptions of the spaces to which the absent pigments could apply.

I would be surprised if I ever saw another non-verbal printed construction I liked half as much!

I really liked the little piece you excerpted above, Nemo, on Yoko Ono's "conceptual art." I do think she's describing something akin to a "trigger," which I mentioned in my post (#9) and which Amit also alluded to in his post (#12). He added that "Zen koans are like this. So are certain mantras. Or short poems by Paul Celan..."

The fish poem nudges our preconceptions, makes us think, argue, question, pay attention.... And what Yoko Ono apparently has tried to do is to find more attentive ways of looking IN, and ways of looking further OUT than we are accustomed to--ways of paying attention to what's really there, without worldly clutter, also an attempt to shuck off inner clutter.

But isn't this also is the mark of a good poet? Paying attention is the preparation for a poem, isn't it? So, is the preparation itself a kind of art?

And isn't that kind of attention a matter for the individual? In what way is it accessible to others? Isn't art about sharing with others, or can it be simply in the making, whether it's tangible or not?

How does art include others if it is: "To stand back, to hold back, to keep your mouth shut. To yell with your silence."

Is connecting with others through art always "...the will to power? (See the end of Nemo's excerpt above.)

?????

Charlotte

I'm too busy hunting my puppy to pay much attention to this affair. Amit, I have written one concrete poem, a fully rhymed tetrameter, Frost in Key West, which the Formalist nominated for a pushcart. It was concrete because it started out on the right margin, and the way I wildly lineated it and spaced it, it trended to the left margin, imitating the map of the Keys as it descended the page. I have also written one Zen koan. I don't object to experimentation, but I expect meter and rhyme of anyone pretending to the title of poet.

I'm afraid this is nonsense. If poetry means anything, or indeed human art, it requires to be the expression of senient human beings capable of understanding and recognition, at least in some part, by other human beings. This prating about meaningful absences and silent yelling is a pathetic, at best, abnegation of the potential of human experience and, at worst, a fraud on human consciousness. The number of people who buy this is, thank goodness, negligible. The number of 'intellectuals' and artistic critics who do so, is tragically large. Time and survival will tell as it has always done. Meanhwile, let it be plainly stated "The Emperor has no clothes."

(This refers back to the posts praising this work and especially to the Lisa Carver piece quoted above.)

I have no automatic aversion to conceptual art of any kind. But, while I agree there is something endearing about the poem (I think Bill put it well -- "a sweetness"), I don't find it all that compelling or effective.

David R.

You have to remember that Morgenstern (unlike say Mark Rothko) didn't spend his life doing this sort of thing. I am determined you will like this guy

The Moonsheep
The moonsheep stands upon the clearing.
He waits and waits to get his shearing.
The moonsheep.

The moonsheep plucks himself a blade
returning to his alpine glade.
The moonsheep.

The moonsheep murmurs in his dream:
'I am the cosmos' gloomy scheme.'
The moonsheep.

The moonsheep, in the morn, lies dead.
His flesh is white, the sun is red.
The moonsheep.

-- Christian Morgenstern

I like the work of this poem appreciator. He raised the poem/visual thingy value for me, led me to look through versions of Morgenstern's Werewolf poem on the web until I found one I really dug. (Like John said, it is important to put this work alongside the rest of the artist's stuff.)
I have no idea where to divide that which the poet brought and that which the appreciator infused but all I can say is the appreciator made we wish to find all those thrums and nightsongs in those scales and I usually hate concrete poems. Should I ever take to pissing in fountains I should like this appreciator as my PR agent.

This prating about meaningful absences and silent yelling is a pathetic, at best, abnegation of the potential of human experience and, at worst, a fraud on human consciousness. The number of people who buy this is, thank goodness, negligible. The number of 'intellectuals' and artistic critics who do so, is tragically large. Time and survival will tell as it has always done.

Oh, please, Nigel! "Meaningful absences?" I for my part pointed out several quantifiable attributes to this piece of visual art. Not that therefore you must agree with me but it is hardly the case that my and others’ appreciation of this work is somehow fraudulent, that it induces, for example, “a fraud on human consciousness.” Or perhaps you mean that those who appreciate this work are being duped but don't know it. Which is a gentlemanly way of saying you think we're idiots. Fair enough, if so.

No doubt you and I radically diverge on some aesthetic, perhaps even moral, fronts. I honestly have no rancor towards you, Nigel. However, I take exception to being, by implication, taken as an "intellectual." Both Orwell and John Lukacs have taught me to hate intellectuals. Fair enough also.

How can you declare that this poem is like an abnegation of the potential of human experience? You certainly had an experience looking (not reading) this work of visual art. No?

This poem, mind you, is as old as a Hardy masterpiece. Though you hate it, intelligent people like you who care about poetry and communication can actually enjoy “this kind of thing.” Can I not have this and Hardy too?

Respectfully,

Don

BTW: Rothko did amazing work.

I think it's perfectly fine to say you don't see any meaning or value in a work of art, if you really don't see any meaning or value there, but when a bunch of people talk about what meaning and value they find in it, and give lengthy expression to what it is they find, at that point it seems a bit silly to insist that the work has no meaning and no value and that the people who said it does are seeing something that isn't there. If one wants to insist that the emperor is naked, one must show the people who see clothes on him that the clothes they see aren't actually there, or give sound reason to suggest that those people are seeing clothes because they feel compelled to see them because they are worried that other people won't think they're very clever if they say they don't see them.

I see clothes on this emperor, and I've described the clothes in a bit of detail which really isn't much of a stretch at all, and others have pointed out the clothes that they see, and which, once pointed out, I can see also. The job for those who claim the emperor is naked is to explain to those who see clothes on him that those clothes are only illusions, and not really there at all.

This poem has already stood the test of time that 99.999999...% percent of poems, published or not, will not be able to match. How many poems published in the last year all across the world, or posted on the Internet, will still be talked about a century from now? Precious few, I would venture to guess, and with good reason.

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."