[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