[Bill Carpenter]

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!