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Unread 10-21-2012, 10:35 AM
Christopher ONeill Christopher ONeill is offline
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Location: Cardiff, Wales, UK
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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.
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