[Charlotte Innes]

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.