Morgan Võ’s debut poetry collection, The Selkie, revolves around a central, fictional character, a fish monger. And the fish monger, of course, revolves around fish. [1]

The enigmatic monger of The Selkie is jovial, social, a trickster. He laughs with a young couple whose toddler, wandering the market, keeps stealing small fish from the monger’s stall to bring to its parents. He shows the fish a DaBaby meme.

The monger is curious. He goes to the public library to hear talks given by Anthony Bourdain, the filmmaker Kelly Reichart. He asks his wife a long series of questions. He writes down her answers on a legal pad, gathering information about her, what she loves, what she remembers.

favorite word?

succor

favorite color?

champagne (18)

The monger is, quietly, an artist, devising two decades-worth of performance art pieces, engaging conceptually with his role as fish monger.

STATEMENT

I, THE MONGER, plan to do a one year performance piece.

I shall chuck a fish from my stall every hour on the hour for one year.

I shall immediately leave my stall, each time after I chuck the fish. (50)

I feel compelled to describe the monger because I find the monger so lovable, or I feel compelled to describe the monger in spite of knowing that what makes a character, or person, lovable, is more than the sum of their characteristics.

After his reading, Võ, in casual conversation with a few other poets said he still loved the book. He said that because it was about this other person and not so localized in his own experience, it felt like the kind of love one has for a friend. That there was no shame involved.

Is the monger lovable if the poet who invented him loves him?






Whatever else the monger may or may not be, the monger is also a worker and his work is fish. He tends, feeds, kills and sells fish to customers from his stall in a market. The poems are composed of the monger’s work. Unlike other kinds of work, the work of a fishmonger is not abstract. One accepts money in exchange for fish. One poem highlights the tactile, concrete nature of the work in an absurd anecdote illustrating the fish’s role in the monger’s life as currency. The monger fails to distinguish between a fish and a bill.


by accident or mistake
one of the fish
gets shuffled in with the cash

the monger fails to notice
a clammy white tail
poking out from his wallet

the banker takes it
she washes her hands but
she does that after
every touch

the atm passes it out

in just one week
the fish is used to pay for

an oil change
a bag of candy
a seafood platter
margarine (25)


Even though the monger’s proximity to fish is circumstantial and commercial, he still falls into a very particular category of characters I am interested in: men who think about fish.





It’s hard to write about fish without succumbing to the puns, which are everywhere. 




In the closing stanzas of the strangest, in my opinion, of his Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke evokes the mystery of fish, what draws some of us to regard their existence with a kind of reverence and longing, their knowledge as inaccessible and of value [2]. In Sonnet XX, Part 2, a poem musing on the incomprehensible distances between us, Rilke writes,

All things are far—and nowhere does the circle close.

Look at the fish, served up on the gaily set table:

how peculiar its face on the dish.

All fish are mute…, one used to think. But who knows?

Isn’t there at last a place where, without them, we would be able

to speak in the language of fish?  (173)

It seems he believes their language comes from within their silence, that a language beyond the muteness might be accessible if we weren’t of different consciousness.

In a letter to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart in February 1920, he writes of the language he senses within silence.

It often happens that one is at odds with the outward behavior of language and wants something inside it, an innermost language, a language of word-kernels, a language which is not plucked from stems, up above, but gathered as language-seeds—wouldn’t the perfect hymn to the sun be composed in this language, and isn’t the pure silence of love like heart-soil around such language kernels? Ah, how often one wishes to speak a few levels deeper […] but one penetrates such a very little way down, one remains with just an intuition of what kind of speech is possible in the place where silence is. (266–267)

Perhaps what we envy of fish is their ability to go into the depths. Places we can’t go, places we can’t know. Rilke laments that we can penetrate such a very little way down to that place, to where silence is.

I can’t help but think this place, this silence, is death.




In the novel Chevengur by Andrey Platanov, one character, a fisherman from Lake Mutevo, is so drawn to the mystery of the fish, he dies trying to see it. [5] The fisherman, “loved fish not as food but as a special being that most probably knew the secret of death.” Holding dead fish up to his friend he explains, “A fish stands between life and death, that’s why it’s mute and why it stares without expression. Even a calf thinks, but a fish doesn’t—it knows everything already.”

The fisherman contemplates the lake for years, dreaming of fish and death and the marriage of the two until he could no longer live without knowing the secret. He binds his legs and throws himself from his boat. “He saw death as another province, situated beneath the sky, as if at the bottom of the cool water, and it had an attractive pull.” (8)

He was jealous of the fish who could see, and already knew, the material that most interested him.




At the launch of The Selkie, Võ began with these words:

Briefly, the kind of premise of the book, or the thing that I wanted to be with was the degree to which wherever you look is possibly another shadow of death, or of extreme violence. And to think about not only how they permeate the world, these two forces, but also how we make it possible for these things to permeate.

In another letter, this one addressed to Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, Rilke wrote, “I sank, weighted down with a millstone’s torpor, to the bottom of silence, below the fish, who only at times pucker their mouths into a discreet Oh, which is inaudible.”  (266)

In The Selkie, the fish know death, they know silence, but they know something more, too. They seem to know about us, and their inaudibility does not keep them from sharing some of this knowledge. On a drive home from a fish market, instead of the monger, there’s a “you.” And the fish have something to say.

you buy two

you drive them home

late at night

you notice something stuck

inside one’s chalky lip

you reach in

with fingers and thumb

you reach a thin scroll

it reads

after

all

you

know

and

tibet

is

still

not

free?  (34)

The scroll that rolls from the fish’s mouth reflects the idea that the knowledge at the depths, what is below the fishes, might be a source of hope, that there is a knowledge somewhere, somewhere, there is a consciousness that sees what we are doing up here and knows better. 

As someone who wants to believe that a different world is possible, one where occupied and brutalized people are free, reading the message on the fish’s scroll made me feel physical relief, albeit one created in the experience of art, by the imaginative possibility that there is a kind of undersight (as opposed to oversight) of the chaotic and violent world we continue to participate in, the one of which we have no choice but to be a part.




The imaginative space opened up by the scolding scroll, that the fish were shaking their heads at our failures, recalled to me the undercurrent of one of my favorite childhood movies, The Incredible Mr. Limpet, about yet another man, this one portrayed by Don Knotts, who is completely obsessed with fish. [3]

In this movie, the country has entered World War 11, and all the strong men around meek, mild-mannered bookkeeper Henry Limpet (Knotts) are being conscripted into the war. Henry loves fish, he explains, because it’s where we came from. They are our primordial forbears, and hold the knowledge. Henry, too, seems to believe the fish know better than what the people have made of the world on land, better than the violence and war that plagued his times. He wonders, with a sparkle in his eye, if, when men actually destroy and kill off the human race, if fish will evolve into the next race of people, create something better, starting from scratch and learning from our mistakes.

The bespectacled, gentle man instead turns his attention toward the depths, toward the silence, he sings, over his beloved aquarium full of fish, and again, in reprise, over the sea at the end of a small pier, “I wish, I wish, I wish I was a fish cause fishes have a better life than people.” 

His nagging wife appears, telling him he must choose once and for all. Will it be her, or will it be fish?  You can imagine which he chooses.

“I don’t want to wait a million years to go back again,” he says. “More than anything, I wish I could be one of you, right now.”

As he makes his transformation from live action Don Knotts to animated Don Knotts-esque fish, a burst of strings and a high pitched chorus join the score. What is that, that the disembodied voices are saying?

“Be careful, be careful, be careful.”

In hindsight, I believe what he had to be careful of was the fact that the film he was in was essentially US Army propaganda. Soon, Henry Limpet, in fish form, is conscripted into to the U.S. Navy to spy on U-Boats.

He seems to forget, halfway through the movie, that he wanted to join the fish because they had a better life than people, not the same one, just mirrored under the water’s surface.

Still, the hope was there at the beginning.




Here, I want to return to Rilke, to wonder what the hope might have been for him. What knowledge might he have expected at that far edge of silence, where the fish speak and know? What does he intuit when he mentions that enticing “intuition of what kind of speech is possible in the place where silence is?”

I turn to a passage in one of his Letters to a Young Poet concerning the unprecedented. [4] He says it is our duty as people and as poets to accept our reality as vastly as possible. We must accept so much that even the unprecedented is welcome within our understanding. He warns against our fear of the unknown as one of the methods by which we as humans keep ourselves from knowledge which might be allowed us if only we could accept it: 

The fact that people have in this sense been cowardly has done infinite harm to life; the experiences that are called “apparitions,” the whole so-called “spirit world,” death, all these Things that are so closely related to us, have through our daily defensiveness been so entirely pushed out of life that the senses with which we might have been able to grasp them have atrophied. (89)

Apparitions, the spirit world, death. Rilke suggests that we once had the ability to perceive them, but we have evolved, through our defensiveness against that which we do not or do not want to understand, into beings which cannot see.

This suggestion is not unlike Henry Limpet’s. It is not unlike the fisherman’s of Lake Mutevo. Rilke suggests that worlds beyond the edge of our perception may be seen if only the senses we have of grasping them had not fallen away. Perhaps the fish have not undergone this tragic mutation.

The fish of The Selkie, too, have abilities humans do not.

they use fish to stain the skin around their eyes

they use fish to make sequins a dark color green

they use fish to find leaks in pools

they use fish to induce labor

they use fish to send messages to people who have died (36)

The fish of The Selkie can breach the membrane of death. The language of the fish moves beyond it.




It’s in the eyes.

The fisherman from Lake Mutevo would specifically show the eyes of dead fish to his friends in the village before recounting their special power. “Look—true wisdom!” (8)

Rilke’s “Eighth Elegy” invokes the realm, invisible to us, that animals can see. “With all its eyes the natural world looks out/ into the Open.” He calls this realm the Open, but also the opposite of World. The Open is “[n]owhere without the No: that pure unseparated element which one breathes without desire and endlessly knows.”

And what makes up that pure unseparated element which only nature can see? A few lines down, a child might wander into the timeless stillness. “Or someone dies and is it.” (49)




The particular death and violence which fish can see in The Selkie is different from the other works I cite in that this book was published in 2024. The death and violence which seep into the pages of The Selkie comes from the ubiquity of visceral images of the suffering of Vietnamese people during the American War in Vietnam. Rilke, Platonov, and Jameson Brewer, John C. Rose, and Joe DiMona (the writers of the Incredible Mr. Limpet) wrote from a time before suffering was televised and published to the degree it has been since the American War in Vietnam. 

The difference may lie here. Now, we see death, bloodshed and violence in endless broadcast. 

In an email, Võ writes,

…the book is a result of thinking about my family’s immigration to the U.S. after being displaced by the American War in Vietnam. What made/makes it possible for an influx of South Asian people to be integrated into this country? Now Vietnamese people are all over. How was their integration smoothed out, particularly considering the ubiquity of visceral images of their suffering during that war? How are relationships forged when the food, the language, the names, the faces of these people might remind Americans of a period defined by a reprehensible moral failure, and by a then-unprecedented confrontation with gore via television, magazines, etc.

Is this gore, what we the humans can/are forced to see the same death the fish see? Do they see it from the other side?



In the same email, Võ generously writes to me about the monger coming into his life.

He kept coming back every day, since it was his job. I asked him to do things to experiment with the idea that performance of good cheer might be one approach towards the assimilation of those marked by death; the fish could be the dead, or the not-only-alive.

I had already suspected, and had already begun writing this essay, but it was then I knew for sure. These were the same fish I had so often been awed by and drawn toward in other moments of reading.

I think again of the poem, silly on first read, heart wrenching after all this thought, about the fish that gets mixed in with the money.

The poem ends like this:

eventually

the fish gets worn in two

then taped together again

then passed back out

by a firmly held hand (26)

The marked-by-death, the not-only-alive being, once assimilated into the culture, by dissemination of his image, by work, by commerce, by good cheer, by the simple fact of her existence, is worn down, but never gets to stop participating, to stop being passed around.




The American War in Vietnam steps into the book, by name (or in human language), from the other side of the membrane in two surprising moments.

In one, Bourdain, in his talk at the library, asks,

how many times

am I going to

get to go

to vietnam

in my life?

how many times

am I going to

sit down with

a table of viet-cong

war heroes

in the middle

of the jungle? (40)

Bourdain’s recollection causes the monger to have one of his own. In high school, he was asked to summarize an event from the evening news. When the assignment was returned to him, the teacher had written in red pen

THE NAM IN

VIETNAM

IS SPELLED WITH

AN ‘A’

NOT AN ‘O’ (41)

Again, the undercurrent of death breaks into the human language. The monger struggles, like we all struggle, to articulate. To bring the realm of death into language. To name.




When Henry Limpet the fish, living his life in the wonderful world he’s always dreamed of, falls in love with another fish, he doesn’t know what to call her. Neither does she. The concept of names is foreign to the fish.




Yeah. It’s been hard to… Well, it has been so hard to live in this season where we’re seeing such an extreme production of death happening. But I also feel that it’s a moment in which a certain thing that was always happening is being brought to light for us, so that we can better respond to it. So with that, I will say, Free Gaza, and Free Palestine, and we’ll begin…


These were Võ’s last few words of introduction at the launch of The Selkie at Giorno Poetry Systems in New York City on May 23rd, 2024.

He began to read, accompanied by his musical collaborator and friend, Anna Cataldo.

the monger kisses each fish goodbye

the fish kiss back with hands

across each eye (55)

Notes

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Transcript of his introduction to The Selkie book launch in New York City and additional thoughts from Morgan Võ were received in an email to the writer.



Works Cited

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[1] Morgan Võ, The Selkie (New York: The Song Cave, 2024)

[2] Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies & Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage International Edition, 2009)


[4] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1986)

[5] Andrey Platonov, Chevengur, trans. Robert Chandler and Elizabeth Chandler (New York: New York Review of Books, 2023)