Current Musicology, No. 95 (Spring 2013)
© 2013 by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York 381

Nigun Poems

Jake Marmer

Preface

This set of poems grew out of my experiences of listening and finding myself 
inside nigunim (pl; singular nigun or nign), Chassidic chants—mystical, 
usually wordless songs used as accompaniment for rituals—weddings, 
prayers, candle–lightings—collective beckoning of transcendence. The nigun 
experience is fraught with what Amiri Baraka called, referring to blues, the 
“re/feeling”—proximity and shape of personal history of encounters with 
unfathomable. 

Because most of the nigunim did not have lyrics they were comprised of 
scat—but a somber sort of a scat: “oi–oi”, “di–dai”, “bah–bom”, etc. Musical 
instruments were not used to accompany them, either, since most of 
the singing happened on the Sabbath, when instruments were put away. 
Rid of accompaniment, rid of lyrics, these stripped down chants were 
visceral and prayer–like but washed out of content, and filled, instead, with 
implication—with attempts. At the climax of one of his talks, balancing at the 
edge of the cognitive void, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov reportedly said: “And 
even to this, too, there’s an answer. But that answer is necessarily a song.” 

These poems attempt to reimagine the sensation of locating oneself inside 
a nigun. 



Current Musicology

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Induction into Nigun1

people turn into rocks
song like water
beats between them

1. This poem was originally published in the New Vilna Review in March 2012



Jake Marmer

383

Blanket Nigun

what this blanket weighs
for days, yr muscles will remember 
feet land on the floor
so cold you begin to feel
a tonic sled, under another 
you, under another
blanket, heavier, bigger, what
it weighs you may never 
know—
 the cold—
is inside the vision
as blankness, your voice
nesting, missing feathers
lifting off 
 you
       begin
  to feel 



Current Musicology

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Painters’ Nigun

On hearing Frank London’s H.W.N.

this is a song of people painting walls
walls of a shul that doesn’t exist

paint rolls upwards 
pulled by other gravities

you could celebrate a bris a yontef

air thickening with paint—

inanimate painted
with breath
 breathes

as it is said: 
“living words” 

painting walls on the scaffolding of a drum solo
of fists banging a table which is a real table it’s really here
but the scaffolding is full of paint the scaffolding is a face
of the shul that doesn’t exist

the sound rises like an animal and walks
   moving its burden
to the pit 

in the shul a pit built for the chazzan
as it is said “from the depth . . .”

this yontef commemorates what
has never happened

but the paint the paint
rolls like walls stands like sea

walls standing 
  mercurially



Jake Marmer

385

Nigun Au Rebours

this song is not an act but erasure

the way other songs reach into you
 this one retreats, 
  taking with it stuff that seemed nailed to the floor

this song is cinematic in its reel 

you may find yourself humming its residue

you may wonder who you’re
 feeding—
through the song’s straw that ascends
to the pouting mouth 
 of the vanishing point



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Root–Note Nigun

this nigun is about a stick figure
and the wind over canvas 
 that bared it—

it’s about a two–bone 
abstraction, a solitary root
note, resounding its stripped chorus
no aesthetics beyond instinct—

this nigun is about a scratch, 
a typo, doodle of person—dropped 
into an impressionist painting
amidst the ball of flesh and color 

and it knows there must be a mistake
and mumbles all it ever knows to mumble
—“I exist”—“I exist”—“I exist”—
 a  note bent in and out of the question 

this nigun is about a stick figure
imagining it could change its fate
by lifting its stick–figure hands
   heavenward



Jake Marmer

387

Cecil’s Scarecrow Nigun

for Anthony Coleman

this nigun is a scarecrow

in your old clothes
it looks a little bit like you—
a no–thanks–prophecy—

the fence:  scarecrow’s
  stage and metalepsis

 melody lint,
    limp sleeves and run–on paint 

everybody here forgets
  what they came for—

 newly unknotted,
  turn 
  into congregants
  dissipating in their coats
  
the nigun shuckles, rocks
 alone
 victorious
  creaking guardian

in the field of pure color



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Amphibian Nigun

needle threads nothingness 
 hunks of it

transparent slices of ice 
a dress
good for running up and down 
the stairs
  of the ancestral dream 
ice quickly goes 
New York 

ice always does 
melting ripples around your face
it’s the puddle–waltz—
for a minute you remember 
there’s a world at the bottom 
of your stomach 
peopled with memories 
sad eyes, winking—
and when you raise your head and ask for a drink 
someone shows you to the ocean 
and says welcome to your new life 
under the water