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# Vasily Kandinsky's Poems
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/sounds-vasily-kandinsky-tony-frazer-shearsman-books/
- Published: 2019-02-03T11:30:28.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T15:54:23.000Z
- Description: Evocations of color dominate these ruminative prose poems.
- Author: Douglas Messerli
- Tags: Books, Poetry, Review, Wassily Kandinsky, Weekend, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:34 (2019, 2020, part 1)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2019/01/kandinsky.jpg)

Vasily Kandinsky, Sounds (all images courtesy Shearsman Books)

Vasily Kandinsky’s only published book of poetry, prose poems titled *Klänge* ([*Sounds*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1848616074/?tag=hyperallergic-20&ref=hyperallergic.com)) (ca. 1912–13), is available for the first time with its original art in color (a previous Yale University edition only presented the black-and-white prints), courtesy of Shearsman Books and translated by Tony Frazer.

In addition to his significant contributions to modern art and important theoretical works such as *Über des Geistige in der Kunst* (*Concerning the Spiritual in Art*), Kandinsky was clearly a talented poet, with other poetic attempts that appear in his papers, but remain unpublished in book form. These compositions reveal his interest in language, in relation to the visual image.

A certain narrative pattern is apparent throughout these works. For example, this volume’s first poem, “Hills,” begins almost in a mode of story-telling:

> A mass of hills in all the colours one can imagine  
> or would even wish to imagine. All varying sizes,  
> but shapes always the same, i.e. just one: Fat at the  
> bottom, bulging at the sides, flat-round on top. Simple  
> everyday hills, then, just as one always imagines but  
> never sees.

One might expect from Kandinsky that color that is dominant in nearly all of these written works. From “Seeing”:

> Blue, Blue rose up, rose up, and fell.  
> Spiky, Thin whistled and tried to barge its way in, but  
> didn’t get through.  
> On every corner there was a din.  
> Fat Brown got caught, apparently for all eternity.  
>  
> Apparently. Apparently.

A dark sense of humor also emerges in several of them that recalls folklore or even of children’s stories:

> Great big houses suddenly collapsed. Small houses  
> remained standing, unaffected.  
> A thick hard egg-shaped orange-cloud hung suddenly  
> over the town. It seemed to hang from the steep  
> steeple of the Town Hall tower, tall, all angles, and  
> radiated violet. (“Bassoon”)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2019/01/kand1.jpg)

Vasily Kandinsky, “Zwei Ritter vor Rot / Two Riders in front of Red” (1911), woodcut, 4 x 6 inches

The very best of them — such as “Open” below — play with language in a way that surely must have attracted his Dadaist friends, who came together to read these works.

> Now slowly disappearing in the green grass.  
> Now stuck in the grey muck.  
> Now slowly disappearing in the white snow.  
> Now stuck in the grey muck.  
> Lay long: long fat black tubes.  
> Lay long.  
> Long tubes.  
> Tubes.  
> Tubes.

Here is a poem that is anything but “open,” as everything and everyone is trapped in beautiful repetition — the long lay of the grey muck that becomes almost a celebration of nature, while also referencing the artist’s paint “tubes” which abstractly “capture” the very figures the painting creates. In its semi-nonsense repetitions this poem might almost remind one of works by Gertrude Stein.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2019/01/kand2.jpg)

Vasily Kandinsky, “Orientalisches / Oriental” (1913), woodcut, 4.7 inches x 7.4 inches

Similarly the repetitions of “Not,” fill the page with a kind of “Jack-in-the-box” character, who “jumped from one side of the hollow to the others with an effort that would be enough / For a hole three meters side. And back again right away.” The poem humorously continues:

> And back right away. Back,  
> back. Oh! back again, back again! Again, again. Oh  
> again, again, again. Ba-ack . . . Ba-a-ack . . .

The poem ends: “Don’t go there! Don’t look at him!!…..Never!!……,” before the observer, like the White Rabbit in *Alice in Wonderland* declares that he’s going “over there. Otherwise I’ll be too late.”

There is often a kind of Beckettian quality to his poems, as well, expressed in “Water”:

> In the yellow sand walked a small thin red man. He kept  
> slipping all the time. It looked as if he were walking  
>  
> on black ice. It was however yellow sand of the never-  
> ending plain.  
>  
> From time to time he said: “Water . . . Blue water.” And  
> didn’t understand himself why he said it.

Finally, some of these works, convey an odd sense of tenderness. In the volume’s final poem of, “Softness,” Kandinsky writes:

> Each lay on his own horse, which was unbecoming and  
> improper. It’s better anyway if a fat bird sits on this not  
> on his thin branch, with the little trembling quivering  
> living leaf. Everyone can kneel down (anyone who can’t  
> learns how). Can everyone see the spires? Open the  
> door! Or the fold will tear the roof off!

Here we truly see Kandinsky represent the spiritual in art, a theme that runs through his visual and written oeuvres. Drawing from the Old and New Testaments simultaneously he tells us: see the spires or God might tear off your roof.

[Sounds](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1848616074/?tag=hyperallergic-20&ref=hyperallergic.com) *by Vasily Kandinsky, translated by Tony Frazer, is published by* [*Shearsman Books*](https://www.shearsman.com/store/Vasily-Kandinsky-Sounds-p102838847?ref=hyperallergic.com) *and is available from* [*Amazon*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1848616074/?tag=hyperallergic-20&ref=hyperallergic.com) *and other online retailers.*