on the verge of rational meaning
P.
Inman per se (Providence, Rhode
Island: Burning Deck, 2012)
In some senses, that title still might fit, but over the years I have
become less interested in how his writing has little or no “literal” semantic
meaning, than, despite the often-seeming impenetrability of his poetry, how
Inman’s language actually does mean.
Certainly, the title of this 2012 book, published by the unstoppable (thank
heaven) Burning Deck press, is appropriate. Inman’s work is “of itself” or
relating, at least, to itself. Unlike so much of today’s best poetry
writing—the marvelous work, for example, of Charles Bernstein—Inman’s work does
not seem, at first, to reach out to its audience, but demands, rather, that
each individual reader enter its world, opening him or herself to whatever
associations and possibilities of semantic significance the work might suggest.
Inman’s wordscape—more often, fragmentized parts of words—is a private world of
interruptions, walls of punctuation, sounds, and newly-coined phrases that go
far beyond what most readers might describe as disjunctive.
One is tempted, of course, to represent these “poems” as having a deeper
relationship with music, indeed, than with prose or poetic expression. But
Inman’s work, we quickly realize, has little connection with, for example, John
Cage’s structural and chance-oriented writings. For Inman’s phrases, despite
their seeming to come from some “other language,” are apparently quite
intentional, careful word combinations that the reader senses might have great
meaning, if only he spoke “Inmanese.” Consider, for example, one of the first
poems of per se:
another lang(e)
for art lange
distance evanesce.
pekoe stein duckling.
konitz next to some
drummed time.
all the song form dusk
coast broken up.
ink neck texture
business end.
aleatorist upon nylon.
thus often since where
weight leaves off.
pony monad ocean
neural.
talk nudge plural bone
o’hara.
minute-minutes.
Although we can all share the pun of the title and the play on the
poet-critic Art Lange’s name, from there on, where do we go? The poem, indeed, begins with a distant
fading, like a puff of smoke, almost vanishing before it has begun. But then we
suddenly are presented with what almost might be an image, a “pekoe duckling,”
a duck steamed in black tea. What does “stein” have to do with this duckling?
Is the poet suggesting that the relationship of words is more like the writing
of the poet Gertrude Stein, or that the duckling was served with a stein
(perhaps of beer), or, if we want to go back to German, set out on a stone? Who
or what is konitz* that appears next to a period of “drummed” time, presumably
a portion of a jazz piece where the drummer dominates, or maybe just a period
of silence where the diners drum out time on their fingers. The song or just
the event, apparently, as in the first line of the poem, has been “broken up”
in the gathering “dusk” or “fog” of the coast, not necessarily a body of water,
but the coast or slide of the mind into the pleasure of the music. And what
does “ink neck texture business end” mean? Is the drummer tattooed around his
neck, the image getting lost in the crevices of his shirt? Is the chance
pattern (suggested in “aleatorist”) lost in the texture of his garment? Perhaps
this often happens where “weight,” the size of the body, intrudes, or where the
“heavier” seriousness of the piece ends. Perhaps it can be attributed to loss
of seriousness of their conversation. The “pony,” probably a small unit of
liquor rather than a little horse, makes the nerves placid (“pony monad ocean
neural”), while the conversation turns to the poet Frank O’Hara, with a joke
about his many lovers and the social community by which he was surrounded (“talk
nudge plural bone o’hara”). So the minute, the little things, are transformed
into minutes in what might be perceived as another gathering of friends
(perhaps poets) eating and drinking while listening to jazz or simply talking.
I certainly do not suggest that this is
the way one should read an Inman poem! My “off the cuff” interpretation is
obviously strained in its search for definitive significance in a world in
which no such thing has even been proffered and is, at moments, firmly rebuffed
(Charles Bernstein described my slightly mad narrative interpretation as
reminding him of the questions a translator might ask). But what I want to
suggest by my rather absurd grasping at meaning is that Inman’s poems hint at
such a possible language, just out of reach. If Inman’s words are fascinating
for their tonal possibilities—and are often just as exciting as musical
gestures—there is a feeling that they exist always on the verge of rational
meaning.
In fact, in this book, three related
poems, “now/time” (in memoriam, Walter Benjamin), “nono” for the Italian
composer Luigi Nono, and “prose lachenmann,” presumably about Nono’s student,
the composer Helmut Lachenmann, Inman tips his hand, and suggests some of the
methods through which he composes his poems and how we might read them.
Nono, who late in his life was very influenced by the works of Benjamin,
wrote one of his major lectures with Lachenmann, “History and Presence in the
Music of Today,” arguing strongly against the composers, such as Cage, of
chance and aleatoric music. Indeed, particularly in the later works, influenced
by Benjamin, Nono’s clusters of sound were intended to be perceived as highly
politically charged (he was an outspoken Marxist) that express the “concept of
history.” And in later works such as Das atmende
Klarsein, Diario polacco II, and Guai
ai gelidi mostri, he worked with other composers and musicians on
technologies that would create a sound that circulated in space rather than
simply emanating from a particular instrument or group of instruments. His
grand “operatic” productions, involving often harsh, dissonant, microtonal
writing, created drama “within” the work rather than upon the stage. In short,
although one might think of Nono’s works as aleatoric explorations of musical
sound, they are, in fact, highly intentional acoustic expressions of ideas in time
and space.
Helmut Lachenmann expressed it, perhaps, even better that Nono in his
description of a music:
in which the sound events
are chosen and organized so that the manner
in which they are generated
is at least as important as the resultant
acoustic qualities, such as
timbre, volume, etc, do not produce sounds
for their own sake, but
describe or denote the concrete situation:
listening, you hear the
conditions under which a sound-or-noise
action is carried out, you
hear what materials and energies are involved
and what resistance is
encountered.
In short, as my outrageous “reading” of “another lang(e)” reveals, even
though you cannot (nor would not want to)
“translate” Inman’s poems into a standardized poetic narrative or poetic
expression, there is always in his work the suggestion, the feeling that deeper
coherency lies just behind the surface that involves particularized ideas of
the social, political, and historical context. Consider, for example, part 2 of
Inman’s poem “Six Feldman Amounts”:
2
a split alone of finicks
haircut prairie
planton dusk
shoe workers into con-
ditions
Or, a page from his “Prose
Lachenmann”:
a hair of tea lap cement
of myself around a bed
*
slaves’ history buried under asphalt
at its core was how flat he saw as
the ives piece in its own few
language
state itself class itself
lighthouse cattle lengthens.
Certainly, we sense a political message in this world where
“state itself [is] class itself,” and the “slaves’ history is buried under
asphalt.”
Although Inman’s poems are not perhaps “easy” to digest (who would want
them to be?), like Stein, even today, they need new readers unafraid to dip
into their private and public connotations.
*Lee Konitz, born in 1927, was a
major jazz composer and saxophonist who performed with most the jazz greats. In
2012 he performed as part of Enfants Terribles (Bill Fissell, Gary Peacock, and
Joe Baron) at the famed Blue Note in Greenwich Village.
Los Angeles, August 16, 2013
Reprinted from Sibila [Brazil] (August 18, 2013) and Or (No. 11, Fall 2013).
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