M A R K W A L L A C E
__________________________________________________________MOVEMENT BEYOND THE IMAGE:
PATTERN & REFUSAL IN THE POETRY OF P. INMAN
“Writing as an attempt to create a negative, insubordinate space within the administered space we're all daily subjected to... So most of the terminology I find myself falling back on is a terminology of distancing & differentiation. What writing has to get rid of, what it isn't, or hopes it isn't.”
P. Inman
Of all the writers associated with language poetry, P. Inman may be the most severe. First, there's his determined attempt to explore what his writing isn't, what he wants it rid of. To understand his work we have to be aware of what he's refusing to do. Second, there's his adherence to fundamental principles that he has both stated (however rarely) and made implicit within his poems. Perhaps more than any other language poet, Inman's practice follows from his principles and does not (except perhaps in rare instances) do anything other than his principles demand. While it's always a mistake to suggest that any writer can ultimately serve as a paradigm for a whole field of literary activity, Inman's work puts into action, relentlessly, some of the ideas most fundamentally associated with language poetry.
At a reading, I once introduced Inman as a writer who over many books had never once presented a coherent image. I said, therefore, that he had created an ironic and socially incisive inversion of Pound's statement that “it is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to write voluminous works” (“A Retrospect” 4). My point was not quite true, of course, as Inman himself told me later. One can find images in his work, if rarely conventionally coherent ones. Even in those rare moments when he presents an image, it's never quite realistic, tending more towards a disruptive surrealism that highlights absurd juxtapositions: “the outfielder broke stride the more i spoke” (Red Shift 35). Any visual coherence in such images is always quickly undermined by their jarring connection to surrounding phrases. The above image, for instance, is followed by “bottle allowing a red minus. deadener put to people,” a phrase reminiscent of the anti-representational, multiple perspective focus on the everyday found, for instance, in Stein's Tender Buttons, although Inman's socio-political concerns distinguish his work from Stein's Cubist phenomenology. (Red Shift 35). So if Inman sometimes does create images, they're usually absurd and quickly undermined.
Language poetry became associated with a critique of the relationship between imagery and capitalism or, more broadly, between imagery and what Steve McCaffery has called “restricted economies”: social institutions and methods of reading in which all meaning is recuperable within defined economies of meaning and there is never any excess either of meaning or what lies beyond meaning. What Charles Bernstein calls “absorptive” methods of writing and reading, such as the creation of clear images in literary realism, help make it possible to represent the world in a way that makes that world seem more easily controlled and consumed. In a basic sense, the image-making function of language allows readers the illusion that they are seeing pictures rather than reading words, thus dropping them into an alternative world (whether realistic or fantastic) in which the immediate facts of their social condition, including the condition of language itself, can be ignored.
Inman, however, has claimed to be skeptical of the power of anti-representational resistance, as the following remark makes clear: “If one looks at the history of Abstract Expressionism... It's a process through which an extremely non-representational technique, Pollack's overall dripping, becomes signatory. Through which a radical formal approach to figuration is turned into a trademark, something to peddle the goods with” (Aerial 6/7 70). Whether, like Inman, they were skeptical about the resistance offered by anti-representational art, many language poets also wrote books that refused to present clear images. But none of them have staked their whole writing life as thoroughly on the idea of undermining the image as Inman has, have been as committed to resisting the image in as many permutations, or have been as unwilling to bring images back in later years of their work. For Inman, one of the things writing isn't is a series of images. It's not just a rhetorical tool; it's an idea to which all his writing has been devoted. But why should that be true, if he's skeptical of the resistance it offers?
Poet and critic Tom Orange likes to suggest in conversation that one should read the rhetorical gestures in early language poetry critical statements as a kind of conscious overkill. Those statements, he says, maybe weren't meant so much as the final word as they were a calculated disruption of the public world of American poetry of the 80s and late 70s, with its addiction to image and to the figure of the author as a focal point for social authority and economic consumption. It's an intriguing idea, if debatable and not easy to prove, since it's hard to tell the difference between somebody who means what they're saying absolutely and someone who is exaggerating what they're saying to influence the person they're speaking to. But the point is worth considering, especially because of the way many poets associated with the language movement have gone on to different stances and engagements, such as Barrett Watten's involvement in cultural studies. But what's also worth considering is that Inman has not gone on in that way. His writing has consistently refused to develop over time in any of the obvious senses of development; his writing hasn't grown if one means by grown that he has gone on to new principles or new problems as times have changed. To some this fact might make Inman a case of arrested development. As the language poetry critique of the relation between image and capital turns out to be lodged in a historical moment now gone, and the inevitable critiques of that critique have also begun to fill volumes, Inman might seem a writer who's still back there, doing an 80s thing that the newer wisdom has already seen through. A fascinating dinosaur perhaps, but still a dinosaur.
To my mind though, there's a more insightful way to see Inman's refusal to go on in new directions. It's hardly fair to critique his work by saying his poems give us an old-fashioned way of resisting capitalism, since he doesn't think they do resist capitalism in that way. The resistant, insubordinate spaces of his writing cannot ultimately be co-opted for such a singular goal. The distance and differentiation in his work is resistant in a more multi-faceted way. It's not at all clear in what way his poems might suggest a critique that can help us move forward to a better future, despite his long commitment to social justice as an intellectual and a worker for labor unions. The negativity of his poetry is too thorough. That's perhaps frustrating to those who imagine themselves and their poetry as taking a clear stance on social change, but it may also be a relief to those of us just as likely to feel left out by the very idea of the future. When I read Inman's work I feel comforted because I don't know where I'm headed either, and don't always want to know.
But why do what he's doing, then? Why resist images, creating poems that don't use images except in those brief and always surprising instances when they do? If resisting capitalism isn't the point, what is? It's not a question that can be answered with terms like theme, for instance, since Inman's work doesn't present themes in the way that term is conventionally understood. It never talks about things for more than brief, always disrupted instances. To the extent that themes exist in his work, they're embedded within the structure, not a commentary about the world but a function of the interrelationships of the pattern. So the only way to consider what his work is about is to look at the pattern, at how his poems create a shifting framework of words. I can't talk about what his work says. I can only talk about what it does.
What I've always noticed about Inman's poetry is the way his patterns move across poems. His books are not collections of separate, individual poems, but more about shifts, weaves, disruptions, blockades. Brief images, oddly juxtaposed and undermining each other; phrases and sentences torn up by improperly placed periods; slash marks, jump cuts, stray bits of words; moments thick with meanings that never quite complete themselves; social ironies, a sly and biting humor. It's not simply that Inman's poems repeat all these elements in various degrees. The repetition itself presents a consciously varied pattern that one needs to follow over the course of the book and in fact over many books. The pattern isn't headed anywhere, per se; the changes don't accumulate in the direction of some goal, either of a completed pattern or an ultimate point. It's the movement that matters, the swoops, twists, barriers, jolts.
Inman has noted the centrality of motion to the history of literature: “Writing is linked to motion. Words moving across the page, the reading eye following them... basically everything's designed along the lines of some traffic system” (Aerial 6/7 71). But his own poetry undermines the implied goal of such movement as it is often found in other forms of literature, which usually develop from a beginning to an end in some clear progression, however complex. More normative literature is headed somewhere. In Inman's work the motion doesn't leave us off at any final location, including one of social justice. Instead the language just keeps on moving, even as the constant periods always make it seem about to come to a grinding stop:
they lost notes into. their footsteps a cigarette.
a cigarette as each. stilled off black letters.
row upon every graze. minched sight skin from. (Vel 35)Ultimately, the pattern is not like that of traffic, moving according to grids defined by disciplinary restraint. Instead the movement is more one of following where the words and fragments and marks happen to lead us, wherever that might be, and turning back where they won't let us go. Then he varies those patterns so that he doesn't repeat himself.
Still, Inman's severity: it's equally crucial to remember what Inman's writing isn't. Contrast the above passage, for instance, to the following passage from I Don't Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) by Bruce Andrews, a poet who more often than Inman is taken as a paradigm for anti-representational tendencies in language poetry:
I need attention bad; explicit fix planet, balls are bad attitude. Everything but the girl but proto-fascist progressive youth, ear wax fearless knobs, mere pinpricks calcified into manic exposer. I guess this is my own general reactionary & ignorant embarrassment, the stable boy inside a large inflatable stab at the matchbox; fetish has no physical limitations. (129)
Both sections have many features in common: quick jumps, absurd juxtapositions of images, social irony. But their differences are perhaps greater. Compared to Inman, the passage from Andrews has more complete phrases, images and statements (however ironic), an energetic, chant-like flow reminiscent almost of Ginsberg or Whitman, and a freely emotive, practically transcendent rage prepared to shout at all pretenders. Andrews' quick cuts may jam the airwaves with the punishing noise they send through the wires, but the passage from Inman is more thoroughly jammed. Phrases aren't finished. Movement is never allowed either to break free or to stop. Emotion is understated, quickly undermined. Compared to Andrews' raging, nasty, liberatory gesture, nothing in Inman ever comes close to breaking free. It's hardly a liberated, open-ended schizo flow. On the contrary, it keeps crashing into everything.
My point isn't that Inman's poetry is therefore somehow better than Andrews'. It's simply that its refusals are more all encompassing. Here's a partial list of the things Inman's work never allows to break free: images, phrases, sentences, emotions, critiques, clarity, understanding, compassion, connection. If, as Charles Bernstein points out, the terms “absorptive” and “anti-absorptive” “should not be understood as mutually exclusive,” there are still very few poets who have created work as anti-absorptive as Inman's (“Artifice” 22). It's easy to imagine, in fact, how a description of Inman's work from a more conventional literary perspective might seem a parody: “Here is a poet who has never shown us anything clearly, who has never presented an emotion or expressed an idea, who will not finish his sentences and undermines even his phrases, who obsessively returns to improper punctuation and does not always finish spelling a word, and who does not even believe that all this negativity serves any clear purpose.”
It's all these things that make me—and I hope others—return to Inman's work with such consistent energy. Technical refusals linked to social complications. The obsessive nature of his focus depends on the subtlety of his patterns. Like a poet such as William Bronk, I know that Inman will return to the same thing in every book, but I know equally that he'll return to it differently, and I find myself picking up new books to see what the difference will be this time. I find his inverted drive for honesty and authority compelling. Here is a poet who believes powerfully in truth and so would never be caught trying to state it in his poetry, who knows that in his refusal to claim the truth lies something very true. I want to travel like the poems travel. I want to discover again, this time, how he will manage to make it all not come together or go anywhere definite. Try to write like that yourself, and you'll see how difficult it is.
Reading Inman's poetry embroils me in a dynamic and always skeptical linguistic anti-landscape that's defined by the severity of his insistence. Its tensions are never allowed to break free and for that reason grip me. No doubt we live in a world where not simply tradition but also the idea of poetic innovation is now sold relentlessly. But we also live in a world where a determinedly critical poetry can be hard to find because of the claims of originality thrown at us from every direction. Inman's work has showed me repeatedly that such a poetry does not come from denying the limitations of language or avoiding the severe facts of the world we live in, but often requires us to explore them.
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