Mysterious letters

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.

(From Mark Wallace, http://www.fascicle.com/issue03/essays/wallace1.htm, 9 April 2009)

Reading a few lines--if "lines" can be used here--of David Melnick, or for that matter--if that matters--from P. Inman, brings you to the edge of linguistic forms, where it seems the paralinguistic elements of language have overtaken the priority formerly given to words and syntax. Less words than cyphers, the elements we see on the page transform the nature of our attempt to understand from a hermeneutics to a cryptology. Just like Paul Klee's mysterious letter paintings, the linguistic elements appear to bob in and out of relief in a space that presents and swallows them at the same time.

These fragmented graphemes inviting completion, doing probably something beyond sound and concrete poetics, explode the arbitrary existence of the Word, and interrogate the flux of meaning-making that a contact with symbols normally seduces us into. There is pain in the absence or lack of recognition, but at the same time a liberation of hard-boiled associations, whenever a line, if not a word, begins to dream by itself. And the almost declarative. Almost. Scattered letters pulling each other to form a thought, like pure objects orbiting the outer space of our lives.