Inventors

Michael Blumenthal 1980

“Inventors” appears in Michael Blumenthal’s first book, Sympathetic Magic (1980), for which he won the Water Mark Award from Poets of North America. Blumenthal was inspired to write the poem after hearing a lecture by poet Howard Nemerov, who talked about poets being the first “namers.” A contemporary lyric, “Inventors” embodies the speaker’s mood of expectation and joy. Like much of Blumenthal’s work, “Inventors” is celebratory, praising the acts of naming and discovery, and implicitly exploring the links between them. In asking readers to imagine being the first to use words to name discoveries of particular things and processes (e.g., “peristalsis,” “penicillin,” “convolvulus”), the speaker is providing an excuse for himself to also participate in that very exercise. In seven stanzas, he imagines (and implores readers to do the same) being present during the discovery of such things as “electricity,” for example, and vicariously situates himself in the discoverer’s body, awash with the anticipation of putting into speech the thing just discovered. Blumenthal revels in the very sound of words, their material and sensuous qualities. By asking readers to do the same, he is reminding us of poetry’s capacity to please — to satisfy us as much with its music as with its meaning. “Inventors” is a humorous poem with a weighty theme: the relationship between words and their referents. Blumenthal seems to be saying that words do more than merely name something recently discovered; they actually bring that thing to life and help construct the reality in which that thing (or idea or process) will exist and develop.