Inventors (Themes)

Themes

Language and Meaning

The opening stanza of “Inventors” sets up a pattern that is repeated throughout the poem: the speaker exhorts readers to imagine themselves being the first to name a discovery. Historically, the intersection between language and meaning has been an issue for poets and philosophers. While some have viewed language as being a slave to sensory impressions of the “outside world” or the thing named, others, more recently, have argued that words are primarily symbolic; that is, they are able to mean by virtue of their differences from other words in a network of relationships within linguistic systems, not by any feature inherent in the sound or look of a word or the thing(s) it points to. Put another way, these thinkers claim that it is primarily language, not our sensory perceptions of the world, that is the building block of reality. Blumenthal plays with this idea through his use of irony. By titling the work “Inventors,” he emphasized the question of which came first, the name or the named. This is similar to the chicken and the egg conundrum; Blumenthal knows this and uses the issue to make poetry. Indeed, the first line of the poem is a repetition of the epigraph, which is a quotation from another poet, and it prepares us for the inherently ironic tone of the rest of the poem. That irony is borne out most tangibly in the fourth paragraph, when the speaker asks us to think of Werner Karl Heisenberg, the German physicist who formulated quantum mechanic’s “uncertainty principle,” and to “Imagine being the first to say, with confidence: / uncertainty.” By asking readers to imagine the act of naming discoveries, the speaker implicitly also asks them to be poets and to revel in the delight that naming offers. The question of which came first is ultimately not important to the poem or to the speaker, as the sheer exercise of using language to explore meaning and sound is what really counts.

Beauty and Aesthetics

Sound, as much as meaning, makes a poem. “Inventors” stresses the experience of thinking about how words sound and analyzing the muscle movements required to pronounce them. Like Wallace Stevens, Blumenthal regards poetry as “a freshening of life.” That he implores readers to imagine thinking about and saying new words demonstrates his desire to share his experience as a poet as well as his delight in the materiality of language, the poet’s tool. His choice of words, including “surveillance,” “penicillin,” “electricity,” “petroleum,” “uncertainty,” “convolvulus,” “peristalsis,” and “oregano,” ranges from the mundane to the exotic and from the concrete to the abstract. This variety in both types of words and the people he wants us to imagine saying them, underscores the idea that poetry is not a practice only for those who “get it,” but it is a way of experiencing the world, regardless of who we might be. One of the distinguishing features of human beings is our capacity to use language, but Blumenthal reminds us that language is more than simply a vehicle for communicating; it is also a means by which we can celebrate our existence — our presence both to ourselves and to others. He emphasizes this view in the penultimate stanza, when he exhorts readers to “Go on. / Let your mind wander. Imagine being the first to say: / I love you, oregano, onomatopoeia.” Such an appeal celebrates both the imagination and language for its own sake. The only things these words have in common is the joy we take in saying them. By including “onomatopoeia,” a word that means naming a thing or action with a word that supposedly sounds like what it describes, in this list, the speaker illustrates how language can also embody, as well as represent, what it names. The last line of the poem repeats what the speaker has been asking readers to do all along. It signifies the participatory, interactive nature of language and emphasizes the relationship between imagination (an abstraction) and language use (material practice).

Topics for Further Study

• Invent a product and think of at least three different groups of people who might use it. Give the product three different names and sketch a marketing idea for how you would pitch the product to each group.
• Think of a historical invention (for example, the telephone), and then write an imaginative account of the moment when the inventor realized what he or she had done.
• After reading Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky,” write a poem whose focus is sound rather than meaning. Try to incorporate end rhyme, internal rhyme, and various near rhymes.