Contents: Introduction Author Biography Poem Text Poem Summary Themes Style Historical Context Critical Overview Sources For Further Study

Criticism

Morton D. Rich

Morton D. Rich is an associate professor of English at Montclair State University who teaches a variety of courses in writing and contemporary literature. He is guest editor of the spring 1999 issue of Inquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines, an issue dedicated to autobiography and critical thinking. In the following essay, Rich provides an in-depth analysis of “Inventors, “focusing on the poem’s words and their sounds.

With the opening line, “Imagine being the first to say: surveillance,” Michael Blumenthal’s speaker confesses his love for words by quoting a fellow lover of language, poet Howard Nemerov. In this whimsical exercise of sound and form, Blumenthal moves us to see, think, and imagine, but mainly to experience words as physical events in the mouth, throat, and ears. Indeed, when Blumenthal performs this poem, he radiates delight in the feel of the words as he speaks them. In addition, the juxtaposition of the words, the syntax, offers intellectual pleasure. The syntax of the poem controls the flow of images and sounds, so that each word must be savored — especially the focal words preceded by colons, italicized, and placed strategically at the ends of lines, the most emphatic position in poems. Savoring these words — “Surveillance, penicillin, electricity, petroleum, uncertainty, convolvulus, peristalsis, tour-jetté”, ronde-de-jambe, I love you, oregano, onomatopoeia” — allows full reader participation in the poem. Five romantic, esthetic expressions and words follow seven scientific words. Imagine these words as the basis for a short story. Perhaps that is part of Blumenthal’s purpose — to suggest a narrative through the use of twelve key words. Even if a reader does not construct a narrative, the movement from “Imagine” to “onomatopoeia” is both a linguistic and an esthetic event, since the poem itself comprises a kind of plot by which it gets from its own beginning to its own end. Poet John Ciardi wrote (in How Does A Poem Mean?): “Like a piece of music, [the poem] exists as a self-entering, self-generating, self-complicating, self-resolving form.” Ciardi’s suggestive statement offers several ways to view the form and plot of “Inventors.” Repetition of the word “imagine” is one aspect of plot in this poem. It appears six times, in five of the seven stanzas, and is always in imperative form. The reader is strongly invited, but not commanded, to “Imagine being the first to say: surveillance,” to “Imagine Franklin holding his key that dark night,” to “imagine digging for shale in some dull Oklahoma,” to “imagine being the first to say: petroleum,” to “Imagine being the first to say, with confidence: / uncertainty,” and, finally, in the last line of the poem, to “Just imagine it.” For variety, the poet employs the imperative “think” twice: “think of Heisenberg / taking his ruler to the world for a measure,” and “Just think of it — .” In this poem, the use of the imperative is a gentle invitation to participate in the speaker’s love of words. He offers the opportunity to have a full experience by being inventors ourselves, through the saying of the poem. As Ciardi says, “What the poem is, is inseparable from its own performance of itself.” Naturally the reader must be added to the equation.

Another aspect of plot in “Inventors” manifests as patterns within the stanzas. The first three, and the last two, stanzas begin with imperatives, while stanzas four and five begin with declarative sentences. Stanza four also contains an imperative, but it is delayed until the end of the second line: “think of Heisenberg.” Thus, stanza five alone has the only conventional declarative sentence to start it; indeed, the entire stanza comprises declarative sentences. What is the effect of this change of grammatical form or syntactical flow?

Like a musical composition, a poem works best when a form is established at the beginning, and then is repeated and varied. The first stanza establishes a way of entering the poem — a mode of presentation through diction and syntax. In “Inventors,” the entry is through an imperative invitation followed by an accretion of images that lead to the main event of the stanza, the word “penicillin.” The opening line establishes a norm of syntax that the poet works with variations, just as a composer might create a sonata, and the line is borrowed from another poet’s work, a move often seen in musical composition. In a near or slant rhyme, “surveillance” and “penicillin” are sonically connected, and, even more cleverly, they are linked by images of parts of an active countenance: “the mouth taking in air,” “the tongue / light... gliding,” “the eyes burning.” The images belong, at first, to the first line, then reflect on the last line. In other words, the speakers of both italicized words react with mouth, tongue, and eyes. Additionally, many short “i” sounds occur throughout the stanza, sonically connecting the images and the two key words. The grammar of the stanza also unites the italicized words, in that the last four lines are comprised of elliptical clauses; that is, none is a complete conventional clause. To complete each clause, the word “imagine” needs to be added at the beginning: “[Imagine] the mouth taking in air,” [imagine] the tongue / light as an astronaut,” “[imagine] the eyes burning.” While adding “imagine” might clarify meaning for some readers, such repetition would be heavy-handed and impede the flow of the stanza. It is up to the reader to fill in the missing words, and, paradoxically, it is not necessary for a fluent speaker of the language to do so explicitly and consciously, unless the lines do not make sense. These elliptical clauses connect the words “surveillance” and “penicillin” by applying “imagine” to both and bringing the stanza full circle.

The second stanza reprises the theme “imagine” and varies it by including only one key word: “electricity.” Again, as in the first stanza, the first line of stanza two is an independent clause, and the next four contain elliptical clauses that omit the word “imagine”: “[imagine] the clouds,” “[imagine] the air heavy,” [imagine] the whole thing.” In this stanza, all of the images are directed toward the final word, “electricity.” Note that its “i” sounds connect “electricity” with “surveillance,” “penicillin,” and “imagine.” The third stanza adds another variation by starting with “Or,” introducing “o” sounds to contrast with the previously dominant “i” sounds. Once more, the first line of stanza three is an independent clause followed by two elliptical clauses that omit “imagine”: “[imagine] how the ground,” “[imagine] knowing something.” The key word, “petroleum,” with its centered long “o” is anticipated by the “o” sounds of “Oklahoma,” “how,” “throat,” “knowing,” “no,” and “for.” “I” and “o” sounds come from different parts of the vocal mechanism — one higher in the throat, the other lower — and the feelings associated with these sounds differ from each other. Higher sounds suggest greater vitality, while lower sounds are associated with feeling weighted down. With the change of dominant sounds, the poet has produced a stanza more somber in tone than the previous two. Stanza four brings another variation, as “think” substitutes for “imagine” and is delayed to the second half of the second line, while “Imagine” makes its first appearance in the penultimate line. “I”

“In this whimsical exercise of sound and form, Blumenthal moves us to see, think. and imagine, but mainly to experience words as physical events in the mouth, throat, and ears.”

sounds regain their dominance with “night,” “think,” “Heisenberg,” and “finding.” The final and key word, “uncertainty,” participates in the tones of the preceding stanzas with its mix of higher and lower sounds.

Stanza five changes the rules of the linguistic game the poet is playing. It is composed of four independent clauses lacking any imperatives. As in classical music, a composition needs a rest point, a change of pace, to avoid becoming too predictable or repetitious. Again, the key words — “convolvulus, peristalsis, tour-jetté, ronde-de-jambe” — contain a mix of higher and lower sounds. The sixth and longest stanza introduces more variations: the imperative “think” preceded by “Just,” only one elliptical clause requiring “imagine” (“[imagine] your tongue”), two new imperatives (“Go” and “Let”), and a full line of key words: “I love you, oregano, onomatopoeia.” And the imagery reprises that in the first stanza, with the words “tongue” and “mouth,” and the fourth stanza, with “uncertainty.” Such internal reference is also a feature of musical compositions.

The final line and stanza of the poem recapitulates the main theme: “Just imagine it,” where “it” becomes an invitation to reimagine the whole poem and its referents. This line also provides closure, just as sonnets and sonatas require endings that satisfy the ear and mind.

The imagery of the poem offers another opportunity for seeing plot and movement within stanzas and within the poem as a whole. The dominant images are related to the work of a poet. The first stanza shows mouth, tongue, and eyes in similes comparing them to “a swimmer,” “an astronaut, gliding” and the “eyes of Fleming / looking at mold.” The astronaut and Fleming are engaged in discovery, or invention, like the poet. The second stanza has Franklin, another inventor, “holding his key that dark night,” and again, a tongue — this time “a poet’s tongue” — is compared to “clouds rolling across the sky’s roof.” The “unnamed potential ... suspended / from a string like a vocal cord waiting to say” refers to the poet’s work, the waiting for the right word. Similarly, the third stanza, with its “digging,” “parched throat,” “and you all derricky and impatient, knowing something / you have yet no name for might rise and surprise you” precisely names the waiting poet. The fourth stanza — with its image of Heisenberg paradoxically saying, “with confidence: / uncertainty” — also alludes to the work of the poet, who constantly uses words whose referents change from one context to another, and from reader to reader. This is the uncertainty principle of poetry. The phrase “It goes on like this always” begins the fifth stanza, and a poet, a biologist, and a choreographer say, think, or whisper their special words, all chosen by Blumenthal for their rich sounds and out-of-the-ordinary referents.

The penultimate stanza intensifies the word game with sound and imagery, including two multisyllabic words containing the Greek root “poeia,” which means “maker” and is another name for a poet. Onomatopoeia is a poet’s tool, and it stands as the final, key word in the poem. In every stanza but one, the word “say” appears, and in every stanza, “mouth,” “tongue,” or “throat” shows up; all of these words refer to speech or its apparatus of production. These fifteen occurrences comprise a concentrated diction of poetic production. Blumenthal keeps his subject in focus from first line to last.

The last stanza returns the reader to the opening line of the poem to restart the game (named “Just imagine it”), and the right word arrives. Who, then, are Blumenthal’s “inventors”? They are all stand-ins for the poet, seeming to discover penicillin, electricity, petroleum, and the uncertainty principle; or thinking and saying words that feel good in the mouth and mind. What they are really doing is celebrating words — their sounds, force, sensuousness, and capacity to name. Theirs are the tools of Adam in the poet’s perpetual Garden of Eden, the observable world. “Inventors” is a playful display of how poems are created from their basic materials: the sounds of words that name ideas, things, and events. The poet, in the act of writing, plays the role of the creator, making a universe through the poem.

Source: Morton D. Rich, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

Chris Semansky

A widely published poet, fiction writer, and critic, Chris Semansky teaches literature and writing at Portland Community College. In the following essay, Semansky examines the ways in which Blumenthal’s poem suggest that the real “Inventors” are the readers of the poem itself.

Michael Blumenthal’s poem “Inventors” asks readers to consider the relationship between language and what it refers to, suggesting that the act of discovery is actually an act of invention. Blu-menthal probes the differences between these two terms and calls upon readers to participate in that investigation by imagining ourselves, literally, in the shoes of various inventors.

To discover something suggests that the thing or the idea is already out there, waiting to be perceived by human senses and then acknowledged. In this case, language is seen as a tool to record that phenomenon — to index its place in the world. In the first stanza, when the speaker imagines Sir Alexander Fleming “looking at mold and thinking penicillin,” we are meant to understand that Fleming came upon penicillin almost by accident; it always existed and merely awaited someone’s perceiving it. Thinking the word “penicillin,” then, is akin to saying “aha!” or eureka!” Fleming’s 1928 discovery actually was accidental, as he was was trying find a way to kill bacteria when he observed that an unwashed and bacterially infected flask appeared to be disinfected by mold that had grown from airborne spores. The speaker tells a similar story of discovery in the third stanza, where “petroleum” is in the ground (figured as a throat) waiting to be discovered by the reader, who is asked to imagine him- or herself in the symbolic role of derrick and drill:

.... imagine digging for shale in some dull
        Oklahoma,
how the ground is a parched throat waiting for
      moisture,
and you all derricky and impatient, knowing
      something
you have yet no name for might rise and surprise
      you.
Imagine being the first to say: petroleum.

What is interesting in this stanza, as well as throughout the poem, is that the speaker doesn’t so much emphasize the thing that he wants readers to imagine discovering, but, instead, he highlights the word that discoverers attach to that thing or idea. It is the act of naming that is the real subject of this poem, Blumenthal implies, for in naming something, true invention takes place. The roots of this idea lie

“It is the act of naming that is the real subject of [‘Inventors’], Blumenthal implies, for in naming something, true invention takes place.”

in a theory of language claiming that it is only through words, not merely sensory perceptions, that we can come to know and describe the world, for the very act of thinking would be impossible without language. Language is the raw material out of which we construct our world and ourselves, but it is also, in some ways, the very world itself.

Blumenthal’s ironic tone throughout the poem demonstrates that he is aware of these differences between discovery and invention, but rather than dogmatically spelling out a position, he illustrates the instability of language to merely record “what is there.” In the fifth stanza, we are asked to picture a famous physicist grappling with the very nature of reality:

Some night, dry as an old well and speechless
beneath a brilliant moon, think of Heisenberg
taking his ruler to the world for a measure
and finding, in the measuring, an irrevocable
      changing.
Imagine being the first to say, with confidence:
uncertainty.

Not only is the world unknowable, the speaker implies, but language itself, as a tool of knowing, is an inherently unreliable ruler. However, rather than lament language’s incapacity to record or measure, the poem celebrates language as a tool of the imagination. The image of a speechless person “beneath a brilliant moon” provides the atmosphere for this celebration. Notice how, in this stanza and throughout the poem, readers are asked again and again to “imagine” themselves as someone else, to vicariously participate in the experience of another. However, these experiences are themselves imagined, by the poet (Blumenthal) exhorting us to participate in his fantasies. It is this kind of sharing, the speaker implies, that language can facilitate. But it is a sharing of the imagination (and done through the imagination), rather than of the empirical world.

Historically, poets have laid claim to the imagination as the wellspring of their art, calling on it for inspiration and sustenance — and even justification for their work. In “Inventors,” Blumenthal wants to demonstrate that the imagination is no longer reserved for poets; it is an essential human attribute that anyone could (and should) exercise. He implores readers to imagine not only famous inventors but people from other walks of life as well — a biologist, a poet, a choreographer — saying words specific to their lives. This democratization of the imagination is a particularly Romantic trait that has carried over to today. We might not all be inventors, or even choreographers, poets, or biologists, but most of us can imagine saying or thinking something, especially when that something is specified for us. Blumenthal makes it easy by providing concrete and very sensuous illustrations of what mouthing an exotic word would be like: “Just think of it — ” he says, “your tongue rolling over the first pharmacopoeia / like a new lover, the shuddering thrill of it ....” All language is inherently sensuous, he seems to suggest. The very act of saying something, and especially of being the first to say something, involves desire. “Let your mind wander,” he exhorts us. “Imagine being the first to say: I love you, oregano, onomatopoeia.” The first item in this series is a declaration of passion, the second a fragrant herb, the third is a poetic term meaning to name a thing or action with a word that sounds like what it describes (for example, the word “buzz”). All of these items elicit strong associations. Even “I love you,” though on the surface an abstraction and a cliché, resonates powerfully in us because we have each used these words in a personal manner. That Blumenthal should include “onomatopoeia” in the list is particularly telling, as this word denotes one of the few instances in language in which words are not arbitrary (i.e., there is no inherent relationship between the words and the idea or thing that they denote) but embody the sound that they signify. Such a word helps readers grasp the idea of language’s materiality more readily and, hence, understand the idea that language need not point to things outside of itself to provide pleasure or to communicate meaning.

The ultimate irony in Blumenthal’s poem is that the imagination, historically linked to ideas of originality, is, in this poem, more of a glue that serves to bring people (reader and writer) together. On the one hand, the speaker repeatedly implores us to “imagine being the first to say,” yet, on the other hand, the words we are to “imagine” have already been said. Even the poem’s first line is a copy of the poem’s epigraph, which itself is a line from another poet’s poem. Who, then, are the inventors? The real inventors, the putative subject of this poem, are the readers of the poem. In heeding the speaker’s exhortations to imagine, we are, in essence, inventing the poem anew in our head — each of us, presumably, in a different way. This exercise, more than merely repeating a word, is the real meat of the poem, and the extent to which we are able to visualize the speaker’s own imaginings is the extent to which we can credibly call ourselves inventors.

Source: Chris Semansky, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

What Do I Read Next?

• The Language Book, first published in 1984 and edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, collects essays, poems, and short prose pieces that explore language and its role in meaning making. Language is investigated for its denotative, connotative, and associational capacities.
• American Inventors of the 20th Century by Laura S. Jeffrey is an anthology of biographies of famous modern inventors.
• 1,000 Years, 1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the Millennium by Agnes Hooper Gottlieb and others is a compilation of the most important, influential, and intriguing figures of this past millennium. This book ranks the top ones and profiles each with a brief biography and a discussion of his or her importance in history.
• Steven Pinker, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT who is well known for popularizing Noam Chomsky’s revolutionary theory of how children acquire language, theorizes that language is a human instinct, hardwired into our brains by evolution, in his 1995 study, The Language Instinct.
• Michael Blumenthal is a novelist and essay writer as well as a poet. His novel Weinstock Among the Dying, published in 1993, exposes the pretensions of academic life at Harvard, as seen through the eyes of young assistant professor, Martin Weinstock, a thirty-something Jewish poet.