VEL

DESCRIPTION: 1995, 64 pages.
P. Inman’s mind is a thouroughly attached organ. There are no places to escape to or from in relation to its consideration, its inclusion. His work is liberating: images crystallize then overflow their frames, the ends of lines complete phrases whose content is picked up– goes off– on the next line in sudden tangential angles. P. Inman’s writing exists simultaneously in the realms of formal experimentation...social and cultural witness...and political, economic, institutional critique...

VEL makes it clear once again that without Peter Inman’s work a whole register of our language would not exist. It comes to us via his uniquely musical intelligence, his compound mind’s ear, opening a range from "suth.pitted.light.stream." to "forks of ponders" to "Their every brink of mouth." This work is as uncompromised and uncompressible in its lush detail as all linguistic weather beyond dichotomies of sense-nonsense. What Tractarian Wittgensteins might say must be passed over in silence Inman’s work realizes as the possibility of a third term, n e w sense. When I read "teak of near eskimo" and "he couldn’t hide the mind blanched past." I marvel.

Inman’s attention is unique. He’s a maker with respect for materials. There’s no excess & no lack. We need to learn to live like these writings.

From : / " glimpse" /

nelk:

my: eye: itched: flat:

the: grass: it: slends: behind:

tip: of: the: tongue: flooded: by:

tack: steck:

emptied: bird: punctuation: rules:

some: content: left: from: temper-

ature: along: one: woman:

flak: of: footsteps:

sounded: ball: except: everything:

roe: distinctions

only: Colo.: finched: because:

she: wrote: it:

the: overcast: in: the: package:

lurled: crow: miniscules:

whatever: de: Kooning: saw:

surrounded: to: small: talk:

soda: build: than: imagination:

the: landscape: between:

how: much: you’d: want

___________________

celled sifts: (pg.2)

a paper: spread of: strokes a: stream career:

the mane: her parve: of land:

ice dutter

Vermeer as: the far:

part through: flavored wall:

the same: daughter waned: to him:

build stream:

bits of: rock steach: in woods:

their span: each line:

while it: missed her: size in:

beau’m vert:

an English: lecture rubbed: into cells:

how i: imagine her: lank thinks:

Lake Champlain: a single: bourgeois outset:

utterly left: from it:

my leg: spots by: a dream

__________________

the spread she stood at: the window talk flooded in: (pg.3)

he’s thinking of the one: difference some content left

them: as shoreline puffed into diction: character traits

as some interruption: speech cattling off of fingertips:

my glance maned into birthrate: of mind parted a

unit: of length before she remembered: length walled

with murdered people: a narrow of Billie Whitelaw

_____________________

nothing but painter along: her (pg.4)

headache every step: to my arm a:

midst that its prim: the far part from:

workmen syruped from history: each

sight into daughter: in her thinnest paper

a bankers finch eye: the river

shapes he: existed at all once: last rice

of act: the only family anywhere: before

they think from: distance left tarred

write: plunks in a cadillac: the back of her:

blood given to commonplace: simplist

outset the mind: they were built through:

women thicked to river: she was its midst:

at the expense of: the stronger work the:

cherokee a banker’s grist