Afghanistan, poem by Robert Sheppard
- By choosing the latter path, Ingmire, to speak in a general way, has been required, almost as a matter of necessity, to begin dismantling the borders between some of the hoariest, most restrictive categories of cultural practice: visual art and language; the pictorial and the literary; the drawn line and the normally stable structures of letters and words; reader and viewer; and, finally, artist and writer. In his hands, those relationships are reviewed at length, tested, and sometimes merged, but Ingmire brings a persuasive logic to the business of redefining activities we often take for granted — ways, that is, of discovering, defining, interpreting, and expressing cultural value and meaning. In his work, the normative is always open to further investigation. The entire basis of his enterprise can be enclosed, perhaps, in the idea that (our) written language, as a repository of repeatable, ostensibly secure communicative forms, related to drawing through line, can still partake freely in the protean, originative energies of drawing, while its bases in orthography and the alphabet insure as well that the calligrapher is free to look every which way across an endlessly negotiable territory between text, functionality, and art.
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