Michael Palmer

Michael Palmer Poems

Michael Palmer Biography

Michael Palmer was born in New York City and educated at Harvard in the early 1960s, where he encountered Confessional poetry. His opposition to Confessionalism found root in a developing poetics when he attended the landmark 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, a three-week gathering where he met Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Clark Coolidge. Correspondence with those three poets greatly influenced Palmer’s early development as a poet. Often associated with Language poetry, Palmer’s exploratory work confronts notions of representation and habits of language, and also seeks to examine the space through which poetry acts. Though critics have noted the influence of Louis Zukofsky, Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, Surrealism, and philosophical and linguistic theory in his poetry, Palmer’s work continues to evade categorization. For example, on awarding the 2006 Wallace Stevens Award to Palmer, panel judge Robert Hass wrote, “Michael Palmer is the foremost experimental poet of his generation and perhaps of the last several generations…His poetry is at once a dark and comic interrogation of the possibilities of representation in language, but its continuing surprise is its resourcefulness and its sheer beauty.” Palmer has written more than half a dozen books of poetry, beginning with Blake’s Newton (1974). Critic Brighde Mullins notes, “His poetic is situated yet active, and it affords a range of pleasure due to his wonderful ear, his intellection, his breadth. In this century of the Eye over the Ear, Palmer’s insistence on Sound evokes a subtextual joy.” The Company of Moths (2005) aligned the poet figure with its eponymous moths, but in such a way to suggest, according to Geoffrey O’Brien in the Boston Review that “the figure’s borders are open; the moth is a stage in a transformation, two pages in the book of a species, temporary, migrant, recursive.” In a 2006 interview, Palmer described the trajectory of his poetry as “moving a little bit away from radical syntax into the mysteries of ordinary language, in the philosophical if not every day sense. It probably looks less unusual on the page. And I’ve been interested in the infinite, ingathering potential of the lyrical phrase—not confession, but the voicing of selves that make up the poetic self, from Greek lyrics to the Italians, to modern poets like Mandelstam.” Rather than pursuing teaching as a primary career, Palmer has translated work from French, Portuguese, and Russian, and edited Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain: Twenty Contemporary Brazilian Poets (1997). He has also collaborated extensively with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and with visual artists and composers. Palmer’s awards include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. From 1999 to 2004, he served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in San Francisco.)

The Best Poem Of Michael Palmer

Sun

Write this. We have burned all their villages

Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them

Write this. We have adopted their customs and their manner of dress

Write this. A word may be shaped like a bed, a basket of tears or an X

In the notebook it says, It is the time of mutations, laughter at jokes,
secrets beyond the boundaries of speech

I now turn to my use of suffixes and punctuation, closing Mr. Circle
with a single stroke, tearing the canvas from its wall, joined to her,
experiencing the same thoughts at the same moment, inscribing
them on a loquat leaf

Write this. We have begun to have bodies, a now here and a now
gone, a past long ago and one still to come

Let go of me for I have died and am in a novel and was a lyric poet,
certainly, who attracted crowds to mountaintops. For a nickel I will
appear from this box. For a dollar I will have text with you and
answer three questions

First question. We entered the forest, followed its winding paths, and
emerged blind

Second question. My townhouse, of the Jugendstil, lies by
Darmstadt

Third question. He knows he will wake from this dream, conducted
in the mother-tongue

Third question. He knows his breathing organs are manipulated by
God, so that he is compelled to scream

Third question. I will converse with no one on those days of the week
which end in y

Write this. There is pleasure and pain and there are marks and signs.
A word may be shaped like a fig or a pig, an effigy or an egg
but
there is only time for fasting and desire, device and design, there is
only time to swerve without limbs, organs or face into a
scientific
silence, pinhole of light

Say this. I was born on an island among the dead. I learned language
on this island but did not speak on this island. I am writing to you
from this island. I am writing to the dancers from this island. The
writers do not dance on this island

Say this. There is a sentence in my mouth, there is a chariot in my
mouth. There is a ladder. There is a lamp whose light fills empty
space and a space which swallows light

A word is beside itself. Here the poem is called What Speaking Means
to Say
though I have no memory of my name

Here the poem is called Theory of the Real, its name is Let's Call This,
and its name is called A Wooden Stick. It goes yes-yes, no-no. It goes
one and one

I have been writing a book, not in my native language, about violins
and smoke, lines and dots, free to speak and become the things we
speak, pages which sit up, look around and row resolutely toward
the setting sun

Pages torn from their spines and added to the pyre, so that they will
resemble thought

Pages which accept no ink

Pages we've never seen--first called Narrow Street, then Half a
Fragment, Plain of Jars or Plain of Reeds, taking each syllable in her
mouth, shifting position and passing it to him

Let me say this. Neak Luong is a blur. It is Tuesday in the hardwood
forest. I am a visitor here, with a notebook

The notebook lists My New Words and Flag above White. It claims
to have no inside
only characters like A-against-Herself, B, C, L and
N, Sam, Hans Magnus, T. Sphere, all speaking in the dark with their
hands

G for Gramsci or Goebbels, blue hills, cities, cities with hills,
modern and at the edge of time

F for alphabet, Z for A, an H in
an arbor, shadow, silent wreckage, W or M among stars

What last. Lapwing. Tesseract. X perhaps for X. The villages are
known as These Letters--humid, sunless. The writing occurs on
their walls

Michael Palmer Comments