Michael Palmer (born May 11, 1943) is an American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University, where he earned a BA in French and an MA in Comparative Literature.[1] He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance since the 1970s and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists. Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969.
Michael Palmer began actively pursuing a career in poetry during the 1960s. Two events in the early sixties seem decisive to his development as a poet.
First, Palmer attended the Vancouver Poetry Conference in 1963. This July–August 1963 Poetry Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia spanned three weeks and involved about sixty people who had registered for a program of discussions, workshops, lectures, and readings designed by Warren Tallman and Robert Creeley as a summer course at the University of B.C.[3] There Palmer met writers and artists who would leave a mark on his own developing sense of a poetics, especially Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Clark Coolidge, with whom he formed lifelong friendships. It was a landmark moment as Robert Creeley observed:
For those who attended the Vancouver Conference or learned about it later on, it was apparent that second-generation modernist poet Charles Olson was exerting a significant influence on the emerging generation of artists and poets (the so-called third-generation modernists) who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, and included the New American poets. The latter poets, such as Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Denise Levertov would have an impact on the new generation of artists emerging in the 1970s, which included Palmer.[6] Says Palmer:
“...before meeting that group of poets in 1963 at the Vancouver Poetry Conference, I had begun to read them intensely, and they proposed alternatives to the poets I was encountering at that time at Harvard, the confessional poets, whose work was grounded to a greater or lesser degree in New Criticism, at least those were their mentors. The confessional poets struck me as people absolutely lusting for fame, all of them, and they were all trying to write great lines.”[7]
Work and recognition
Palmer is the author of fourteen full-length books of poetry, beginning in 1972 with Blake's Newton and most recently in 2021 with Little Elegies for Sister Satan. Other notable collections include Company of Moths (2005) (shortlisted for the 2006 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize), The Promises of Glass (2000), At Passages (1996), Sun (1988), and Notes for Echo Lake (1981).
A prose work, The Danish Notebook, was published in 1999. In the spring of 2007, a chapbook, The Counter-Sky (with translations by Koichiro Yamauchi), was published by Meltemia Press of Japan, to coincide with the Tokyo Poetry and Dance Festival. Palmer’s work has appeared in literary magazines such as Boundary 2, Berkeley Poetry Review, Sulfur, Conjunctions, Grand Street and O-blek.
Besides the 2006 Wallace Stevens Award, Michael Palmer's honors include two grants from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1989-90 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. During the years 1992–1994 he held a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund Writer's Award. From 1999 to 2004, he served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In the spring of 2001 he received the Shelly Memorial Prize Prize from the Poetry Society of America.
Since he seems to explore the nature of language and its relation to human consciousness and perception, Palmer is often associated with the Language poets (sometimes referred to as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, after the magazine that bears that name).
Of this particular association, Palmer comments in an interview:
”It goes back to an organic period when I had a closer association with some of those writers than I do now, when we were a generation in San Francisco with lots of poetic and theoretical energy and desperately trying to escape from the assumptions of poetic production that were largely dominant in our culture. My own hesitancy comes when you try to create, let's say, a fixed theoretical matrix and begin to work from an ideology of prohibitions about expressivity and the self — there I depart quite dramatically from a few of the Language Poets.”[8]
Themes and writing style
Introducing Palmer for a reading in 1996, Brighde Mullins noted that his poetics is both “situated yet active.” Likewise, Palmer himself speaks of poetry as signaling a "site of passages":
"The space of the page is taken as a site in itself, a syntactical and visual space to be expressively exploited, as was the case with the Black Mountain poets, as well as writers such as Frank O'Hara, perhaps partly in response to gestural abstract painting."[9]
Elsewhere, Palmer observes that "in our reading we have to rediscover the radical nature of the poem" and search for "the essential place of lyric poetry" as we delve "beneath it to its relationship with language".[10] Here Palmer confronts not only the problem of subjectivity and public address, but the specific agency of poetry and its relationship with the political:
"The implicit...question has always concerned the human and social justification for this strange thing, poetry, when it is not directly driven by the political or by some other, equally other evident purpose [...] Whereas the significant artistic thrust has always been toward artistic independence within the world, not from it."[10]
If poetry and literature is, as Pound observed, "news that stays news", in his own work Palmer also wants to account for a subterranean or “counter-tradition”. He invokes the latter as a way to “think against” the prevailing doxa, and to have access to an 'alternative tradition' that slips under the radar of the Academy but exerts an underground influence.
And the poem, from its homeless home,
writes of blindsight and silence
from the poem "Night Gardening", Company of Moths (2005)
Palmer has repeatedly stated, in interviews and talks over the years, that the situation for the poet is parodoxical: a seeing which is blind, a "nothing you can see", an "active waiting", "purposive, sometimes a music", or a "nowhere" that is "now / here". For Palmer, poetry can "interrogate the radical and violent instability of our moment, asking where is the location of culture, where the site of self, selves, among others" (as Palmer has characterized the poetry of Myung Mi Kim).
Critical reception
Michael Palmer's poetry has been described variously as abstract, intimate, elegant, hermetic, allusive, personal, political and inaccessible.[11]
"How does the human break down so completely that the only alternative we have is to impose massive destruction and then...massive suffering among civilian populations?"
While some reviewers or readers may value Palmer's work as an "extension of modernism",[12] some criticize Palmer's work as discordant: an interruption of our composure (to invoke Robert Duncan's phrase).[13]
As for the modernist project, its legacy is something Palmer both resists and embraces. Palmer is candid about the towering figures of early modernism, the great inventors of the period, those who MADE THINGS NEW. (i.e., Yeats, Eliot and Pound).[14] As Palmer has pointed out: there remains “something quite harrowing inscribed at the heart of modernism.”[15]
Perhaps the "weary beauty"[16] of his work comes out of Palmer’s concern “to maintain or at least continue the search for an ethics of the I/Thou."[15] The poet must suffer 'loss', embrace disturbance and paradox, agonizing over what cannot be accounted for. Palmer will admit into his work that "essential errancy of discovery in the poem" that would not be a “unified narrative explanation of the self,” but would allow for “cloaked meaning and necessary semantic indirection.”[15]
Collaborations
Palmer has continued to work on his own and with others through multiple collaborations in the fields of dance, translation, teaching, and the visual arts. Perhaps similar to Olson's and Duncan’s impact on their generation, Palmer's influence remains singular and palpable, if difficult to measure.
Palmer has published translations from French, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese, and has engaged in multiple collaborations with painters. These include the German painter Gerhard Richter, French painter Micaëla Henich,[17] and Italian painter Sandro Chia. He edited and helped translate Nothing The Sun Could Not Explain: Twenty Contemporary Brazilian Poets (Sun & Moon Press, 1997).
With Michael Molnar and John High, Palmer helped edit and translate a volume of poetry by the Russian poet Alexei Parshchikov, Blue Vitriol (Avec Books, 1994). He also translated "Theory of Tables" (1994), a book written by Emmanuel Hocquard, a project that grew out of Hocquard's translations of Palmer's "Baudelaire Series" into French. Palmer has written many radio plays and works of criticism.
Dance
Since the 1970s, Palmer has collaborated on over a dozen dance works with Margaret Jenkins and her Dance Company. Early dance scenarios in which Palmer participated include Interferences, 1975; Equal Time, 1976; No One but Whitington, 1978; Red, Yellow, Blue, 1980, Straight Words, 1980; Versions by Turns, 1980; Cortland Set, 1982; and First Figure, 1984.[18] A noteworthy example of a Jenkins/Palmer collaboration might be The Gates (Far Away Near), an evening-length dance work in which Palmer worked with not only Ms. Jenkins, but also Paul Dresher and Rinde Eckert. This was performed in September 1993 in the San Francisco Bay Area and in July 1994 at New York's Lincoln Center.
Another recent collaboration with Jenkins resulted in "Danger Orange", a 45-minute outdoor site-specific performance, presented in October 2004 before the presidential elections. The color orange metaphorically references the national alert systems that are in place that evoke the sense of danger.[see also:Homeland Security Advisory System]
Painters and visual artists
Similar to his friendship with Robert Duncan and the painter Jess Collins, Palmer's work with painter Irving Petlin is important.
Palmer has also worked with painter and visual artistAugusta Talbot, and curated her exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation (March 17 -April 23, 2005)[19] Talbot, in turn, provided the cover art for Palmer’s collection The Company of Moths (2005) and for Thread (2006). When asked how collaboration has pushed or shaped the boundaries of his work, Palmer responded:
“One was that, when I was using language — but even when I wasn't, when I was simply envisioning a structure, for example — I was working with the idea of actual space. Over time, my own language took on a certain physicality or gestural character that it hadn't had as strongly in the earliest work. Margy (Margaret Jenkins) and I would often work with language as gesture and gesture as language---we would cross these two media, have them join at some nexus. And inevitably then, as I brought certain characteristics of my work to dance, and to dance structure and gesture, it started crossing over into my work. It added space to the poems.[10]
These are not one-off collaborations for Palmer: they are on-going. It may be that friendship via collaboration becomes part of what Jack Spicer terms a "composition of the real.” And that might articulate a place for, and even spaces where, both the "poetic imaginary" is constituted and a possible social space is envisioned.
Bibliography
Poetry
Plan of the City of O, Barn Dreams Press (Boston, Massachusetts), 1971.
The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems, 1972-1995, New Directions (New York, New York), 1998.
The Promises of Glass, New Directions (New York, New York), 2000.
Codes Appearing: Poems, 1979-1988, New Directions (New York, New York), 2001. Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure, and Sun together in one volume. ISBN978-0-8112-1470-4
(With Régis Bonvicino) Cadenciando-um-ning, um samba, para o outro: poemas, traduções, diálogos, Atelieì Editorial (Cotia, Brazil), 2001.
Period (senses of duration) this is a version of a talk Palmer gave in San Francisco in February 1982. Scroll down to "Table of Contents" to find the Palmer selection. Here it appears in an e-book representation of Code of Signals (which Palmer edited in 1983, with the subtitle "Recent Writings in Poetics").
On Robert Duncan reprint of Palmer's essay "Robert Duncan and Romantic Synthesis"
"Ground Work: On Robert Duncan" Michael Palmer's "Introduction" to a combined edition of Ground Work: Before the War, and Ground Work II: In the Dark, published by New Directions in April 2006.
Interview with Michael Palmer an interview conducted at Washington University in St. Louis in 2008 by the student editors of "Arch Literary Journal" in conjunction with a talk and reading Palmer gave at the school. Includes an introductory essay by one of the editors, Lawrence Revard, "'What Reading?': Play in Michael Palmer's Poetics"
Cultural camaraderie article from Hindustantimes.com on the dance performance A Slipping Glimpse. Article discusses Palmer's collaboration (includes quotes)
↑ Robert Hass, among those selecting Palmer to receive the award, wrote: "Michael Palmer is the foremost experimental poet of his generation and perhaps of the last several generations. A gorgeous writer who has taken cues from Wallace Stevens, the Black Mountain poets, John Ashbery, contemporary French poets, the poetics of Octavio Paz, and from language poetries. He is one of the most original craftsmen at work in English at the present time. 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." - Press release from poets.org
↑ The note on the website indicates that in this lecture, Michael Palmer is exploring translation and its aesthetic implications. The title refers to writers who refuse to submit to an authoritarian poetic or political reality. Palmer discusses Arthur Rimbaud, Herman Melville, Stéphane Mallarmé, Friedrich Hölderlin, Octavio Paz and Paul Celan. The lecture concludes with a brief question and answer session.
Related Research Articles
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↑ East Bay Express's Events Column (November 29, 2006)Archived November 1, 2006, at the Wayback Machine "Choose your euphemism for the work of Michael Palmer", writes columnist Anneli Rufus, "who has been busy in the Bay Area these past thirty years, writing and translating poetry and collaborating with painters and choreographers".
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