Michael Palmer
Encyclopedia
Michael Palmer is an American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University
where he earned a BA in French and a MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance
for over thirty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists
. Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969.
Palmer is the 2006 recipient of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets
. This $100,000 (US) prize recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.
First, he attended the now famous 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. There Palmer met writers and artists who would leave an indelible 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:
Palmer's second initiation into the rites of a public poet began with the editing of the journal Joglars with fellow poet Clark Coolidge
. Joglars (Providence, Rhode Island) numbered just three issues in all, published between 1964–66, but extended the correspondence with fellow poets begun in Vancouver. The first issue appeared in Spring 1964 and included poems by Gary Snyder
, Michael McClure
, Fielding Dawson
, Jonathan Williams
, Lorine Niedecker
, Robert Kelly
, and Louis Zukofsky
. Palmer published five of his own poems in the second number of Joglars, an issue that included work by Larry Eigner
, Stan Brakhage
, Russell Edson
, and Jackson Mac Low
.
For those who attended the Vancouver Conference or learned about it later on, it was apparent that the poetics of Charles Olson
, proprioceptive
or Projectivist in its reach, was exerting a significant and lasting influence on the emerging generation of artists and poets who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. Subsequent to this emerging generation of artists who felt Olson's impact, poets such as Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan would in turn exert their own huge impact on our national poetries (see also: Black Mountain poets
and San Francisco Renaissance
). Of this particular company of poets encountered in Vancouver, Palmer says:
Following the Vancouver Conference, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley remained primary resources. Both poets had a lasting, active influence on Palmer's work which has extended until the present. In an essay, "Robert Duncan and Romantic Synthesis" (see 'External links' below), Palmer recognizes that Duncan's appropriation and synthesis of previous poetic influences was transformed into a poetics noted for "exploratory audacity...the manipulation of complex, resistant harmonies, and by the kinetic idea of "composition by field", whereby all elements of the poem are potentially equally active in the composition as 'events' of the poem".
And if this statement marks a certain tendency readers have noted in Palmer's work all along, or remains a touchstone of sorts, we sense that from the beginning Palmer has consistently confronted not only the problem of subjectivity and public address in poetry, but the specific agency of Poetry and the relationship between poetry and 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."
So for Michael Palmer, this tendency seems there from the beginning. Today these concerns continue through multiple collaborations across the fields of poetry, dance, translation, and the visual arts. Perhaps similar to Olson's impact on his generation, Palmer's influence remains singular and palpable, if difficult to measure. Since Olson's death in 1970, we continue to be, following upon George Oppen
's phrase, carried into the incalculable, As Palmer recently noted in a blurb for Claudia Rankine
's poetic testament Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), ours is "a time when even death and the self have been re-configured as commodities
".
), Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988 (2001), The Promises of Glass (2000), The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 (1998), At Passages (1996), Sun (1988), First Figure (1984), Notes for Echo Lake (1981), Without Music (1977), The Circular Gates (1974), and Blake's Newton (1972). 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. His 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.
Introducing Palmer for a reading at the DIA Arts Center in 1996, Brighde Mullins noted that Palmer's poetics is both "situated yet active". Palmer alludes to this himself, perhaps, when he speaks of poetry signaling a "site
of passages". He says, "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."
Elsewhere he observes that "in our reading we have to rediscover the radical nature of the poem." In turn, this becomes a search for "the essential place of lyric poetry
" as it delves "beneath it to its relationship with language". 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 a recent (2000) interview:
While some reviewers or readers may value Palmer's work as an "extension of modernism
", they criticize and even reject Palmer's work as discordant: an interruption of our composure (to invoke Robert Duncan's phrase). Palmer's own stated poetics will not allow or settle for "vanguard gesturalism". In a singular confrontion with the modernist project
, the poet must suffer 'loss', embrace disturbance and paradox, and agonize over what cannot be accounted for. It is a poetry that can, at once, gesture toward post-modern, post-avant-garde
, semiotic concerns even as it acknowledges that
We can recognize that the "weary beauty" of Palmer's work bespeaks the tension and accord he offers toward the Modernists and the vanguardists, even as he is seeking to maintain or at least continue to search for an ethics of the I/Thou.
It is an awkward truce we make with modernism when there is no cessation of hostilities. But sometimes in reading Palmer's work we recognize (almost against ourselves) a poetry that is described as surreal
in context and contour, livid in aural accomplishment, but all the while confronts the reader with a poetics both active and situated. And if Palmer is sometimes praised for this, more often than not he is criticized, rebuked, vilified and dismissed (just as Paul Celan
was) for hermeticism
, deliberate obscurity, and bogus erudition. Palmer admits to a stated "essential errancy of discovery in the poem" that would not necessarily be a "unified narrative explanation of the self", but would allow for itself "cloaked meaning and necessary semantic indirection"
, Eliot
and Pound
. Whether it is the fascism
of Ezra Pound
or the less overt but no less insidious anti-semitism
found in the work of T. S. Eliot
, Palmer's position is a fierce rejection of their politics, but qualified with the acknowledgment that, as Marjorie Perloff
has observed of Pound, "he remains the great inventor of the period, the poet who really MADE THINGS NEW". Thus, Palmer decries that what remains for us is something quite harrowing "inscribed at the heart of modernism".
Perhaps we can invoke one of Palmer's real 'heroes', Antonio Gramsci
, and say here, now, what precisely has been inscribed over against what today (in the vicious circles of media and cultural production) is merely forecast as cultural hegemony
.
So if Palmer, on the one hand, variously describes or defines an Ideology
as that which "invades the field of meaning", we recognize not only in Pound or Eliot, but now as if against ourselves, that ideology implicitly deploys values and premises that must remain unspoken in order for them to function as ideology or to remain hidden in plain sight, as such. At some point we can invoke the 'post-ideological' stance of Slavoj Žižek
who, after Althusser, jettisons the Marxist equation: ideology=false consciousness and say that, perhaps Ideology, to all intents and purposes, IS consciousness.
As a way out of this seeming double-bind
, or to his admissions that poetry is, as Pound observed, "news that stays news", that it remains an active and viable (or "actively situated") principle within the social dynamic, critics and readers alike point to Palmer's own avowals of an emerging countertradition to the prevailing literary establishment: an 'alternative tradition' that just slipped under the radar as far as the Academy and its various 'schools' of poetry are concerned. Though not always so visible, this counter-tradition continues to exert an underground influence. Poetry, as critique
or praise, can perhaps in its reach exceed the grasp of modernism and procure for us as visible again, that which is all or nothing except for the 'ghostlier demarcations' of the social wager within sight of the shipwreck of the singular (as George Oppen
characterized it) which denotes or delimits the very idea of the social, if not the very idea that there is a definition of the social other than this : the community of those who have no community. Indeed, the unavowable community (to borrow a title and phrasing from Maurice Blanchot
).
Faced with shipwreck, "in the dark" amidst the ravished heresies of the unspoken as even against silence itself, we can think with the poem. With fierce determination or graceful adherence we can perhaps even "see" with the poem, account for its usefulness. Even as we use the language, attend to its fissures and abhorrences, language in turn uses us, or has its own uses for us, as Palmer attests:
Palmer has repeatedly stated, in interviews and in various talks given across the years, that the situation for the poet is paradox
ical: 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, it is a situation which is never over, and yet it mysteriously starts up again each day, as if describing a circle
. 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).
s with painters. These include the German painter Gerhard Richter
, French painter Micaëla Henich, 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
. But his lasting significance occurs as the singular concerns of the artist extend into the aleatory
, the multiple, and the collaborative.
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. A particularly noteworthy example of a recent Jenkins/Palmer collaboration would 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
]
, Palmer's work with painter Irving Petlin
remains generative. Irving's singular influence from the beginning demonstrated for Palmer a "working" of the poet as "maker" (in the radical sense, even ancient sense of that word). Along with Duncan, Zukofsky, and others, Petlin's work modeled, demonstrated, circumscribed and, perhaps most importantly for Palmer, verified that "the way" (this way for the artist who is a maker, a creator) would also be, as Gilles Deleuze
termed it, "a life". This in turn delineates Palmer's own sense of both a poetics
and an on-going counter-poetic tradition, offering him fixture and a place of repair.
Recently he worked with painter and visual artist Augusta Talbot, and curated her exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation (March 17 -April 23, 2005). When asked in an interview how collaboration has pushed the boundaries of his work, Palmer responded :
It may be that for Palmer, friendship
(acknowledging both the multiple and collaborative), becomes in part what Jack Spicer
terms a "composition of the real". Across the fields of painting and dance, Palmer's work figures as an "unrelenting tentacle of the proprioceptive". Furthermore, it may signal a Coming Community underscored in the work of Giorgio Agamben
, Jean-Luc Nancy
and Maurice Blanchot
among others. It is a poetry that would, along with theirs, articulate a place for, even spaces where, both the "poetic imaginary" is constituted and a possible social space is envisioned. As Jean-Luc Nancy has written in The Inoperative Community (1991): "These places, spread out everywhere, yield up and orient new spaces...other tracks, other ways, other places for all who are there."
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
where he earned a BA in French and a MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance
Contemporary dance
Contemporary dance is a genre of concert dance that employs compositional philosophy, rather than choreography, to guide unchoreographed movement...
for over thirty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists
Visual arts
The visual arts are art forms that create works which are primarily visual in nature, such as ceramics, drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, crafts, and often modern visual arts and architecture...
. Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969.
Palmer is the 2006 recipient of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets
Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is a non-profit organization dedicated to the art of poetry. The Academy was incorporated as a "membership corporation" in New York State in 1934...
. This $100,000 (US) prize recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.
Beginnings
Michael Palmer began actively publishing poetry in the 1960s. Two events in the early sixties would prove particularly decisive for his development as a poet.First, he attended the now famous 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
Warren Tallman
Warren Tallman was an American-born poetry professor who inspired the Canadian Tish movement and influenced the mid-20th century poetry scene in Canada.- History :...
and Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...
as a summer course at the University of B.C. There Palmer met writers and artists who would leave an indelible mark on his own developing sense of a poetics, especially Robert Duncan
Robert Duncan (poet)
Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...
, Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley
Robert Creeley was an American poet and author of more than sixty books. He is usually associated with the Black Mountain poets, though his verse aesthetic diverged from that school's. He was close with Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Ed Dorn. He served as the Samuel P...
, and Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge is an American poet born in Providence, Rhode Island.Often associated with the Language School, his experience as a Jazz drummer and interest in a wide array of subjects--- including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac, and movies--- often finds...
, with whom he formed lifelong friendships. It was a landmark moment as Robert Creeley observed:
Vancouver Poetry Conference brought together for the first time, a decisive company of then disregarded poets such as Denise LevertovDenise Levertov-Early life and influences:Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales...
, Charles OlsonCharles OlsonCharles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...
, Allen GinsbergAllen GinsbergIrwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, Robert DuncanRobert Duncan (poet)Robert Duncan was an American poet and a student of H.D. and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black...
, Margaret AvisonMargaret AvisonMargaret Avison, OC was a Canadian poet who twice won Canada's Governor General's Award and has also won its Griffin Poetry Prize. "Her work has often been praised for the beauty of its language and images."-Life:...
, Philip WhalenPhilip WhalenPhilip Glenn Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.-Biography:...
... together with as yet unrecognised younger poets of that time, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge and many more."
Palmer's second initiation into the rites of a public poet began with the editing of the journal Joglars with fellow poet Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge
Clark Coolidge is an American poet born in Providence, Rhode Island.Often associated with the Language School, his experience as a Jazz drummer and interest in a wide array of subjects--- including caves, geology, bebop, weather, Salvador Dalí, Jack Kerouac, and movies--- often finds...
. Joglars (Providence, Rhode Island) numbered just three issues in all, published between 1964–66, but extended the correspondence with fellow poets begun in Vancouver. The first issue appeared in Spring 1964 and included poems by Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder is an American poet , as well as an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist . Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry...
, Michael McClure
Michael McClure
Michael McClure is an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955 rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums...
, Fielding Dawson
Fielding Dawson
Fielding Dawson was a beat-era author of short stories and novels, a student of the Black Mountain College. He was also a painter & collagist whose works were seen in several books of poetry & many literary magazines....
, Jonathan Williams
Jonathan Williams (poet)
Jonathan Williams was an American poet, publisher, essayist, and photographer. He is known as the founder of The Jargon Society, which has published poetry, experimental fiction, photography, and folk art for more than fifty years...
, Lorine Niedecker
Lorine Niedecker
Lorine Faith Niedecker was a Wisconsin poet and the only woman associated with the Objectivist poets...
, Robert Kelly
Robert Kelly (poet)
Robert Kelly is an American poet associated with the deep image group.-Early life and education:Kelly was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Samuel Jason and Margaret Rose Kelly née Kane, in 1935. He did his undergraduate studies at the City College of the City University of New York, graduating in 1955...
, and Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...
. Palmer published five of his own poems in the second number of Joglars, an issue that included work by Larry Eigner
Larry Eigner
Laurence Joel Eigner / Larry Eigner was an American poet of the second half of the twentieth century and one of the principal figures of the Black Mountain School....
, Stan Brakhage
Stan Brakhage
James Stanley Brakhage , better known as Stan Brakhage, was an American non-narrative filmmaker who is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th century experimental film....
, Russell Edson
Russell Edson
Russell Edson is an American poet, novelist, writer and illustrator, and the son of the cartoonist-screenwriter Gus Edson....
, and Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low
Jackson Mac Low was an American poet, performance artist, composer and playwright, known to most readers of poetry as a practioneer of systematic chance operations and other non-intentional compositional methods in his work, which Mac Low first experienced in the musical work of John Cage, Earle...
.
For those who attended the Vancouver Conference or learned about it later on, it was apparent that the poetics of Charles Olson
Charles Olson
Charles Olson , was a second generation American modernist poet who was a link between earlier figures such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and the New American poets, which includes the New York School, the Black Mountain School, the Beat poets, and the San Francisco Renaissance...
, proprioceptive
Proprioception
Proprioception , from Latin proprius, meaning "one's own" and perception, is the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement...
or Projectivist in its reach, was exerting a significant and lasting influence on the emerging generation of artists and poets who came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s. Subsequent to this emerging generation of artists who felt Olson's impact, poets such as Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan would in turn exert their own huge impact on our national poetries (see also: Black Mountain poets
Black Mountain poets
The Black Mountain poets, sometimes called projectivist poets, were a group of mid 20th century American avant-garde or postmodern poets centered on Black Mountain College.-Background:...
and San Francisco Renaissance
San Francisco Renaissance
The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range of poetic activity centered on San Francisco and which brought it to prominence as a hub of the American poetic avant-garde. However, others The term San Francisco Renaissance is used as a global designation for a range...
). Of this particular company of poets encountered in Vancouver, Palmer says:
Early development of poetry and poetics
|
| Michael Palmer |
Following the Vancouver Conference, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley remained primary resources. Both poets had a lasting, active influence on Palmer's work which has extended until the present. In an essay, "Robert Duncan and Romantic Synthesis" (see 'External links' below), Palmer recognizes that Duncan's appropriation and synthesis of previous poetic influences was transformed into a poetics noted for "exploratory audacity...the manipulation of complex, resistant harmonies, and by the kinetic idea of "composition by field", whereby all elements of the poem are potentially equally active in the composition as 'events' of the poem".
And if this statement marks a certain tendency readers have noted in Palmer's work all along, or remains a touchstone of sorts, we sense that from the beginning Palmer has consistently confronted not only the problem of subjectivity and public address in poetry, but the specific agency of Poetry and the relationship between poetry and 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."
So for Michael Palmer, this tendency seems there from the beginning. Today these concerns continue through multiple collaborations across the fields of poetry, dance, translation, and the visual arts. Perhaps similar to Olson's impact on his generation, Palmer's influence remains singular and palpable, if difficult to measure. Since Olson's death in 1970, we continue to be, following upon George Oppen
George Oppen
George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
's phrase, carried into the incalculable, As Palmer recently noted in a blurb for Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City. She has taught at Case Western Reserve University, Barnard College, University of Georgia, and in the writing program at the University of Houston. As of 2011, Rankine is the Henry G...
's poetic testament Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004), ours is "a time when even death and the self have been re-configured as commodities
Commodity
In economics, a commodity is the generic term for any marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Economic commodities comprise goods and services....
".
Work
Palmer is the author of ten books of poetry, including Company of Moths (2005) (shortlisted for the 2006 Canadian Griffin Poetry PrizeGriffin Poetry Prize
The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language....
), Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988 (2001), The Promises of Glass (2000), The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 (1998), At Passages (1996), Sun (1988), First Figure (1984), Notes for Echo Lake (1981), Without Music (1977), The Circular Gates (1974), and Blake's Newton (1972). 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. His 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
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created by an act of the U.S. Congress in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal government. Its current...
. 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
Academy of American Poets
The Academy of American Poets is a non-profit organization dedicated to the art of poetry. The Academy was incorporated as a "membership corporation" in New York State in 1934...
. In the spring of 2001 he received the Shelly Memorial Prize
Shelley Memorial Award
The Shelley Memorial Award of more than $3,500, given out by the Poetry Society of America, was established by the will of the late Mary P. Sears, and named after the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The prize is given to a living American poet selected with reference to genius and need. The selection is...
Prize from the Poetry Society of America.
Introducing Palmer for a reading at the DIA Arts Center in 1996, Brighde Mullins noted that Palmer's poetics is both "situated yet active". Palmer alludes to this himself, perhaps, when he speaks of poetry signaling a "site
Site
A site is the location of an event, structure, object, or other thing, whether actual, virtual, abandoned , extant, or planned.*For a building site, see construction.*For a site on the World Wide Web, see website....
of passages". He says, "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
Frank O'Hara
Francis Russell "Frank" O'Hara was an American writer, poet and art critic. He was a member of the New York School of poetry.-Life:...
, perhaps partly in response to gestural abstract painting."
"Palmer's dialectic Dialectic Dialectic is a method of argument for resolving disagreement that has been central to Indic and European philosophy since antiquity. The word dialectic originated in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato in the Socratic dialogues... , with its underpinning of phenomenological Phenomenology (psychology) Phenomenology is an approach to psychological subject matter that has its roots in the philosophical work of Edmund Husserl. Early phenomenologists such as Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty conducted their own psychological investigations in the early 20th century... panic, with its awareness of the psychotic matrix of the political and the personal, is evinced in somatic Somatic The term somatic means 'of the body',, relating to the body. In medicine, somatic illness is bodily, not mental, illness. The term is often used in biology to refer to the cells of the body in contrast to the germ line cells which usually give rise to the gametes... terms, is realized through semantic sustenance. 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." |
| Brighde Mullins |
Elsewhere he observes that "in our reading we have to rediscover the radical nature of the poem." In turn, this becomes a search for "the essential place of lyric poetry
Lyric poetry
Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat...
" as it delves "beneath it to its relationship with language". Since he seems to explore the nature of language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
and its relation to human consciousness and perception, Palmer is often associated with the Language poets
Language poets
The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...
(sometimes referred to as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (magazine)
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was an avant garde poetry magazine edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews that ran thirteen issues from 1978 to 1981...
, after the magazine that bears that name).
Of this particular association, Palmer comments in a recent (2000) interview:
Critical reception
Michael Palmer's poetry has received both praise and criticism over the years. Some reviewers call it abstract. Some call it intimate. Some call it allusive. Some call it personal. Some call it political. And some call it inaccessible.
|
| Michael Palmer |
While some reviewers or readers may value Palmer's work as an "extension of modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
", they criticize and even reject Palmer's work as discordant: an interruption of our composure (to invoke Robert Duncan's phrase). Palmer's own stated poetics will not allow or settle for "vanguard gesturalism". In a singular confrontion with the modernist project
Project
A project in business and science is typically defined as a collaborative enterprise, frequently involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular aim. Projects can be further defined as temporary rather than permanent social systems that are constituted by teams...
, the poet must suffer 'loss', embrace disturbance and paradox, and agonize over what cannot be accounted for. It is a poetry that can, at once, gesture toward post-modern, post-avant-garde
Avant-garde
Avant-garde means "advance guard" or "vanguard". The adjective form is used in English to refer to people or works that are experimental or innovative, particularly with respect to art, culture, and politics....
, semiotic concerns even as it acknowledges that
We can recognize that the "weary beauty" of Palmer's work bespeaks the tension and accord he offers toward the Modernists and the vanguardists, even as he is seeking to maintain or at least continue to search for an ethics of the I/Thou.
It is an awkward truce we make with modernism when there is no cessation of hostilities. But sometimes in reading Palmer's work we recognize (almost against ourselves) a poetry that is described as surreal
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
in context and contour, livid in aural accomplishment, but all the while confronts the reader with a poetics both active and situated. And if Palmer is sometimes praised for this, more often than not he is criticized, rebuked, vilified and dismissed (just as Paul Celan
Paul Celan
Paul Celan was a poet and translator...
was) for hermeticism
Hermeticism
Hermeticism or the Western Hermetic Tradition is a set of philosophical and religious beliefs based primarily upon the pseudepigraphical writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus...
, deliberate obscurity, and bogus erudition. Palmer admits to a stated "essential errancy of discovery in the poem" that would not necessarily be a "unified narrative explanation of the self", but would allow for itself "cloaked meaning and necessary semantic indirection"
Confrontation with Modernism
He remains candid about the giants of modernism: i.e., YeatsYeats
W. B. Yeats was an Irish poet and playwright.Yeats may also refer to:* Yeats ,* Yeats , an impact crater on Mercury* Yeats , an Irish thoroughbred racehorse-See also:...
, Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
and Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
. Whether it is the fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
of Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound
Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...
or the less overt but no less insidious anti-semitism
Anti-Semitism
Antisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...
found in the work of T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, Palmer's position is a fierce rejection of their politics, but qualified with the acknowledgment that, as Marjorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff
Marjorie Perloff is an Austrian-born U.S. poetry critic.Perloff was born Gabriele Mintz into a secularized Jewish family in Vienna. Faced with Nazi terror, her family emigrated in 1938 when she was six-and-a-half, going first to Zürich and then to the United States, settling in Riverdale, New York...
has observed of Pound, "he remains the great inventor of the period, the poet who really MADE THINGS NEW". Thus, Palmer decries that what remains for us is something quite harrowing "inscribed at the heart of modernism".
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| Michael Palmer |
Perhaps we can invoke one of Palmer's real 'heroes', Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci
Antonio Gramsci was an Italian writer, politician, political philosopher, and linguist. He was a founding member and onetime leader of the Communist Party of Italy and was imprisoned by Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime...
, and say here, now, what precisely has been inscribed over against what today (in the vicious circles of media and cultural production) is merely forecast as cultural hegemony
Cultural hegemony
Cultural hegemony is the philosophic and sociological theory, by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, that a culturally diverse society can be dominated by one social class, by manipulating the societal culture so that its ruling-class worldview is imposed as the societal norm, which then is...
.
So if Palmer, on the one hand, variously describes or defines an Ideology
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
as that which "invades the field of meaning", we recognize not only in Pound or Eliot, but now as if against ourselves, that ideology implicitly deploys values and premises that must remain unspoken in order for them to function as ideology or to remain hidden in plain sight, as such. At some point we can invoke the 'post-ideological' stance of Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, critical theorist working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory, and theoretical psychoanalysis....
who, after Althusser, jettisons the Marxist equation: ideology=false consciousness and say that, perhaps Ideology, to all intents and purposes, IS consciousness.
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| Michael Palmer |
As a way out of this seeming double-bind
Double bind
A double bind is an emotionally distressing dilemma in communication in which an individual receives two or more conflicting messages, in which one message negates the other. This creates a situation in which a successful response to one message results in a failed response to the other , so that...
, or to his admissions that poetry is, as Pound observed, "news that stays news", that it remains an active and viable (or "actively situated") principle within the social dynamic, critics and readers alike point to Palmer's own avowals of an emerging countertradition to the prevailing literary establishment: an 'alternative tradition' that just slipped under the radar as far as the Academy and its various 'schools' of poetry are concerned. Though not always so visible, this counter-tradition continues to exert an underground influence. Poetry, as critique
Critique
Critique is a method of disciplined, systematic analysis of a written or oral discourse. Critique is commonly understood as fault finding and negative judgement, but it can also involve merit recognition, and in the philosophical tradition it also means a methodical practice of doubt...
or praise, can perhaps in its reach exceed the grasp of modernism and procure for us as visible again, that which is all or nothing except for the 'ghostlier demarcations' of the social wager within sight of the shipwreck of the singular (as George Oppen
George Oppen
George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
characterized it) which denotes or delimits the very idea of the social, if not the very idea that there is a definition of the social other than this : the community of those who have no community. Indeed, the unavowable community (to borrow a title and phrasing from Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida.-Works:...
).
Faced with shipwreck, "in the dark" amidst the ravished heresies of the unspoken as even against silence itself, we can think with the poem. With fierce determination or graceful adherence we can perhaps even "see" with the poem, account for its usefulness. Even as we use the language, attend to its fissures and abhorrences, language in turn uses us, or has its own uses for us, as Palmer attests:
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| from the poem "Night Gardening", Company of Moths (2005) |
Palmer has repeatedly stated, in interviews and in various talks given across the years, that the situation for the poet is paradox
Paradox
Similar to Circular reasoning, A paradox is a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition...
ical: 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, it is a situation which is never over, and yet it mysteriously starts up again each day, as if describing a circle
Circle
A circle is a simple shape of Euclidean geometry consisting of those points in a plane that are a given distance from a given point, the centre. The distance between any of the points and the centre is called the radius....
. 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).
Collaborations
Palmer has published translations from French, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese, and has engaged in multiple collaborationCollaboration
Collaboration is working together to achieve a goal. It is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together to realize shared goals, — for example, an intriguing endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing...
s with painters. These include the German painter Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter
Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist. Richter has simultaneously produced abstract and photorealistic painted works, as well as photographs and glass pieces, thus undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.- Biography :Gerhard Richter was born in...
, French painter Micaëla Henich, and Italian painter Sandro Chia
Sandro Chia
Sandro Chia is an Italian painter and sculptor.A native of Florence, he was a key member of the Italian Transavanguardia movement, along with fellow countrymen Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, Nicola De Maria, and Enzo Cucchi....
. 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
Alexei Parshchikov
Alexei Maximovich Parshchikov was a Russian poet, critic, and translator.Born in Olga, Primorsky Krai, Russian SFSR to the family of a famous physician, Maxim Reiderman , and a surgeon, L.S. Parschikova, Parshchikov was raised in the Ukrainian SSR and attended the Kiev Academy of Agriculture...
, Blue Vitriol (Avec Books, 1994). He also translated "Theory of Tables" (1994), a book written by Emmanuel Hocquard
Emmanuel Hocquard
Emmanuel Hocquard is a French poet who grew up in Tangier, Morocco. He served as the editor of the small press Orange Export Ltd., and, with Claude Royet-Journoud, edited two anthologies of new American poets, 21+1: Poètes américains ď aujourďhui and 49+1...
, 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
Criticism
Criticism is the judgement of the merits and faults of the work or actions of an individual or group by another . To criticize does not necessarily imply to find fault, but the word is often taken to mean the simple expression of an objection against prejudice, or a disapproval.Another meaning of...
. But his lasting significance occurs as the singular concerns of the artist extend into the aleatory
Aleatory
Aleatoricism is the incorporation of chance into the process of creation, especially the creation of art or media. The word derives from the Latin word alea, the rolling of dice...
, the multiple, and the collaborative.
Dance
For more than thirty years he has collaborated on over a dozen dance works with Margaret JenkinsMargaret Jenkins
Margaret Jenkins is a postmodern choreographer based in San Francisco, California. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1980 and in 2003, San Francisco mayor, Willie Brown, declared April 24 to be Margaret Jenkins Day.-Biography:...
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. A particularly noteworthy example of a recent Jenkins/Palmer collaboration would 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
Homeland Security Advisory System
In the United States, the Homeland Security Advisory System was a color-coded terrorism threat advisory scale. The different levels trigger specific actions by federal agencies and state and local governments, and they affect the level of security at some airports and other public facilities. It...
]
|
| David Bromige David Bromige David Mansfield Bromige is a Canadian poet who resided in northern California from 1962 onward. Bromige published thirty books, each one so different from the others as to seem to be the work of a different author... |
Painters and visual artists
Similar to his friendship with Robert Duncan and the painter Jess CollinsJess Collins
Jess Collins , simply known today as Jess, was an American visual artist.- Biography :Jess was born Burgess Franklin Collins in Long Beach, California. He was drafted into the military and worked on the production of plutonium for the Manhattan Project...
, Palmer's work with painter Irving Petlin
Irving Petlin
Irving Petlin is an American artist and painter renowned for his mastery of the pastel medium and collaborations with other artists and for his work in the "series form" in which he uses the raw material of pastel, oil paint and unprimed linen, and finds inspiration in the work of writers and...
remains generative. Irving's singular influence from the beginning demonstrated for Palmer a "working" of the poet as "maker" (in the radical sense, even ancient sense of that word). Along with Duncan, Zukofsky, and others, Petlin's work modeled, demonstrated, circumscribed and, perhaps most importantly for Palmer, verified that "the way" (this way for the artist who is a maker, a creator) would also be, as Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...
termed it, "a life". This in turn delineates Palmer's own sense of both a poetics
Poetics
Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory...
and an on-going counter-poetic tradition, offering him fixture and a place of repair.
Recently he worked with painter and visual artist Augusta Talbot, and curated her exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation (March 17 -April 23, 2005). When asked in an interview how collaboration has pushed the boundaries of his work, Palmer responded :
It may be that for Palmer, friendship
Friendship
Friendship is a form of interpersonal relationship generally considered to be closer than association, although there is a range of degrees of intimacy in both friendships and associations. Friendship and association are often thought of as spanning across the same continuum...
(acknowledging both the multiple and collaborative), becomes in part what Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer
Jack Spicer was an American poet often identified with the San Francisco Renaissance. In 2009, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer won the American Book Award for poetry.-Life and work:...
terms a "composition of the real". Across the fields of painting and dance, Palmer's work figures as an "unrelenting tentacle of the proprioceptive". Furthermore, it may signal a Coming Community underscored in the work of Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben
Giorgio Agamben is an Italian political philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception and homo sacer....
, Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Luc Nancy
Jean-Luc Nancy is a French philosopher.Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre , a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe...
and Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot
Maurice Blanchot was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on post-structuralist philosophers such as Jacques Derrida.-Works:...
among others. It is a poetry that would, along with theirs, articulate a place for, even spaces where, both the "poetic imaginary" is constituted and a possible social space is envisioned. As Jean-Luc Nancy has written in The Inoperative Community (1991): "These places, spread out everywhere, yield up and orient new spaces...other tracks, other ways, other places for all who are there."
Poetry
- Plan of the City of O, Barn Dreams Press (Boston, Massachusetts), 1971.
- Blake's Newton, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Barbara, California), 1972.
- C's Songs, Sand Dollar Books (Berkeley, California), 1973.
- Six Poems, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Barbara, California), 1973.
- The Circular Gates, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Barbara, California), 1974.
- (Translator, with Geoffrey Young) Vicente HuidobroVicente HuidobroVicente García-Huidobro Fernández was a Chilean poet born to an aristocratic family. He was an exponent of the artistic movement called Creacionismo , which held that a poet should bring life to the things he or she writes about, rather than just describe them.Huidobro was born into a wealthy...
, Relativity of Spring: 13 Poems, Sand Dollar Books (Berkeley, California), 1976. - Without Music, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Barbara, California), 1977.
- Alogon, Tuumba Press (Berkeley, California), 1980.
- Notes for Echo Lake, North Point Press (Berkeley, California), 1981.
- (Translator) Alain Tanner and John BergerJohn BergerJohn Peter Berger is an English art critic, novelist, painter and author. His novel G. won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism Ways of Seeing, written as an accompaniment to a BBC series, is often used as a university text.-Education:Born in Hackney, London, England, Berger was...
, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, North Atlantic Books (Berkeley, California), 1983. - First Figure, North Point Press (Berkeley, California), 1984.
- Sun, North Point Press (Berkeley, California), 1988.
- At Passages, New Directions (New York, New York), 1995.
- 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. ISBN 978-0-8112-1470-4
- (With Régis Bonvicino) Cadenciando-um-ning, um samba, para o outro: poemas, traduções, diálogos, Atelieì Editorial (Cotia, Brazil), 2001.
- Company of Moths, New Directions (New York, New York), 2005. ISBN 978-0-8112-1623-4
- Aygi Cycle , Druksel (Ghent, Belgium), 2009 (chapbook with 10 new poems, inspired by the Russian poet Gennadiy Aygi.
- (With Jan LauwereynsJan LauwereynsJan Lauwereyns , full name Johan Marc José Lauwereyns, is a poet, essayist, and scientist. As a cognitive neuroscientist, he specializes in the voluntary control of attention and decision making. He has published articles in journals such as Nature, Neuron, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and the...
) Truths of Stone, Druksel (Ghent, Belgium), 2010. - Thread, New Directions (New York, New York), 2011. ISBN 978-0-8112-1921-1
Other
- Idem 1-4 (radio plays), 1979.
- (Editor) Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics, North Atlantic Books (Berkeley, California), 1983.
- The Danish Notebook, Avec Books (Penngrove, California), 1999 — prose/memoir
- Active Boundaries: Selected Essays and Talks, New Directions (New York, New York), 2008. ISBN 0-8112-1754-X
Palmer sites and exhibits
- Exhibit at The Academy of American Poets includes links to on-line poems by Palmer not listed below
- Modern American Poetry site
- Author Page at Internationales Literatufestival Berlin site (in English) Palmer was a guest of the ILB (Internationales Literatufestival Berlin/ Germany) in 2001 and 2005.
- An internet bibliography for Michael Palmer from LiteraryHistory.com
Poems
- "Dream of a Language That Speaks" a poem from Company of Moths (2005) @ Jacket Magazine site
- "Scale" first published in Richter 858 (ed. David Breskin, The Shifting Foundation, SF MOMA: San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtSan Francisco Museum of Modern ArtThe San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is a modern art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th century art...
); included in Company of Moths - "Autobiography 3" & Autobiography 5" two poems from Conjunctions magazine's on-line archive; included in The Promises of Glass (2000)
- To the Title (Are there titles?) included in Jacket Magazine 33
- four poems from Thread from Boston ReviewBoston ReviewBoston Review is a bimonthly American political and literary magazine. The magazine covers, specifically, political debates, literature, and poetry...
's March/April 2010 issue - Late Night Poetry @ Tony Bilson's Number One: Palmer reads "The Dream of Narcissus" Video of Palmer at the 2010 Sydney (Australia) Writers Festival.
- Michael Palmer reads Mahmoud Darwish's "The Strangers' Picnic" Video of Palmer reading a poem from Mahmoud DarwishMahmoud DarwishMahmoud Darwish was a Palestinian poet and author who won numerous awards for his literary output and was regarded as the Palestinian national poet...
's collection Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems
Selected essays and talks
- 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-bookE-bookAn electronic book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital...
representation of Code of Signals (which incidentally Palmer edited in 1983, with the subtitle "Recent Writings in Poetics"). - On Robert Duncan reprint of Palmer's essay "Robert Duncan and Romantic Synthesis"
- Michael Palmer audio-files at PENNsound
- "On the Sustaining of Culture in Dark Times" text of Palmer's keynote address given at the 3rd Annual Sustainable Living Conference at Evergreen State College in February 2004
- "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.
- Lunch Poems reading by Michael Palmer: Webcast Held on October 5, 2006, in the Morrison Library, University of California at Berkeley: webcast online
- "In Company: On Artistic Collaboration and Solitude" This is the title of the lecture/talk that Palmer gave, along with a poetry reading, at the University of ChicagoUniversity of ChicagoThe University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
in October 2006. (In audio & video format) - Bad to the bone: What I learned outside Lecture & Talk given in June 2002, when Palmer taught for a brief stint at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at NaropaNaropa UniversityNaropa University is a private American liberal arts university in Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 1974 by Tibetan Buddhist teacher and Oxford University scholar Chögyam Trungpa, it is named for the eleventh-century Indian Buddhist sage Naropa, an abbot of Nalanda.Naropa describes itself as...
in Boulder, ColoradoBoulder, ColoradoBoulder is the county seat and most populous city of Boulder County and the 11th most populous city in the U.S. state of Colorado. Boulder is located at the base of the foothills of the Rocky Mountains at an elevation of... - Poetic Obligations (Talking about Nothing at Temple) This is a talk Palmer gave at Temple UniversityTemple UniversityTemple University is a comprehensive public research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Originally founded in 1884 by Dr. Russell Conwell, Temple University is among the nation's largest providers of professional education and prepares the largest body of professional...
in February 1999, and was originally published in Fulcrum: An annual of poetry and aestheticsFulcrum (annual)Fulcrum, An annual of poetry and aesthetics is a United States literary periodical that has been published since 2002. It is edited by Philip Nikolayev and Katia Kapovich...
(Issue 2, 2003). - Poetry and Contingency: Within a Timeless Moment of Barbaric Thought essay/talk originally published in the Chicago ReviewChicago ReviewThe Chicago Review is a literary magazine published four times per year in the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago. It was founded in 1946. Three stories published in the Chicago Review have won the O. Henry Prize...
(June, 2003)
Interviews with Palmer
- The River City Interview conducted by Paul Naylor, Lindsay Hill, and J. P. Craig; appeared in 1994.
- An Interview with Michael Palmer by Robert Hicks in 2006
- Interview at Berkeley Daily Planet: April 7, 2006 discusses a reading Palmer & Douglas BlazekDouglas BlazekDouglas Blazek is a poet who affected American letters during the 1960s as the publisher of the literary chapbook Ole and proprietor of the Open Skull Press. Blazek was a major force in "underground", i.e., non-mainstream press poetry...
gave together at Moe's, a bookstore in Berkeley, California; includes interviews - Interview with Michael Palmer an interview conducted at Washington University in St. LouisWashington University in St. LouisWashington University in St. Louis is a private research university located in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. Founded in 1853, and named for George Washington, the university has students and faculty from all fifty U.S. states and more than 110 nations...
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"
Others on Palmer
- Margaret Jenkins Dance Company info on both Palmer & his collaborators in their on-going work with Dance
- Lauri Ramey:"Michael Palmer: The Lion Bridge" Ramey wrote a doctoral dissertation on Palmer, and here reviews his "Selected Poems"
- A Collision of "Possible Worlds" A 2002 review of The Promises of Glass by Michael Dowdy @Free Verse website
- A review of Company of Moths a book review of Palmer's 2005 collection
- Griffin Poetry Prize biography, including audio and video clips Palmer was shortlisted for this prize in 2006
- Margaret Jenkins Dance Company's "A Slipping Glimpse" 2006 dance piece in collaboration with Tanushree Shankar Dance School & the text by Palmer
- Cultural camaraderie article from Hindustantimes.com on the dance performance A Slipping Glimpse. Article discusses Palmer's collaboration (includes quotes)
- Palmer is Spring 2007 Writer in Residence press release from California College of the ArtsCalifornia College of the ArtsCalifornia College of the Arts , founded in 1907, is known for its broad, interdisciplinary programs in art, design, architecture, and writing. It has two campuses, one in Oakland and one in San Francisco, California, USA...
- Michael Palmer (Six Introductions) a brief essay by Clayton EshlemanClayton EshlemanClayton Eshleman is an American poet, translator, and editor.-Life:Eshleman has been translating since the early 1960s. He is the recipient of the National Book Award in 1979 for his co-translation of César Vallejo's Complete Posthumous Poetry...
who edited SulfurSulfur (magazine)Sulfur magazine was an influential, small literary magazine founded in 1981 by poet and award-winning translator Clayton Eshleman and ran for 46 issues until the spring of 2000...
magazine, for which Palmer served as a contributing editor. - Hands Across Many Seas: From San Francisco and India, a dance collaboration article by Deborah Jowitt on "A Slipping Glimpse", performed by the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company at the "Danspace Project" at Saint Mark's Church, October 4 through 6, 2007
- Lyric Persuasions at Poets House Rae ArmantroutRae ArmantroutRae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language Poets. Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. She has published ten books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies...
and Zoketsu Norman FischerZoketsu Norman FischerZoketsu Norman Fischer is a Jewish-American Soto Zen roshi, poet and Buddhist author practicing in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki. He is a Dharma heir of Sojun Mel Weitsman, from whom he received Dharma transmission in 1988. Having served as co-abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center from 1995—2000,...
discuss Michael Palmer's work as recorded by Vasiliki Katsarou at the Poet's House in the Spring of 2010