Michael Palmer (poet)

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. 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: “The Vancouver Poetry Conference brought together for the first time, a decisive company of then disregarded poets such as Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Duncan, Margaret Avison, Philip Whalen... together with as yet unrecognised younger poets of that time, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge and many more.” The second decisive event in Palmer’s early career as a poet began with the editing of the journal Joglars alongside fellow poet Clark Coolidge. Joglars (Providence, Rhode Island) numbered just three issues in all, published between 1964 and 1966, but it extended Palmer’s 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 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. Says Palmer: ==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 Shelley Memorial Award 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. Of this particular association, Palmer comments in an interview: ==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 the poem on the page as signaling a "site of passages": 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". 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. Palmer has repeatedly stated, in interviews and talks over the years, that the situation for the poet and/or the poem 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, speculative, and inaccessible. While some reviewers or readers may value Palmer's work as an "extension of modernism", some criticize Palmer's work as discordant: an interruption of our composure (to invoke Robert Duncan's phrase). 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, with opinions similar to Yeats, Eliot and Pound. Contrarily, Palmer clearly states that there remains “something quite harrowing inscribed at the heart of modernism.” 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.” ==Collaborations==

Perhaps similar to Olson's and Duncan’s impact on their generation, Palmer's influence remains singular and palpable, if difficult to measure. For many decades now, Palmer has worked collaboratively in the fields of dance, translation, teaching, and the visual arts. Palmer has published translations from French, Russian, and Brazilian Portuguese. He edited and helped translate Nothing The Sun Could Not Explain: Twenty Contemporary Brazilian Poets. 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). And he 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. He has participated in multiple collaborations with a wide range of painters. These include the German painter Gerhard Richter, Italian painter Sandro Chia and French painter Micaëla Henich. 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. 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 artist Augusta Talbot, and curated her exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation (March 17 -April 23, 2005) 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: 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==