(COMICAL MUSIC PLAYS)

SPEAKER:

This is the Poetry Foundation's Essential American Poets podcast. Essential American Poets is an online audio poetry collection. The poets in the collection were selected in 2006 by Donald Hall, when he was poet laureate. Recordings of the poets he selected are available online at poetryfoundation.org and poetryarchive.org. (COMICAL MUSIC PLAYS) In this edition of the podcast, we'll hear poems by Michael Palmer. (COMICAL MUSIC PLAYS) (INHALES) Michael Palmer has been called the foremost experimental poet of his generation. Michael Palmer was born in New York City in 1943, and educated at Harvard. Growing up on the East Coast, Palmer had many poetic models, but none he wanted to emulate. As an adolescent, he was drawn to T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, but abandoned them as idols as these poets' political and social agendas became more clear. Of the confessional poets he met in Boston in the '60s, Palmer said, "They struck me as people absolutely lusting for fame, all of them." But in 1963, Palmer flew West and found his poetic calling.

He had signed up for the now famous Vancouver Poetry Conference, which gathered 60 poets for three weeks of workshops, readings, and discussions. Poet Robert Creeley remembered the conference as a landmark, saying it brought together then disregarded poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Denise Levertov, with as yet unrecognized poets such as Clark Coolidge, and a 20-year-old Michael Palmer. Long after he had returned to the East Coast, Palmer stayed in touch with the poets he met in Vancouver. (INHALES) His correspondence with Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and Clark Coolidge helped Palmer to develop his own poetics. In 1969, Palmer settled in San Francisco, and became briefly associated with the emerging movement of language poetry. Palmer moved on from the language school, but he says he remembers the attraction. "We were a generation in San Francisco with lots of poetic and theoretical energy, desperately trying to escape from the assumptions of poetic production that were dominant in our culture." Palmer published his first book of poetry, 'Blake's Newton' in 1972.

Since then, he's published nearly a dozen collections, including 'Notes for Echo Lake', 'The Lion Bridge', and 'The Company of Moths'. In a 2006 interview, Palmer said his work moved a little bit away from radical syntax into the mysteries of ordinary language, not in the everyday sense, but in the philosophical sense. (INHALES) Palmer has collaborated with other artists, including the postmodern choreographer, Margaret Jenkins, and the genre-crossing painter, Gerhard Richter. He has also translated works from Spanish, French, Russian, and Portuguese. Palmer's work has been recognized with many awards, prizes, and grants. He has also served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Michael Palmer lives and works in San Francisco. The following poems were recorded at the Library of Congress in 1995.

MICHAEL PALMER:

‘Autobiography.’ 

All clocks are clouds.

Parts are greater than the whole.

A philosopher is starving in a rooming house, while it rains outside.

He regards the self as just another sign.

Winter roses are invisible.

Late ice sometimes sings.

A and Not-A are the same.

My dog does not know me.

Violins, like dreams, are suspect.

I come from Kolophon, or perhaps some small island.

The strait has frozen, and people are walking—a few skating—across it.

On the crescent beach, a drowned deer.

A woman with one hand, her thighs around your neck.

The world is all that is displaced.

Apples in a stall at the streetcorner by the Bahnhof, pale yellow to blackish red.

Memory does not speak.

Shortness of breath, accompanied by tinnitus.

The poet’s stutter and the philosopher’s.

The self is assigned to others.

A room for which, at all times, the moon remains visible.

Leningrad cafe: a man missing the left side of his face.

Disappearance of the sun from the sky above Odessa.

True description of that sun.

A philosopher lies in a doorway, discussing the theory of colors

with himself

the theory of self with himself, the concept of number, eternal return, the sidereal pulse

logic of types, Buridan sentences, the lekton.

Why now that smoke off the lake?

Word and things are the same.

Many times white ravens have I seen.

That all planes are infinite, by extension.

She asks, Is there a map of these gates?

She asks, Is this one called Passages, or is that one to the west?

Thus released, the dark angels converse with the angels of light.

They are not angels.

Something else.

Autobiography two. 'Hellogoodbye'.

 The Book of Company which

I put down and can’t pick up

The Trans-Siberian disappearing,

the Blue Train and the Shadow Train

Her body with ridges like my skull

Two children are running through the Lion Cemetery

Five travelers are crossing the Lion Bridge

A philosopher in a doorway insists

that there are no images

He whispers instead: Possible Worlds

The Mind-Body Problem

The Tale of the Color Harpsichord

Skeleton of the World’s Oldest Horse

The ring of O dwindles

sizzling around the hole until gone

False spring is laughing at the snow

and just beyond each window

immense pines weighted with snow

A philosopher spreadeagled in the snow

holds out his Third Meditation

like a necrotic star. He whispers:

archery is everywhere in decline,

photography the first perversion of our time

Reach to the milky bottom of this pond

to know the feel of bone,

a knuckle from your grandfather’s thumb,

the maternal clavicle, the familiar

arch of a brother’s brow

He was your twin, no doubt,

forger of the unicursal maze

My dearest Tania, When I get a good position in the courtyard

I study their faces through the haze

Dear Tania, Don’t be annoyed,

please, at these digressions

They are soldering the generals

back onto their pedestals

This one steals a little from 'Mallarmé's life' at a certain point, if he had one. (INHALES, EXHALES)

Yes, I was born on the street known as Glass—as Paper, Scissors or Rock.

Several of my ancestors had no hands.

Several of my ancestors used their pens

in odd ways.

A child of seven I prayed for breath.

Each day I passed through the mirrored X

into droplets of rain congealed around dust.

I never regretted this situation.

Though patient as an alchemist I failed to learn English.

Twenty years later I burned all my furniture.

Likewise the beams of my house

to fuel the furnace.

Once I bought an old boat.

I abandoned the tyrannical book of my dreams

and wrote about dresses, jewels, furniture and menus

eight or ten times in a book of dreams.

It sets me to dreaming when I dust it off.

Our time is a between time; best to stay out of it.

(SHUFFLES PAPER)

Send an occasional visiting card to eternity or a few stanzas to the living

so they won’t suspect we know they don’t exist.

Sign them Sincerely Yours, Warmest Regards, Thinking of You or

Deepest Regrets.

Brown river outside my window, an old boat riding the current.

What I like most is to stay in my apartment.

So that is my life, pared of anecdotes.

I go out occasionally to look at a dance.

Otherwise the usual joys, worries and inner mourning.

Occasionally in an old boat I navigate the river

when I find the time.

Water swallows the days.

I think maybe that’s all

I have to say

except that an irregular heart sometimes speaks to me.

It says, A candle is consuming a children’s alphabet.

It says, Attend to each detail of the future-past.

Last night the moon was divided precisely in half.

Today, a terrifying wind.

'Eighth Sky'. It is scribbled along the body

Impossible even to say a word

An alphabet has been stored beneath the ground

It is a practice alphabet, work of the hand

Yet not, not marks inside a box

For example, this is a mirror box

Spinoza designed such a box

and called it the Eighth Sky

called it the Nevercadabra House

as a joke

Yet not, not so much a joke

not Notes for Electronic Harp

on a day free of sounds

(but I meant to write “clouds”)

At night these same boulevards fill with snow

Lancers and dancers pass a poisoned syringe,

as you wrote, writing of death in the snow,

Patroclus and a Pharoah on Rue Ravignan

It is scribbled across each body

Impossible even to name a word

Look, you would say, how the sky falls

at first gently, then not at all

Two chemicals within the firefly are the cause,

twin ships, twin nemeses

preparing to metamorphose

into an alphabet in stone

SPEAKER:

That was Michael Palmer recorded at the Library of Congress in 1995. The poems are used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. You have been listening to the Essential American Poets podcast produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with poetryarchive.org.

To learn more about Michael Palmer and other essential American poets, and to hear more poetry, go to poetryfoundation.org.