Interviews
“What Reading?”: Play in Michael Palmer’s Poetics
Occasionally the critical authorities in poetry assume an alarming confidence in their pronouncements about the condition of poetry. Of course, their rhetoric may be as amiably vigorous as it is cutting. Some years ago the poet Richard Howard provided a good example:
Poetry is already a problematic if not a despised art in what I am calling our moment. Despised because popular. More people are writing what they believe to be poetry, what is even called poetry by their readers, their publishers, their detractors, than ever before in our history—many more are writing poetry than are reading poetry, as you have often heard. The situation is not a paradox, it is a necessary consequence of our cultural structure.
Howard goes on to refer to the anthology which he introduced, The New Young American Poets, as a “notable stay against confusion” in the current “moment,” then to recuperate such faint praise into yet fainter forms.
I don’t give this example to condemn Howard. Instead, I mean to draw attention to the great charm in his rhetorical flourish. What amazes me—and what motivates my preamble to an introduction of Michael Palmer—is precisely the playfulness Howard shows to be available to critical authorities even in their serious labors. Michael Palmer provides a different kind of play in the present interview, if not in all his work, yet Palmer’s vigor in this play is equal to the best. Like Howard, Palmer is a poet of national stature. Thirty years of work as a poet, theorist, translator, and collaborator in the artistic communities in American and abroad have assured his position. Also like Howard, Palmer is not uncritical of the defects in our culture, the humble place of poetry, the problems of bad poetry (and bad publicity for poetry), and a host of other matters that could channel sweeping pronouncements. Yet as he touches upon such matters in our interview, he keeps his good nature and his perspective. His art, as he makes plain, consists in remaining responsively at play and in conversation with other poets and artists, but a serene kindness marks his relation to his reader.
Some of Palmer’s serenity emerges from the ferocious focus of his poetry itself. The eponymous sequence in Notes for Echo Lake, for example, probes the concepts of subject, setting, and story with a patience born of deferring the tired emotional appeals built into to so much of our poetic tradition. While Palmer refers to “the water’s edge” in “Notes for Echo Lake 1,” seeming to provide a setting, in the remainder of the poem he turns to statements like “A dead language opens and opens one door” to emphasize his shift away from traditional narrative re-imagining of setting toward a philosophical re-engineering of the relationship between poet and reader. His “lake” and its edges at once make and resist their ideal uses as a figure or sign, and to take up this position requires great trust in the readership.
Palmer’s talents have had some conspicuous influence on recent poetry. Jorie Graham’s poem “Picnic” from Region of Unlikeness, which questions the place, time, and story in her life and employs the figure of a lake, a mirror, and a persistently interrupted dialogue with the reader, contains a footnote reading: “this poem is spoken, in part, to Michael Palmer’s sequence Notes for Echo Lake and so is dedicated to him.” At my first discovery of the note, it was somewhat of a puzzlement. It was “dedicated” to Palmer, but it was also “spoken” to his work.
Could one, I wondered, really do the theatrical work of “speaking” to another poet’s work while presenting one’s own in tribute? Could such honor be abstracted into the ambition of poetic speech? Yes, I realized: “dedication” refers to the gift and the state of mind circumscribed by gift-giving. Similarly, speaking to another’s work can be a graceful and even original yielding of one’s own speech to others’ projects and projections. In this case, the influence of others, for Graham and Palmer, became a happy confluence in which the later work led me back toward the beauties of the earlier.
In the end, an interview like ours may serve scholarly purposes, but more often it serves the interests of the community of poets and writers who search it to understand the alliances and divisions of our moment. This is a messy, political process—a personal process, too. If it were easy to distinguish imitation from emulation or coterie from company, Palmer would not have balked even a moment to answer the question about his own “influence.” To his credit, though, he does pause, reflect, then answer. His pauses illustrate his concern for a balance he is at pains to work out: he is indebted to and cautious of figures like Heidegger; appreciative of anti-war poetry, but conscious of its comical limitations; sensible of his own desire to spearhead political protest, but careful to blunt the shrill edge of complaint. Any writer could assume these balances, but in all likelihood Palmer’s poise comes from his long involvement in many artistic collaborations. His work with painters, dancers, and musicians and his production of drama and translations compel him to place his improvisational talents in the spotlight with others. Yes, he plays well with others, but it is—play is—more than getting along with those around you. Palmer is open to possibilities that too many others pass by. His intuitively comic response to my closing mention of his reading (see the end of the interview) shows the pleasure and surprise such openness delivers.
Michael Palmer has published Company of Moths (New Directions, 2005), which was shortlisted for the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize; 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). He is also the author of a prose work, The Danish Notebook (Avec Books, 1999).
By Lawrence Revard