Information AboutMichael Palmer |
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For the Singaporean politican, see Michael Palmer (politician) . Michael Palmer (b. 1943 in Manhattan , New York) is a contemporary American Poet and Translator . He has worked extensively with Contemporary Dance for over thirty years and has collaborated with many Composers and those in the Visual Arts . He has lived in San Francisco since 1969 . BEGINNINGS Michael Palmer's first stirrings as a poet, at least in the public's eye, occurred in the early 1960's. Palmer's "moment", as such, was two-fold. First, he attended the now famous 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, in that :
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, RI) 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 . {Link without Title} For those who attended the Vancouver Conference or learned about it later on, it was apparent that the poetics of Charles Olson, and San Francisco Renaissance ). For Michael Palmer, however, it was the American poet Robert Duncan who remained a primary resource and lasting influence. 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:
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:
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''. Palmer recently noted in a blurb for Claudia Rankine 's poetic testament ''Don't Let Me Be Lonely'' (2004), that ours is ''"a time when even death and the self have been re-configured as Commodities "''. Thinking with Palmer and Rankine here now, we ask with them:
WORK Palmer is the author of ten books of poetry, including Company of Moths (New Directions, 2005) (shortlisted for the 2006 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize ), '''Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988''' (New Directions, 2001), T'''he Promises of Glass''' (New Directions, 2000), '''The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995''' (New Directions, 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 by Avec Books in 1999. His work has appeared in literary magazines such as ''Boundary 2, Berkeley Poetry Review, Sulfur, Conjunctions, Grand Street'' and ''O-blek''. 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 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 and active; and that he writes a poetry that is allusive, lyrical, and speculative. Palmer himself speaks of poetry signaling a " Site of passages" and 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 explores the nature of Language and its relation to human consciousness and perception, Palmer is often associated with the Language School (sometimes referred to as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets) . Of this particular association, he comments in a recent (2000) interview:
CRITICAL RECEPTION Michael Palmer's poetry has received both praise and criticism over the years. While some reviewers or readers may value Palmer's work as an 'extension of , 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 the artist:
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''. {Link without Title} ( see also article: Modernism ) 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, villified 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"''. {Link without Title} Confrontation with Modernism He remains candid about two of the giants of modernism: T.S. Eliot and Ezra 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 their contributions are and were crucial to our times. He decries that for us what remains 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 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 principle within the social dynamic, critics and readers alike point to Palmer's own avowals of an ongoing ). 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 to in his poem "Night Gardening" from ''Company of Moths'' (2005): ::::''And the poem, from its homeless home'', ::::''writes of blindsight and silence'' Palmer has repeatedly stated, in interviews and in various talks given across the years, that the situation for the poet is . The situation which the poem may activate (and for Palmer it all depends on the generosity of the reader) describes a memory that is not unlike the outline of your body as you felt it there yesterday: a memory or outline of something which was yours then if not for tomorrow, and is once again yours, even so, today. COLLABORATIONS Palmer has published translations from French, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese, and has engaged in multiple , Blue Vitriol (Avec Books, 1994). He translated Emmanuel Hocquard 's '''Theory of Tables''' (1994), which Hocquard wrote after translating into French Palmer's serial poem ''"Baudelaire Series"'' from '''Sun''' (1988). 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. For more than thirty years he has collaborated on over a dozen ] Similar to his friendship with Robert Duncan and the painter Jess Collins , 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 'compostion 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." EXTERNAL LINKS Palmer sites & exhibits Poems
Selected essays & talks
Interviews with Palmer
Others on Palmer
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