Early Palmer

Michael Palmer's work was distinctive from the very beginning. There was a small chapbook, Plan of the City of O [Barn Dream Press, Boston, 1971], and then Blake's Newton, a stylish Black Sparrow Press book [Santa Barbara, 1972], followed by a fuller collection called The Circular Gates [Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara, 1974]. A graduate of Harvard in French and Comp Lit, he was clearly grounded in philosophy, especially theoretical linguistics, logical positivism, and the French post-War streams of Structuralism, Post Structuralism, etc. From its earliest manifestations, his work seemed to be about the entanglements of cognition, representation, logical dilemmas, and the mediation between spheres of subject-matter. Almost anything was likely to happen in a Palmer poem, and usually did. His poems seemed to be like problems in logic, but with the matter and preoccupations of Surrealism. There was a constant dialogue between contexts, of playfulness toying with gravity, consternation confronting the absurd. A precarious balance between jeopardy and delight suggested an uncertainty that was endless, if occasionally reassuring. He was alert to the distortions and misapprehensions of language, and the disjunctions inherent in perception, the weak points in systems and surfaces. His conceits often felt gratuitously flimsy, but that didn't seem to matter in the long run--perhaps they were only pretexts.

Though his espoused mentors were Duncan and Creeley, his own poetry bore little resemblance, at its heart, to the work of either of these men.

The early work sounded like the trumpet's annunciation to an unbounded precinct of elaborations, stretching out in time. And that promise has been fulfilled, albeit in ways that could have been predicted, given the tone and sureness of that confident voice.

Prose 22

Plan of the city of O. The great square

curves down toward the cathedral. The

water runs out into night where the patron

saint still maintains his loft. He enters

from the lower level and pulls up the ladder

after him. The women and children and

most of the old men spend their time painting

pictures of the ladder. The rest lay the

three kinds of stone or type the performance

for the eastern quarter. There the first

colony left its box-shaped mark. But

the sun always goes down in several places,

so the clocks serve as maps. And at the

end of the nearest mountain stands the

larger and less perfect box.

This was playful and curious and intriguing at the same time. It was syntactically whole and didn't challenge the membrane of representation which the medium of language assumes; though it seemed devoted to deconstructing whatever provisional presumptions may have seemed to be forming.

from The Brown Book

But do we interpret the words

before obeying the order

--The Brown Book

for. . .

This is difficult but not impossible: coffee

childhood; in the woods there's a bird;

its song stops you and makes you blush

and so on; it's her

small and dead behind the roses

better left alone; we wander around the park

and out of our mouths come blood and smoke

and sounds; small children and giants

young mothers and big sisters

will be walking in circles next to the water

This could be a fragment of a description composed only of stray parts. The poem could be regarded as a problem, or as a riddle which holds the key to a way of thinking about the world, or about an imaginary world in which giants roam and dead girls lie dead behind some rose bushes. The reference to Wittgenstein [his Blue and Brown Books, 1958, from Notes dictated to his students at Cambridge in 1933-35] seems to suggest that the subject is a problem with perception as demonstrated or laid bare in language. The poem thus becomes both an artifact and a proof of its own indeterminacy. The dead woman might suggest a Lewis Carroll trope; what the bird is telling you, why you are bleeding from the mouth, why this must be difficult--these might all fit into a larger whole whose design we can only partially infer.

for. . .

Is it true that the wolf was crying under the leaves

instead of speaking. And the moon she

come peeking. Four

proceleusmatic clouds

pertaining to night. Four legs and arms

or what sits down when it lies. No wind

but some trains are waiting underground

All the things we shake from

before opening the eyes and mouth

The south is mauve and majesties and heroes

The north: white strips and lavender silks of ice

[Note: proceleusmatic means a four-syllabic foot in poetry.] Separate lines disconnect along their horizontal axes to form broken sequences of narrative or fractured logic. Is what you are thinking happening in the hand (mind) or in the past? Do these impressions join at some imaginary intersection where random numbers and cartoon characters and stuff falling on your head occur in some proximity to the moment of writing? Do questions knock on your door offering to take you to New Guinea? Is the Y by the T for a token metal key?

from The Book Against Understanding

The sun the water and the smallness of the islands

trees sometimes grow from. The semi-circular mountain

A man stands his ground in a lion's skin

and leads his pet lion by a string

through threatening weather. It and if.

It was as if I'd been away for many years

It's as if I've been away for many years

and then the skeleton of a young girl reappears

above the hill in the coruscating air

Once I flew to heaven and

once I went to Europe on a ship.

It is. It was as if.

The levels of statement exist simultaneously from a pack of possible propositions. Each proposition is autonomous, but not integral in the usual sense to the dream of the poem. Allowing obsessive, resistant nodes ("semi-circular mountains" "the skeleton of a young girl") to exist in a stasis of probable accidental relationships. The descriptive oddity of ordinary qualities ("coruscating") invites us to regard everything as a specimen of cognition, as if feelings, words and facts might be confused with each other in a dangerous (though artfully "harmless") game of chance. How can we know a thing untethered to its recognizable context?

The Whale

The whale

A jar disintegrates

or breaks. I pick up the pieces

of the second voice

and the other pieces

more slowly

since we're leaving

A blue marker

and a rounded Japanese

flower. The pieces

have almost disappeared

behind the key

I pick up the pieces

of one and three

They fit

as if they

were made for it

from a dark liquid

gone hazy at the edge

They fit

If a poem could be the combination of multiple "voices" or voicings then the poem's deployment strategies could be a puzzle in which the respective intentions of each agency could be said to "fit" into the overall meaning of the process. "I" wants "you" to see how these separate orders of reality might overlap, creating parallel pages in the book against understanding. As objects and events enter, interrupting the anticipated flow, we put down markers to guide us through a maze of disintegrating landscapes. If a poem is a journey through a series of moments--of stress, diversion, unexpected meetings--Palmer seems uninterested in confirming anything we might covet or desire to occupy for very long.

N Judah Poem

1

My trolley passes the Hub Pharmacy

where one time I went in with Cathy

and found a copy of Raymond Chandler's

Little Sister. Now there's a girl inside

of maybe eighteen who's

trying to decide

which things to buy

2

I open the door to the place

I live

which is called my home

or simply home

a word I've never used before

in a poem

because of its unacceptable sweetness

3

Climbing the stairs

in the bag in my hand

are copies of Whitehead's

Science and the Modern World

and Tom Clark's Air

On the side of the bag

is part one of N Judah poem

beginning "My trolley..."

The reflexivity of this is reenforced as a series of nested paradoxes: The poem in the bag in my hand, (in) the poem where the girl in the Hub Pharmacy (in the poem) where I placed a copy of the poem (I began to write) with Whitehead and Raymond Chandler, on my way home while riding the "N Judah" trolley (poem) in San Francisco once upon a time. The poem is pulled inside out to reveal. . .what we carried in our heads from one place to another. The old poet moves to a new apartment 14 times. Did Raymond Chandler have a sister? The poem travels along a route pre-ordained as the sense of a destiny saved from oblivion by the decision to enact it. Its contents become the poignant keepsakes of correspondences named and specified, from among the illimitable mass. Our rational explanations may be of only nominal use in sorting out values among classes of experience which settle into brief hierarchies of temporary order.

Prose 43

The minotaur was on second base. The

lower part wanted to steal but the rest

seemed to hesitate. The reliever was

still wet from the sea; he was trying

to hold it together with a string

stretched from his right foot sixty

feet and six inches to the plate. His

receiver waited there on one knee with

his left arm extended and the gloved

hand raised. But his eyes kept shifting

from the string to the runner on second,

half bull and half man, and back again.

After a while he asked for time out and

headed toward the mound.

Ostensibly about a simple conceit of a base-runner as satyr, or minotaur, the poem really seems to be about classical relationships, in which a suspension of hostilities through the relaxation of tension as "time out" is a metaphor for the elasticity of mythical tropes.

Prose 50

Until I was seven we lived in 1108. Then

we moved to 1005. Across the air-shaft

lived a former leading lady to Rudolph

Valentino. She always dropped her empty

bourbon bottles out the window, down ten

flights onto the pavement, and she made the

papers when she died. Allen Ginsberg told

me later that he and his friends used to

go there to turn on. Next we spent three

years in north-central Florida, at a re-

sort hotel owned by the San Francisco

Giants. When we returned to New York we

lived in a hotel near Times Square named

after the conqueror of Napoleon at Waterloo,

but I've forgotten the number of our room.

The numerology of assigned and assumed meanings is tickled by insinuation and guile. Places and faces flit in and out of the limelight like neon chimeras. Skewed autobiographical details masquerade as real people and real events, but the verification required to triangulate fact is lacking. Magical incantations may summon a trance of attention, a momentary glimpse into a cardboard reality. What we testity to--as what we may reveal--may constitute merely a template of the known.

from The Circular Gates

I dreamed about the City

of O, the water

and the rubber boats. A compass

might have been of some use

all his emotions as well

As it is in New York

the chignon lies askew on the plane;

there are four kinds of gate

but some of these same

emotions get lost. We are definitely

at war, and I've a precise

color sense of war

like lemon pie or toast

or the onyx torso, now lost

The use of the "compass" is a crucial element in all of Palmer's work. "Some of these...emotions get lost." The need for a rubber boat, a life-raft to use in the rising flood-waters of confusion in the (modern) world are made no less tangible through the imaginary assignments of taste, color or texture which coexist within the context of the knowable. How can we know a thing? And is that knowing something we can transmit without distortion? What does thought really look like? How do words mean? Language may tend to blur, decay, even disintegrate upon close scrutiny. This is the danger that lurks behind any Palmer poem, that we're always on the verge of losing track of what is happening, of forgetting, of sliding--imperceptibly at first, then with gathering speed--into a state of total chaos. If we accept that disintegration, it may be momentarily liberating, but we aren't free to appreciate it. Rationality is the cardinal tendency of our nature. Here is a poem I published in L Magazine back in the 1970's--

Barcelona

The finger tastes of lemon

of cigarette-lemon and how

does the old man

"almost break a table"

or anyone. He

raises his right hand

from the lion on the chair

She had been partly hidden by

the accumulation of white hair

His titles are like mine

The circular gates

start to open and close

and the clouds are

supposed to seem high

The gestural futility of symbolic acts and relations seems to drain energy from the possible effects of specific assertions. Our tendency is always to want to denote with conclusive precision that which would lend substance to the detritus of civilization--some accrual of substance. The formal innovations of this work are its receptivity to change, to chance and mystery. If its flirtatious guile is reminiscent of the Surrealists' hijinks, that is simply another aspect, though a crucially relevant componant.

The range of Palmer's concerns in the years since his work first began to appear has not appreciably changed, in my view. Its aura of mischief and transgressive nonsense, always hiding around and among secret passageways and circuitous cul-de-sacs, leading us further and further astray.... But the maze always has a purpose--if only we could discern it!

Final Score

Cotati Texaco

twenty-three

Berkeley Poets

two