Michael Palmer was born in New York City in 1943. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988 (2001), The Promises of Glass (2000), The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 (1998), At Passages (1996), Sun (1998), First Figure (1984), Notes for Echo Lake (1981), Without Music (1977), The Circular Gates (1974) and Blake’s Newton (1972).
Palmer’s work has appeared in literary magazines such as Boundary 2, Berkeley Poetry Review, Sulfur, Conjunctions, and O-blek. His honours include two grants from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 1999, Palmer was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He lives in San Francisco.
Palmer was the 2006 recipient of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. The $100,000 (US) prize recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.
Judges’ Citation
How listen, where dwell?’, asks Michael Palmer in a book whose continuous questioning only ever opens out to the surprising generosity of a kind of equivocation.
How listen, where dwell?’, asks Michael Palmer in a book whose continuous questioning only ever opens out to the surprising generosity of a kind of equivocation. That is, more questions, rather than a rectitude, follow from reflection, and they are the kinds of familiar questions we pose to a companion we love: ‘what of what wolfhound at full stride?’ ‘Did the glare bother us?’ ‘can you hear what I’m thinking …?’ His sequences shimmer on the edge of the surreal, scattering the suggestions of a symbolic plenitude pertains to a life lived with a dexterous consciousness of the necessity of transience. This is the world in its multiple thing-ness, with no gratuitous attitudinizing.
Selected poems
by Michael Palmer
Hello Gozo, here we are,
the spinning world, has
it come this far?
Hammering things, speeching them,
nailing the anthrax
to its copper plate,
matching the object to its name,
the star to its chart.
(The sirens, the howling machines,
are part of the music it seems
just now, and helices of smoke
engulf the astonished eye;
and then our keening selves, Gozo,
whirled between voice and echo.)
So few and so many,
have we come this far?
Sluicing ink onto snow?
I’m tired, Gozo,
tired of the us/not us,
of the factories of blood,
tired of the multiplying suns
and tired of colliding with
the words as they appear
without so much as a “by your leave,”
without so much as a greeting.
The more suns the more dark –
is it not always so –
and in the gathering dark
Ghostly Tall and Ghostly Small
making their small talk
as they pause and they walk
on a path of stones,
as they walk and walk,
skeining their tales,
testing the dust,
higher up they walk –
there’s a city below,
pinpoints of light –
high up they walk,
flicking dianthus, mountain berries,
turk’s-caps with their sticks.
Can you hear me? asks Tall.
Do you hear me? asks Small.
Questions pursuing question.
And they set out their lamp
a mid the stones.
for Yoshimasu Gozo
From Company of Moths, by Michael Palmer
Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 by Michael Palmer
Dream of a Language that Speaks
So the promise of happiness?
he asked a frog
then swallowed the frog
And the buzz of memory?
he asked the page
before lighting the page
And by night the sliding stars
beyond the night itself
Copyright © 2005, Michael Palmer, The Company of Moths, New Directions Publishing
So
Soon the present will arrive
at the end of its long voyage
from the Future-Past to Now
weary of the endless nights in cheap motels
in distant nebulae
Will the usual host
of politicians and celebrities
show up for the occasion
or will they huddle out of sight
in confusion and fear
Copyright © 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005 by Michael Palmer