MICHAEL PALMER:
THE LION BRIDGE: SELECTED POEMS
1972-1995
The Lion Bridge
brackets the coming
of maturity of a poet
whose vision and voice
were always
extraordinarily self-possessed,
ironic for a poet who so
radically
de-centers identity, and this volume
generously allows readers
to
follow that path.
Because
each
of Michael Palmer's poetry collections is so clearly and carefully
designed
as a book, a self-referential unit, it is easy to overlook the extent
to
which his entire corpus is an inter-linked network. Tom Lux, who
published Palmer's first chapbook, Plan of the City of O, for
his
Barn Dream Press in 1971, recalls that even then the book "was
complete,
a fully realized plan." But in a 1990 interview, Palmer told me,
"I have no romance of the book ÷ or do I?" This is not as
contradictory
as it sounds. Like many of the poets who have been influential
for
him (Duncan, Creeley), Palmer has created a series of books that are
individual
projects with different surface aims and textures, but form an
integrated
network. In 1997, with his early collections out of print or in
distributors'
hands, Palmer was given the opportunity to compile a selected
poems.
This moment provided the chance to recuperate the large body of
virtually
unavailable poems for readers who may have discovered Palmer's work
with Sun
or At Passages. But more than just compiling
representative
poems from each of his five earlier full-length collections, Palmer
felt
that his task was equally to address the relationship among
books.
This meant demonstrating the continuities as well as deliberate
discontinuities
among them, which is one of the propelling forces behind Palmer's
aesthetic
ethos.
Palmer
wrote in a 1990 letter, "The question of the development of the work is
obviously complicated. I have always worked against myself,
crab-like
or Sartre-like, yet the work is undoubtedly also evolutionary, at least
if we can avoid some of the noxious fumes this term exudes. The
trick
I suppose will be to avoid a too linear sense of evolution." He
was
referring to the structure that I might employ in my doctoral
dissertation
on his work; yet the same 
principle
applied six years later, as he began to compile the book which would
represent
twenty years of his writing. Palmer's sole agreement with his
frequent
collaborator, the choreographer Margaret Jenkins, is never to repeat
anything
they've done before. In the same spirit, each of his collections
deliberately sets out in some way to undo the terrain of its
predecessor.
Watching what Palmer does from one collection to the next provides
useful
insight into what he felt, retrospectively, was the focus of each book
÷ we learn what he thinks he did by seeing what he refuses to do
next.
On the other hand, often paradoxically, Palmer is committed to being
receptive
to whatever "arrives" and "insists itself." As a result, there
are
clearly ongoing themes and forms that he cannot shake, try as he might
and does. So, we watch Palmer's poetic evolution as a double
helix,
of progressions up and out, while certain strands weave insistently
throughout
the figure of his work. It was critical to represent that pattern
of "echo and erasure" in the selections made for The Lion Bridge:
Selected
Poems 1972-1995.
Palmer
certainly intended this volume to serve as a resource for readers who
wished
to have access to significant and representative poems from each of his
books. But he was also interested in taking the opportunity to
reassess
his earliest work, feeling that he'd lost touch with poems that were
now
twenty years old. Because Palmer works to a great extent "in the
book" which he is immediately writing, he develops a curious distance
from
previous work. Partly this is deliberate: his greatest interest
always
focuses on current work. Even in the rather nonchalant handling
of
his own archival materials, he prefers not to be his own living
undertaker.
His self-reflectiveness typically addresses the current moment,
although Sun
did represent a project where he deliberately chose to look back over
his
"career" (my word, not his) as well as the century as a whole. In
compiling The Lion Bridge, Palmer had the chance to consider
whether
certain poems still worked for him and for readers, and how they
related
to more recent writing that he experienced in a fresher way. As a
result, the volume leaves out some poems that Palmer essentially viewed
as experiments, which no longer held his interest or didn't seem to
relate
sufficiently to later work. Chiefly among these exclusions,
perhaps,
is the title series from The Circular Gates, modelled after
Frank
Stella's "Protractor Series." He decided to leave out "The
Circular
Gates" partly due to length limitations, but also because it was such a
strategized and isolated undertaking. As his wife Cathy recalls,
using this series of geometrical and conceptual paintings as a
compositional
model was a breakthrough for him at the time; Palmer would agree.
But ultimately, he felt that the value of this particular poetry series
did not justify the space it would take.
The
volume
holds a generous representation of earlier poems that were the most
difficult
to access, including a large selection from the out of print books: Blake's
Newton (1972), The Circular Gates (1974), and Without
Music
(1977). Initially concerned that the Selected represented
the early work too heavily, precisely the writing about which he felt
most
uncertain, he finally decided to allow the early work to remain.
It is greatly to our benefit to experience the full range of his
development.
The collections are unique, and each of a piece: the elegant play of
silent
spaces in Without Music counterpoints the social and
performative
character of First Figure; the "insane clarity" of the
cacophonic
voices in Sun resonates against the hyper-linguistic
autobiography
of Notes for Echo Lake. Yet the development from book to
book
is indeed evolutionary, and a chronological selection of writing from
each
volume allows the correspondences to emerge in powerful relief: "The
stirrings
are the same and different / and secretly the same." ("The Library Is
Burning,"
Eighth Symmetrical Poem)
Perhaps
most of all in The Lion Bridge, we see the presence and
successive
polishings of an immediately identifiable style and voice. It is
striking to see the dominance of poems in series. In spite of the
unitary quality of each of his collections, we see more clearly than
ever
that they are linked into an intricate and thoughtfully articulated
whole.
From the time of Blake's Newton, Palmer's work is seen, in
reverse
or progressive chronology, as a single project: we find installments of
the prose series; the title series or sequences which appear in most of
his collections; symmetrical poems; paired poems; and internal
portfolios
under one title. These are just the formal manifestations of
projects
that are continuous in language, ethos, theme and other poetic
markers.
The overall project is rife with measurement, systems, qualification
(mostly
failures, of course, but summoned nonetheless). We see that
Palmer
is overwhelmingly concerned with poetry that questions and examines its
own language and structure. Exploration of literary form dates
back
to his earliest collections. As we watch the progression in The
Lion Bridge, we find "logics," numbered "symmetrical poems" (which
Palmer describes as arriving with "a certain formal tone ÷ once
I'm into
one, I just say uh-oh, it's one of those"), letters, sonnets, song,
series,
façades, disclosures, a project, and a theory. Poems have
duplicated names, and other poems are carefully titled "Untitled" (some
of which have differentiating subtitles). The volume begins with
"Its Form" and closes with "autobiography," both of which are dominant
themes throughout. Palmer's fascination with structure and system
are partly expressed in his categorization of his poems, which is often
a gesture of anti-naming or anti-categorization (when two poems or more
have the same name, questions are being raised about the purpose and
effectiveness
of naming itself. The process becomes a joke, as in the case of
Palmer
himself referring to his two "Sun" poems as "Sun" and "Son of 'Sun.'")
There is
the motif of approximation, the not-quite, what one might even refer to
as something like "the ineffable," if properly stripped of theological
(though not spiritual) overtones. This is linked to expressions
of
uncertainty. Political witness ÷ to the debacle of the
20th century
÷ is another dominant focus of attention. The first three
volumes
represented in The Lion Bridge were written when Palmer was in
his
late twenties and early thirties, with Vietnam very much a presence,
along
with distant memories of World War II as discussed by his
Italian-American
family. Other atrocities, from the dismantling of Russia to
Tienanmen
Square, are documented throughout. Most moving, and perhaps
ultimately
indicative of the Palmer voice, is the wrenching stutter of
articulation.
He begins his project in the seventies with "This difficult but not
impossible"
("for," The Circular Gates), which evolves into repeated echoes
asking "whose voice is this?", finally devolving into the literal
stutter
of later poems (the "Letters to Zanzotto," "Untitled [April
'91]").
Fragmentary names (B, E, A) deteriorate into names forgotten entirely
""what's-his-name,"
a poem "called I forget"). Palmer frequently tells us what there
isn't (no more dust, no more clouds, no body, no unfoldings, as in "The
Library Is Burning"). But what keeps this from being a poetry of
negativity (as he sometimes worries) is the effort and pathos in utter
Beckettian form of continuing to record the lack of memory, the failure
of language, our inability to speak or understand, to know whose voice
is speaking at all.
In
some
ways, The Lion Bridge brackets the coming to maturity of a poet
whose vision and voice were always extraordinarily self-possessed,
ironic
for a poet who so radically de-centers identity, and this volume
generously
allows readers to follow that path. From the time of Blake's
Newton,
Palmer has included the voices of other artists and writers in his
work,
in acts of dialogue and homage: "I tend to invoke presiding spirits in
a semi-conscious attempt to invoke a constellation of voices . . .
asking
them to inform and preside over the poem being written with them and
their
influence in mind" (Interview, 1992). This Selected Poems
allows us to fully recognize the extent to which Palmer's literary
conversation
and touchstones involve writers, philosophers and artists (as well as
an
assortment of in-house schizophrenics such as Judge Schreber and case
studies
from Géza Róheim), and other denizens. As we see
the
presence of these voices over an extended period of time, it heightens
the sense of pattern and continuity in Palmer's work, as well as his
exceptional
technical craftsmanship.
At
Passages,
begun when Palmer turned fifty, was described by him as having "a
curiously
elegiac tone," especially curious since several of the poets addressed
were and are still living. But a number of poems written during
this
transitional period in Palmer's life were dedicated to the dead, and
considered
the concept of "passage" in a variety of permutations, for poetic roots
and how those influences had converged to influence his writing in the
present. We can examine the question of influence through the
other
end of the telescope by investigating early collections such as Blake's
Newton or The Circular Gates. The early volumes help
us
understand how and why Palmer first began to seek out and build his
"community
of outsiders" (Interview, 1990). But this is an open community,
and The
Lion Bridge offers passage.
Palmer, Michael. The
Lion Bridge.
New York, NY: New Directions, 1998. ISBN:
0-811-21383-8
$18.05
© by Lauri Ramey
