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
