[Wgcp-whc] WG/Poetics--minutes 10/29 (Palmer)

[richard.deming at yale.edu]

11/5/04


Dear Friends,

The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics met on Friday, 
October 29, to discuss a selection of Michael Palmer’s work from his 
selected poems The Lion Bridge, Poems 1972-1995.  The poems were drawn 
from the earlier volume, Notes for Echo Lake, published in 1984.

The discussion was preliminary in that the group spent time locating 
Palmer’s work in regards to the Language Poets with whom he is often 
associated.  Indeed, longtime members of the group will be familiar 
with the problem of whether or not Language poetry is a general or 
local classification.  While Language poetry began appearing in the 
early 70s in the form of a network of fugitive journals such as This, 
Hills, and A Hundred Posters, and small presses such as The Figures and 
Tuumba Press, its apotheosis might be said to have occurred in the 
influential journal edited by Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews known 
as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which first appeared in 1978.  In that journal, 
various poets connected both directly and indirectly with the movement 
presented essays and discussions about poetics, with a particular 
emphasis on the political register of poetry. In the introduction to 
The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, an anthology collecting the run of the 
magazine, Andrews and Bernstein explain that their intent in editing 
the journal was to create a forum that “emphasized a spectrum of 
writing that placed its attention on language and ways of making 
meaning, that takes for granted neither vocabulary, grammar, process, 
shape, syntax, program, or subject matter” (ix).  Although Palmer did 
periodically publish in the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, and although he 
also studied at Harvard in the 1970s as did a number of the key names 
in the Language movement and was (and remains friends with these other 
poets), some of the group members saw Palmer as also being distinct in 
that he seemed less invested in conscious Marxist critique or and his 
poetry less overtly informed by critical theory of the Frankfort School 
variety.  At the same time, there is no overlooking the profound 
influence philosophy has had on his work, and traces of Wittgenstein, 
Heidegger, and others are evident in the work at the level of allusion 
and even quotation.  It may be, the, that the difference between Palmer 
and the language poets may be the difference between philosophy and 
critical theory.  

The question did arise as to what are the aesthetic investments that 
poetry like Palmer’s might reflects and how does one establish the 
means of reflection.  What are the governing compositional (and thus 
formal) criteria?  Some members suggested that the poems’ discursivity 
discovers its own internal logic as its method of cohesion 
and “ongoingness.” Indeed, many pointed to the parataxis and 
repetitions as the way that the poetry both creates intellectual, 
tonal, and sonic textures that reveal disjunctions and suture together 
the fragments and aphoristic tendencies of the lines—some of which are 
prose lines and some of which are verse, all within a single sequence. 
Along the way, various forebears of Palmer’s were identified, including 
Robert Duncan, Louis Zukofsky, and Gertrude Stein.  This may suggest 
how Palmer serves as a kind of link between the New American Poetry 
(usually identified by the famous anthology of the same name edited by 
Donald Allen in the 1960s, which included amongst others Charles Olson, 
Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov) and the Language poets 
(which usually is thought to include along with Bernstein and Andrews, 
Barrett Watten, Ron Silliman, Lyn Heijinian, Bob Perlman, Robert 
Grenier, and others).  The former group privileged voice (especially in 
Olson’s idea as a the breath as a compositional unit) whereas the 
latter sought to deconstruct the idea of presence in poetic 
composition, focusing instead on the materiality of language.  

There was also serious discussion of what the work adds up to.  Some 
saw Palmer’s simultaneous positing and negating of claims as making the 
work disingenuous or at least took away the possibility for any claims 
that might cohere—and thus maintain a meaningfulness.  Does the 
poetry’s destabilizing of itself (both in terms of form and content) 
render the work more than simply opaque but profoundly meaningless? Or 
does the poetry both open up the poem to larger spectrum of 
meaningfulness as it questions both the model of lyric poetry as the 
site for a cohesive subjectivity or as a kind enactment of stable, 
authentic truths?  Or do these paradoxes dismantle overdetermined, 
systematic thought clearing the way for a kind of silence to speak.  In 
short, the very central questions of what poetry does—culturally, 
spiritually, affectively, and philosophically are confronted in reading 
Palmer’s poems, and how one resolves those issues speaks to the range 
of the reader’s own investments.

The group decided that since Palmer is reading Weds at 4 at the 
Beinecke Library, we would carry the discussion over to our next 
meeting to see how the reading might inform way we might respond to the 
poems.  Anyone wishing to join the conversation may pick up photocopies 
of the reading at the Whitney Humanities Center. We meet again on 
Friday, November 12 to resume our discussion of Palmer's work.


“The Working Group in Contemporary Poetry and Poetics met every other 
Friday at 1:45 PM in room 116 at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale 
University to discuss problems and issues of contemporary poetry within 
international alternative and /or avant-garde traditions of lyric 
poetry. All are welcome to attend.”  

---R. Deming, group secretary