Michael Palmer was born in New York City in 1943.

Palmer is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Thread (New Directions, 2011); Company of Moths (New Directions, 2005), which was shortlisted for the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize; The Promises of Glass (2000); The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 (1998); Sun (1988); First Figure (1984); Without Music (1977); The Circular Gates (1974); and Blake’s Newton (1972). He is also the author of a prose work, The Danish Notebook (Avec Books, 1999).

Palmer’s exploratory work confronts notions of representation and habits of language, and also seeks to examine the space through which poetry acts. Though critics have noted the influence of Paul Celan, Samuel Beckett, Surrealism, and philosophical and linguistic theory in his poetry, Palmer’s work continues to evade categorization.

Michael Palmer’s honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and he was awarded the 2006 Wallace Stevens Award. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in San Francisco.

PEN: It can be said that you are the true “bastion” of literature and poetry, mastering the expression through word and art. Do you believe in the impact of artists’ loud engagement in social activism?

MP: A complicated question, and obviously one that has been debated virtually since the origins of the arts in organized society, and one that depends greatly on specific historical moment and place. Let us say that “loud engagement” is often part of the picture, occasionally effective, often silenced, and often effective, ironically, by virtue of its suppression. We must also not underestimate the power of quiet refusal or resistance, the silences that are also part of poetry’s measures, and that are anything but passive. Does poetry make anything happen? Auden grieved that it didn’t, but it was and is something happening among other things happening. We must insist on its good faith when it calls out for justice and the truths of the creative imagination. As to the arts in the United States, and poetry in particular in our wildly materialistic society, we must always ask: Is anyone listening? Is anyone responding? In this case, both yes and no are correct answers. That is, we dwell in paradox, which is always interesting, even if it leaves us dwelling as well in uncertainty. “Instrumental Poetry,” poetry designed to directly effect change, can sometimes produce results, but it also risks succumbing to that debased language of power it aims to challenge. What I’m struggling to say is that it can mimic all too well that very discourse it hopes to counter, mutate into agit-prop, and thus be coopted and neutralized.

PEN: What are the artistic forms and mediums that you work with, and how do you choose what to channel through them? Is it the message that defines the form, or rather the purpose?

MP: I don’t work with preordained forms. Rather, I allow the form to announce itself as I converse with the poem about its desires, or our shared desires, and the apparent necessities of expression. At the same time, I work in an echo chamber where formal measures and historical forms come forward, announce themselves, and enter the picture. Thus my “Little Elegies for Sister Satan” (to appear in my next book), converse with the various forms of elegy we receive from classical letters, yet diverge to find their own voicings and purpose and moment. I imagine them as polyvocal responses to the madness of our time, the rampant, corrupt authoritarianism, and the schizo-ravings of those in power. I suppose they contain an element of satire, and certainly of absurdism as inspired by the Russian absurdist, or oberiu poets and prose writers, as well as many others before them in that noble tradition. (You can also find variations on the sonnet form throughout my work, to cite only one other instance.) What interests me is “active form,” form that informs the work under hand and guides it along its path toward some opening, some awareness of things as they are and things as they might become.

As to the various media in which I work, I’ve collaborated extensively with composers, improvising musicians, visual artists and of course the choreographer Margaret Jenkins and her dancers, an association of well over forty years. In each instance I find myself challenged to overcome habits of making and formal expression. When one is truly collaborating, the resultant work occurs somewhere in the space in between each of the participants, as the result of a creative conversation among multiple voices. One must give up a certain degree of control and begin to work in a space not entirely one’s own, a space unforeseen so to speak, though this is somewhat true as well of making poetry in the traditional manner. So, one arrives at a site that is at once familiar and unknown. If the chemistry is right, then the experience can be liberating.

PEN: Would you agree with the notion that the art expressed in language is political by its nature?

MP: No, I would not. Its “nature,” if we are to call it that, is much more multi-dimensional, born of and shaped by a reality more diverse and complex than the political. Granted, our language for the most part is that of the polis, of the historical and contemporary forces that shape our means of communication and exchange and lie at the heart of the classical city-state. However, there is always an outside, an elsewhere or place of the other, to which much poetry aspires, whether it be mystical, or the lyric poetry of desire, or the poetry of defiance (not only political defiance) as embodied let’s say by Artaud among others. And part of its desire is to be undefinable, outside the limits, the container or vessel that the political represents, while being capable of a conversation with the political and of intervention in the political. Remember that poetry is also born of and shaped by the infans, the prelinguistic and the unsayable, that continue to inform our imaginations and our means of representation, and that the political attempts to suppress or at least contain. Poetry seeks to assert the ungovernable.

PEN: Informational technologies, unlimited access to the internet and social media made self-expression as easy and welcome as ever. How do you think this process influences the content that is created in the world today?

MP: I remember, decades ago, a moment at a futurology conference in Aspen, Colorado as I tried to engage Steve Jobs in a conversation about the difference between data and information. It was hard to discern whether he was uninterested or simply uncomprehending. At the time, he was pitching his new Lisa computer with the pattern of a used car salesman. It turned out to be junk of course, as did most of the technological and social prognostications at the conference. The brightest light afforded by the series of events came from a solo piano improvisation by the great South African musician and composer Dollar Brand, or Abdullah Ibrahim, who created an atemporal conversation of transcendent lucidity among various cultural worlds and musical styles. What the new, so-called unlimited internet access now afforded us adds to this moment of universal artistic expression I cannot say. I am composing this, of course, on my Apple computer and will soon be transmitting it to dear friends in Tbilisi, Georgia by means of the Internet. I do gratefully and all too conveniently search for things on line, but I am also aware how impoverished that search can be in contrast with the discoveries made by finding your way through books and the library shelves, the treasured archives, where chance discoveries can so reward your labor, and where the unexpected presents itself as a gift. Perhaps not so different from the information a flaneur [1]absorbs on his or her random path through the city, or indeed on that path Dante writes of, where the straight way is lost.

PEN: (referring to the previous question) How do you think this process influences the recipient and public?

MP: I hope we will all remain skeptical, and extremely wary, of any utopian projections continually emerging from the new capital of capital, Silicon Valley, due south of my home in San Francisco. As I write this, the forces of darkness and of light seem to be engaged in a struggle for control of the new technologies, and I would be the last person to presume to know what the outcome will be. As recipients, we must resist uncritical absorption and passivity, but this has always been true, whatever the medium, and whatever authority the hierophants cloak themselves in, technological or otherwise.

PEN: The world states that have formed and developed under the democratic principles in the recent decades, seem to be facing the value crisis. As a result, citizens divide and support opposing, at times radical forces. Do you think there is a connection, or a big reason behind this?

MP: Unfortunately, we in the United States, and elsewhere, are presently learning (or relearning) the painful lesson that the establishment of a democracy in no way guarantees a just and well-functioning society. Truth, decency and human tolerance are easily undermined, conditions permitting. Corruption, if not inevitable, is virtually unavoidable, and without a functional justice system (now under assault by Trump and his flunkies) it can all too easily coopt positions of power in the political, cultural and social realms. The goal of Trump and those like him is to sow division, disharmony and mistrust, and to devalue even the possibility of truth. He lies (over 16,000 lies or often grossly misleading claims responsibly documented to date) with apparent impunity, and eventually people become resigned to the impossibility of objective truth, just as Hannah Arendt notes in her essay, “Truth and Politics.”

PEN: There is a clear and strongly expressed discontent among the representatives of almost every creative field in the US regarding president Trump. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, even the legitimacy of his presidency became questionable. Does his presence in the White House cause apathy in the society, or is it slowly becoming a wake-up call?

MP: I have witnessed some degree of despair and some hopelessness, which can easily lead to depression and apathy, and hence passivity. Far more often though, in the artistic circles of which I’m speaking, people have expressed outrage and the need to resist, the need to counter the forces of darkness by whatever means of enlightenment possible. Again, as above, this does not simply mean making “political” work. It means continuing to follow the path or multiple paths of artistic exploration and commitment. It means establishing an alternative conversation and community to that offered by the dictatorial and demagogic voices in power.

Trump is a hollow man, a pathetic, emotionally disabled sociopath and racketeer, a pathological liar and a virulent racist. (Is that enough?) Since he came fully into the public eye, assaulting minorities, (assaulting the Other), assaulting the arts and freedom of expression, assaulting truth by any means available, and lest we forget, assaulting women, I’ve noticed how his body has begun to swell ominously as he attempts to engorge all the evils of this world. (I’m reminded of Goya’s “Saturn Swallowing his Son” or Jabba the Hutt[2] on his throne, belching and ingesting live creatures.) He subsists on a calculated diet of evil. At the same time, he is also growing hollower and hollower. Soon I like to think he will explode like a balloon with nothing but gas inside. If not, perhaps our republic will melt away into the air, as so many have before.

PEN: There’s always a threat to common and social good, if the head of state is incompetent, sometimes even wrongful. Whereas in some cases this affects only internal affairs, in case of the countries of dominant economies, the impact can be much more dramatic. How do you think the precedent of Trump’s presidency can change the narrative of “political probability” in the world (if anyhow)?

MP: We will see what comes about. Let us not forget that the United States, at least since Vietnam, but also going back to nascent imperial ambitions in the Nineteenth Century, has often been a bad actor on the international stage, betraying the ideals of the founders of the republic (ideals in themselves profoundly compromised and eternally stained by the evils of slavery built in to our Constitution). Not all that long after the establishment of the nation, Walt Whitman and the transcendentalist philosophers and artists bewailed what they saw as the results of unfettered capitalism and expansionism. The current Racketeer-in-Chief, that is Trump, is merely a poisonous expression of these worst impulses. He is enamored of anti-democratic dictators and demagogues around the world, and like them is eager to suppress freedom of the press, free expression, and the circulation of the arts, for which he openly expresses contempt. Can he change the narrative? I doubt that in his subliterate ignorance he knows what the word means. Nonetheless, tout est possible, hélas.[3]

PEN: What, in your opinion, is the instrument, or the ‘counter-speech’ that can be used against politicians’ stream of hate speech on social media?

MP: We know that the solitary voice, however moving and righteous, is insufficient in itself. Perhaps this is a good moment to salute PEN International in its various efforts to free political and artistic prisoners, to protect freedom of expression wherever it is endangered, and act as a kind of sentinel. As in the struggle against climate change (which Trump calls “a hoax”), we must create a community of differences in order to effectively resist and undermine the forces of destruction. In other words, it is urgent to foster “voice multipliers” and support those honorable ones that already exist. I read in today’s New York Times that the remarkable Greta Thunberg has received a major monetary award from the Swedish Rightlivelihood Foundation, and that she will use the money to create her own foundation to support ecological and social sustainability.

PEN: The accessibility of public platforms made it easy for Trump-like personas to freely express and reach out to many susceptible, or marginal and vulnerable groups. Even though we cannot deny the harm these actions cause, they are also self-expository. Do you think it is expected for these personas to eradicate selves and own images, or we shouldn’t count on the common sense of the public majority?

MP: I certainly don’t think we can count complacently on the common sense of the majority, or so-called common sense itself, which is too often a mask for, or rationalization of, destructive behavior. We must use whatever means are at hand to disseminate informed opinion and accurate information, and to support whatever means exist to further education and creative and progressive thought. We must confront dictatorial speech whenever and wherever necessary, but I suppose such a conclusion is all too obvious. It is the implementation that is at once difficult and utterly necessary, so we must commit our trust and our efforts to the possible.

 

"Writers about Social and Political Problems" is a project of PEN Georgia. Our partner is Writers' House Of Georgia.