I heard Michael Palmer read back when I was studying at Michigan. Perhaps I wasn’t ready for him then (that happens, that writers speak to you at different points in your life, even certain books speak to you differently when you read them again at another time, in another space, at another place in your life). At that time I couldn’t get into him, but now, I just read Company of Moths and was like, wait, this is quite good–that first section “Stone” made me read and reread every poem before I could go on.
So now I’m giving The Promises of Glass another go–I started to read it back then but couldn’t get past poem one. But now, having tasted his syntax and breaks…well, so far, so good.
I knew I was going to like this book just from the cover: three moth-eaten holes that expose the white space beneath what looks like human skin just visible around the edge where the black cover is also eaten away. They almost look like cigarette burn marks, and the Jackson Pollack-like white strings of paint (if they are paint) look like smoke (if they are not smoke).
What I appreciate here is Palmer’s innovative syntax coupled with his line breaks, how the two in tandem really slow you down at times and make you re-read lines until that “a-ha” moment of pleasure that comes in understanding the sense. And his music is wonderful. (I know, imagine! Contemporary poetry that has music and isn’t afraid of its lyricism!) It’s weird, I know he’s supposedly “experimental” however you want to define that (because his punctuation is simplified? I’d need to see the larger body of his work to determine how that word “experimental” is being deployed), but through the experimentation his work maintains an ear-pleasing lyricism, that, coupled with the complex syntax and the wit with which he approaches words and their meaning, satisfies my expectations of a certain type of good poetry and makes me want to read more. And his genuine use of the posed question in his verse, and not as a ploy or in a rhetorical manner, but as a genuine investigation, a genuine investigative impulse, that recording of process, the mind’s process, the poem an act of thought, of thinking. Yes, yes, yes.