Interviews
Company
An Interview with Michael Palmer
Internet Publication
and Reading
Lawrence Revard: I wanted to start out asking a question about the internet […] since we’re an internet journal. In looking at your early books, The Circular Gates and Without Music, I noticed the beauty of the book itself. What I wanted ask you about, was… There’s been a lot of changes in the way that publication happens now—
Michael Palmer: Sure.
LR: —the internet is playing a more important role, there [are] a lot of conversations in blogs going on… Bearing this in mind, how do you see your place in this new realm of publicity? Is there a change in the way you’re seeing the book conceived itself?
MP: Yeah, that’s an interesting area of speculation which we’ve all been running over in our minds for a long period of time. There’s certainly satisfactions about, let’s say, first of all, publishing online, and the sense of the availability to people—which is astonishing. So it has changed the field of readership in fairly dramatic ways. Certain kinds of online publication—for example, I did an introduction to Robert Duncan’s republishing of his last poems, Ground Work. I said to New Directions, the publisher: We should place this somewhere just to have some publicity for the publishing of the book, of Robert’s book. Well, it was late in the process and no paper magazine [could help]… Art Forum, for example, has a wonderful literary supplement that they were interested, but they didn’t have time before the book came out. So we placed it with a journal called Jacket online. Jacket has—I don’t know—a hundred thousand readers a month, or something like that. And so it had a lovely function in that regard. At the same time, I missed having print version, but of course it came out in the book. It has changed—just at a commercial level—it has changed people’s access to small press materials. To be able to order them, you know—of course, then bookstores are disappearing, too, but… It used to be that you would go to, oh, I don’t know, Cleveland or Wichita, or something, to give a reading, and people said, “How do I get these books? How do I even find out they exist?” Nowadays anybody with a certain amount of curiosity can find out what you’ve done in that respect, where things are available. And it’s been an astonishing thing for small presses because they couldn’t afford the kind of distribution or publicity that it would take otherwise. So, it’s changed the profile of that.
As far as reading things online, it doesn’t give me much pleasure. And I prefer text. And I think they will find a certain mutuality over time. The book is not going to go away, as far as I can tell. You may have instant publishing. You may not have books so much… books that aren’t the best seller type—commercial books--they may have to at some point be simply instantly published, as someone requires a copy. You know, that’s already beginning––
LR: One thing I wanted to follow up on there. In The Circular Gates and Without Music there’s a lot of play with continuity and discontinuity in the work. And it’s really necessary to read the whole work in order to get that.
MP: Yeah.
LR: And that’s very much a product of the book.
MP: Yep.
LR: Like you say, you don’t get as much pleasure out of reading online.
MP: No.
LR: Do you think there’s going to be any way to get around that? Are you concerned about the conceptual usefulness of the book to poetry in terms of the way it’s now having to compete with the financial viability of online publication?
MP: Well, poetry, as far as being able to compete, has never been able to compete with anything. [laughter] So, it survives anyway. And it won’t be able to compete with technology, but it will go on in its own particular way. And there will be a certain audience that is generated by technology that may want to go to the book itself. Because the luxury of the book, of being able to go back and forth, is not equivalent to pushing a button and going back and going forward. It may be that as the electronic book becomes more sophisticated than it is right now, we’ll have the luxury of downloading a library into a little facsimile of a book and reading that way. And those inevitably may more and more come to approximate the book. I’m all for that because I can’t travel with a hundred books like I’d like to, you know, to Paris or something like that. And I think that has a great use. Also for reference works. I live in a small house with ten thousand books, you know, and I’d love to be able to get rid of some of them and just access them online for information.
But I find other curiosities about it. For example, when I do teach (from time to time) creative writing now, a lot of the kids are kind of going on line to get particular algorithms for composition. And then they come up with something that’s kind of weird and kind of interesting in a jazzy way. But it’s just a construction. What they don’t realize [is that] in doing that, and then having a kind of mechanistic play with language, they can come up with something strange, but not with something deep necessarily. And so that’s something that has a something to do with a kind of maturing relationship to technology. It’s like the early days of electronic music when a lot of people thought, “Oh, every sound I make here is weird, therefore interesting.” But it soon became clear that everyone else was making the same weird sounds, and they quickly became boring. And then the great composers who worked in the electronic medium produced great music. But the others produced nothing. And I think there is a little bit of the same relationship to that sort of access. At the same time, I was coming here earlier—and I’m giving this talk next week—and one little section of the talk involves Catullus, one particular song of his that was a translation of Sappho. And I was looking through my translations (and they’re all terrible) of the Catullus. And so I went online, and I just found this astonishing—I put in “Catullus Carmina 51” into Firefox [laughs]—and I came up with this unbelievable, beautiful scholarship, Latin translations were available, etc. etc. It was a marvel. And so even with my ten thousand books, I couldn’t have had that at hand. It was terrific.
“Company”
Carter Smith: [...My question is] specifically about Company of Moths and the kind of reading that seems to inform that.
MP: Yes.
CS: The “company” that you describe being there—I count Richter, Celan (if I read you correctly), Benjamin, Drummond de Andrade—
MP: Manuel Bandeira
CS: Right. I think of “company” as a very provocative word to use there. I wonder if you could speak a bit about—particularly given your interest in other art forms—the way that the lyric might be disposed to provide a kind of company?
MP: Sure. First of all, it provides a certain… you are in the company of others across time. When I am writing—principally in the lyric mode, though I go elsewhere—you feel the resonance of Dante, and you feel the resonance of the poets of Provence, and you feel the resonance of the great poets of the English Renaissance, variously, as you’re working. It’s almost as if you’re having a kind of conversation, including with contemporaries whom I admire, both in the United States and in other cultures. In all the solitariness of working, you feel very generously in that company of others. And one of the reasons, of course, that dance has always been a sort of second art that I’ve been involved with for several decades through the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company in our various collaborations is the notion of company. You have a company of dancers, and in her case it’s a true company in that the works are made collaboratively. None of her dancers are not creative. They all have a vast creative intelligence, and so it’s an ensemble composition in a sense. And for me, in a funny way, that reflects the possibilities of poetry, but in an active, performative way. So, they are always in conversation. And I think that the lyric, we think of it as a single voice, but it’s dialogic, always. There’s always an other. When the book is open, the other is there. You start out as the first reader and there’s an other as you write it, too. Yourself and your other— [laughs] or others. So, it’s not this solitary object. As soon as it’s accessed, if we’re lucky enough to have someone wanting to read the work, it’s in company. And it provokes company. It’s a conversation.
CS: […]You know there’s the short work of Beckett’s called Company that starts out with a person—you say dialogic—a person not knowing whether to believe the voice that’s speaking to him as he’s lying flat on his back in the dark.
MP: Oh, Beckett! The poets claimed Beckett right away. [laughter] Less probably for his poetry, which is interesting enough—because he’s such a great mind and a great writer—but more for the poetics of the theater and the novels, too. No question it’s the same issues. I just wish we could all be as hilarious in the grimness of it all.
Alex Quinlan: To stay with Company of Moths a little bit if that’s all right, you’ve said previously that you feel that book is formally more consistent than some of your earlier work.
MP: I suppose so, yeah. We were talking yesterday about the frequency of the couplet form, for example. So, I think it is. It focuses more on particular aspects of, if you will, lyric agency and lyric signification than some of the others which wander more into different territories.
AQ: […] It seems that, while maybe Company of Moths—at least presently—is the culmination of this exploration of the couplet in your work, it’s been a long journey. Looking back on your work as far as a book like First Figure, “The Theory of the Flower” makes use of couplets in a similar way. I’m wondering if you can speak to the process of coming towards this really durable and elegant—in the mathematical sense—form that you seem to use so well.
MP: Well, you find forms that, for some reason—not necessarily that you’re comfortable with them, because you don’t become comfortable with them—seem endlessly flexible and endlessly generative. And sometimes that’s for a period of time in your work and then you move on. For example, I’m conscious of the fact that I want to explore again other prosodic and formal areas at this point. And I do in the new book to some degree. But, having to do with the nature of the play between logic and illogic and so on in my work, the play of the paradox, things like that are characteristic of the poetics that…That form pretty graphically allows you to engage with the mind’s movement in that way. So it continues to be generative in that regard, though I just wrote a poem in tercets. [laughter]
Politics
LR: […] In one of your early works, Without Music, you refer to the “rats in the pentagon.” And you have similarly energetic language of politics in there, at least you seem to be addressing [politics] very directly. And in the more recent, “Your Diamond Shoe,” in Company of Moths, you also have very direct language, although perhaps a different context. How do you manage the desire to address, directly or indirectly, the current political climate?
MP: Well, I think… speaking of rats, my editor pointed out that rats have become increasingly present in my work since the Bush years [laughter]. Rodents in the garden and things like that! I don’t write instrumental political poetry or harangue or anything like that, nor do I think that’s the best means for activating the political consciousness. But naturally we are in the polis, the city, we hope to be responsible citizens, and we hope to propose poetry in its resistance to the worst of the laws of state and the commands of state. Since the beginning, poetry has celebrated and lamented warfare, as has theater—Aeschylus, and others. Lamented the folly of leadership, the ignorance, and the slaughter. But it does it often by a kind of indirection or allegory or what-have-you. So that the danger of instrumental political poetry or harangue is that you end up absorbed into the very language of power that you are in resistance to. So I have always felt that the profoundly political gesture of poetry was in the nature of its relation to language itself and to poetic truth—
LR: That’s why you titled—in Without Music, I believe—it’s—“On the Way to Language” is the title of the poem which has “rats in the pentagon”—and that’s the Heidegger book, of course.
MP: That’s right. That’s right.
LR: So… putting it in that context, and trying to manage the indirection in that way?
MP: I suppose so… I mean, of course, Heidegger was not very much the way to my poetic truth, as it turns out. I mean, for all his fascination, even the contemporary philosophers who have used Heidegger, sometimes to good effect, and the poets who have been fascinated (such as George Oppen) by his work because of its profound relationship to poetry… which, ah… Paul Celan, one of the great ironies, is here we have the philosopher who was undeniably in a particular way a Nazi philosopher whose work was of the greatest importance to a Holocaust survivor, one of the great post-holocaust poets. So you have multiple ironies of course, always, in your sources. So I have always treated Heidegger as place I could learn from but also as a poisoned well. So a complex relationship and not one that I continue with very much at this point, though my new book, the book of essays that’s coming out, is called “Active Boundaries,” and that is a term right out of Heidegger, out of the notion of the periphery, the “peras” in its activation where we operate. So it still lingers in a certain way, but very cautiously, let’s say.
CS: Do you think there’s something about those works of philosophy or theory, say, like The Arcades Project or Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, that because of their so-called incomplete or failed nature they find a more receptive audience in circles of writers?
MP: Oh, without question. They become—they therefore mirror an aspect of modernist incompletion which you see in Pound’s Cantos. You see it in many areas with the impossibility of a kind of completion. And so they become open works. The Arcades Project, such as it is, is an entirely open work, you know? Probably given the profound contradictions in Benjamin’s thought, there was no possible completion to it (that I could imagine) even if his life had turned out differently. It’s always going to be a suitcase of notes, I think. So that’s formally in its own way interesting. And of course it’s part of a Romantic tradition of the fragment, very much so. Wittgenstein formally is also out of the Romantic tradition of improvisation as Lacoue-Labarthe has noted. It’s an improvisatory form, like much philosophy, and it has a poetics very much of its own. It’s very attractive and interesting. I mean, you can certainly learn more about the poetics of language from Wittgenstein than you can from a third-rate poet.
AQ: […] In relation to the question that Lawrence has asked about the use of politics—not the use, but the engagement with political matter and how that finds an expression formally in your work— in particular I was interested in asking about “Your Diamond Shoe” [in Company of Moths]. The very heavy-cadenced rhythms and the strong use of rhyme are elements it seems the book itself, and your work more largely, shuttles in and out of: this urge to sing. I’m wondering if there is a relationship between those two things, that desire for political engagment but also the denotative denial of the possibility of it?
MP: Sure. Well, the great irony of “Your Diamond Shoe” is that it talks about all these things that it says not to talk about. So it’s a rhetorical trope there taken from a poem by––what is it?—Bandeira?
AQ: It’s Drummond.
MP: Drummond, yes—a beautiful poem by Drummond that does something very similar. […] At one point, Drummond says, “Don’t talk about your diamond shoe.” All this stuff. It’s complicated. It’s personal in the sense that my way to some sort of political efficacy is probably more indirect than some other people. I find Poets Against the War okay as an organization, and I find that it generates a lot of terrible poetry against the war. So at times it feels like Poets Against Poetry. And I think there are other more efficacious ways—deeper ways—of coming to that.
I just gave a lecture on George Oppen, the Oppen Memorial Lecture in San Francisco, and George was very much the same way. He was a man who was a communist activist for much of his life and he never had the illusion that poetry should be put to those uses baldly, that it should be subject to those uses. And yet, George’s poetry is suffused with an ethics. Certainly a political stand comes in at points, but it’s not an ideological stand; it’s a stand towards poetic truth, a stand towards the possibility of seeing the natural world and the cityscape in all of their immediacy rather than cloaked by rhetoric and bad language.
AQ: […] In Of Being Numerous, when (I think the poem is called “Route”) where he [Oppen] directly addresses something freighted with lots of political consequence—I’m thinking of the scene during the war in which the Alsatians are being conscripted and trying to hide from the Nazis—the poem breaks suddenly away from this kind of syntactic fragmentation that [Oppen] had been working with and into a prose narrative. It seems to me that the two of you seem to share this sense of rupture in the prosodic fabric of the poem when these questions come to the forefront.
MP: Yes, I think so, I think so. And, you know, there’s that moving moment when Oppen says, “It’s simple enough—you will either be willing to kill a German or not…” (I’m paraphrasing) “…let’s cut to the chase.”
AQ: Yeah, if you want to, you will… if you don’t…
MP: And there’s that moving thing where as a Jew he has to bury his dogtags—when he’s in (I guess) in the foxhole and wounded—or before that?—in case he’s captured.
Influence
LR: Typically in interviews people ask who your influences are. When I was contemplating this interview, I noticed in Region of Unlikeness, I believe, you had an influence. That is, Jorie Graham put herself in conversation with you in the poem “Picnic.” And so, that was a very clear influence. It made me want to ask, who it was—and maybe you’ve already answered this already by talking about “company”—to turn the question around—who it was you wanted to influence, or where it was you saw yourself having an influence?
MP: You know, that’s not a question I’ve really allowed myself. It’s almost unimaginable. It seems I do have some influence on other writers at this point. It’s not something I could have ever imagined. I couldn’t even imagine that anyone would want to read it—or publish it, or anything like that, at a certain point. There are occasionally—I was joking about this the other day—occasionally someone will come up to me and say, “You don’t remember me, but you gave this reading at such-and-such a place twenty years ago, and it changed my life!” And I’m filled with horror! You mean you became a poet? Don’t do that! [laughs, laughter] It’s not the road to take unless you absolutely have no option! So I have never wanted to have acolytes. There are poets who bathe in that idea of a school of their work or making an impress of what’s to follow. As we all know, that can often be terrible. I mean, imitation Ashbery, imitation Creeley, whatever it may be. But affiliation has always interested me: who you’re in conversation with—to go back to another resonant term that Paul Celan uses—who you’re in conversation with along the way. And certainly as a young poet, I was variously in conversation with the American poets of the generation ahead of mine, mostly identified with the counter-tradition, but not entirely. But I didn’t want so much to be influenced as to be guided a little bit toward the possibility of work that was not simply a repetition of cultural habits or poetic habits from before. But the equal company might also be John Donne and Dante, or what-have-you, Catullus, Francois Villon… All of these poets for me were exemplary in particular ways of what the poetic project might be if undertaken with some determination and determined integrity—maybe put it that way—outside of the acceptable habits of composition.
CS: In “Conversation in the Mountains,” the Celan prose piece, I think one of the most moving moments [is that] series of questions—do you hear me? can you hear me?—which is echoed [at the end] of “Dream of a Language that Speaks.” I guess I’m slightly wrenching the question here—I [must] feel like it’s my job here to ask you about Germans [laughter]—but, Gerhard Richter––your engagement with him?
MP: Well, that was a project. It was proposed by someone. Richter was about to have his retrospective come to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and it was proposed that a number of poets and one musician respond to a particular sequence of abstract paintings that Richter had composed, had put together, after recovering from his major stroke—they were the first works he’d made. So we all responded variously. For me, it was an interesting experience in that it returned me to a certain—it freed me to go into the next phase of my book. It had a certain kind of lyric engagement with not only the visual, but also with the other areas of thinking of Richter’s that come up in his conversation. For example, I called it “Scale.” Well, the Richter Scale. He’s always fascinated, too, by earthquake, by tremblement de terre. And being a resident of San Francisco, I’m also fascinated by when the earth starts moving without our help. And so, as a response—not that explicitly to those works, but to an area of representation that they seem to generate—it was a very interesting project. And, of course, other people took it in very different ways. I don’t normally too often accept that kind of an undertaking because you don’t know how it will come out, and yet at the same time I’ve often found that that sort of collaboration will take me somewhere where I haven’t been working, particularly with painters but sometimes with composers as well. It will take me to another area of language than I would have—another path, so to speak.
CS: It’s interesting that those poems in “Scale” are, well, the titles are so much more focused on particles of language.
MP: Yeah. Of the… yeah. Sometimes I think I’m just running out of titles and so I title things “Untitled.” [laughter]
“What Reading?”
AQ: […] Getting back to this notion of habit which you mentioned earlier, in The Danish Notebook, you keep addressing the person who invited you to write this entry, Sun. You say: “Celine, I accepted your invitation because it seemed against my nature as a writer. Then, of course, one should never have such a nature. If you discover that you do, you must erase it as violently as possible.” Elsewhere, you’ve spoken about an interest in spontaneous composition, rather more of its limitations, as something that leads to a mannered sort of writing. I’m wondering if you could speak about the sense that at least I get from your poems, especially the work that’s been collected in Codes Appearing […], that the work itself is a sort of code that discovers itself through the composition or the writing.
MP: Discovers itself or informs itself, sure, sure. I think The Danish Notebook is a good instance of that, in the sense that it begins explicitly with this notion of what the French call the informe, “the unformed” or “the formless,” however you want to translate it. Partly it’s journal entries as I’m traveling around the world by myself as a poet or with a dance company variously, ending up in Paris and Hawai’i and all this stuff, [ending] up on a volcano— [laughter]
AQ: Where your I.Q. is reduced by ten percent.
MP: [laughs] Right. But then this form, quite evidently began to appear in terms of… I was joking with Paul Auster about this, and I said “Paul, I think there is a little Auster tale in here.” The coincidences suddenly make themselves manifest in part of the plot of life, but they’re real coincidences. Paul’s work, his life is no different from anyone else’s, he just pays attention to all of these threads of coinciding that some of us just tend to disregard as we go along. And that very much began to happen, everything coalesced in this curious way around this adolescent love story that’s hidden in there that really, in a sense, I had very much repressed at one point. And there I was in Paris, on one of the sites where this took place, and it came flooding back to me.
So, the noose tightens. [laughs] The narrative noose began to tighten as I was going along apparently randomly recording things. It was a very interesting experience. And I realized I was writing a work in poetics. Very much addressing what you are talking about, the play between construction and chance, improvisation and re-vision of things, all of those dualisms we dance with.
LR: I’d like to thank you very much. I’m looking forward to your reading tonight, and I appreciate your taking time to talk to us.
MP: Happy to, sure… What reading? [laughter]