Michael Palmer's name is known all over the world, a metonym for the allusive, lyric, and speculative poetry that he has been writing since the mid-sixties. Michael Palmer is the author of several books of poetry and translations including The Lion Bridge (Selected Poems 1972-1995) (New Directions, 1998), The Danish Notebook (Avec Books, 1999), and forthcoming in Spring 2000 The Promises of Glass from New Directions. Palmer is the sage of the unknown, the unverifiable, the poet who promises nothing, withholds less. He asks us not what comes between poetry and its audience, but what poetry reaches toward. In his extension of modernism, and the weary beauties of his life work, what goes toward has yet to spring back, the feelers are out there still, unrelenting tentacles of the proprioceptive.
December 10, 1999
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