Catharina van Bohemen reports on Michael Palmer

“In my notebook it says, it is the time of mutations, laughter at jokes, secrets beyond the boundaries of speech.”

These words from Michael Palmer’s Sun suggest something of the elliptical and experimental nature of his poetry which he read at the first of the Writers on Mondays meetings at the City Gallery on Monday May 5th. He read mainly from his latest collection, The Company of Moths, work which was elusive, musical, political; indeed a theme Palmer returned to throughout his week in Wellington was how the poet “talks to the world” in the face of daily “long distance slaughter.” Afterwards, Bill Manhire asked him about his willingness to offer a context for each poem. Palmer replied that the explanation was a bridge – especially at a public reading – between writer and reader, a way of showing how a poem begins with an experience that is not just words. He spoke of the fugitive nature of a poem: although the work of solitude, it is also always a collaboration of at least two consciousnesses, and one which resists absolute meaning.

At the MA Master Class he developed his thoughts about the role of the poet, and the “purpose and necessity” of the lyric as a response not only to the tumultuous political events of the last hundred years, but also to private upheaval. He quoted Theodore Adorno who said that any poetic utterance after the Holocaust was impossible. The traditional lyric splintered: it reflected global fracture, and the poetry that grew from this fracture has necessarily been a re-formation of structure, voice, nuance, meaning, a poetry based on breath, heart-beat, silence as well as words. As a translator of French, Portuguese and Russian, he referred to Apollinaire, Mandelstam and Paul Celan as well as his own contemporaries, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan, and emphasized the cross-fertilization that has occurred not only in poetry but also in music and dance. Michael Palmer himself frequently collaborates with dancers and artists.

This was his first visit to NZ so he was also interested in our poetry: he compared with delight similarities not only in the lifespans of Robert Creeley and Hone Tuwhare, but also surprising resonances of voice and style in Tuwhare’s “Rain” and Creeley’s “The Rain”. A final pleasure for him – and for all those present at an absorbing afternoon – was Rachel O’Neill’s reading of her new poem ‘Life Immemorial Part 3’. Rachel is a member of the 2008 MA workshop.