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Michael Palmer

photo: Pieter Vandermeer

Close Listening conversation with Charles Bernstein at the Kelly Writers House, March 13, 2018

In conversartion with Charles Bernstein for Tbilisi Internatonal Poetry Festival, hosted by Paata Shamugia October 29, 2020

Link to Video (43:21): MP4


Class Visit to Charles Bernstein's Undergraduate Class, March 13, 2018

Complete Recording (1:16:00): MP3

Reading at Kelly Writers House, March 13, 2018

Boise State MFA Reading Series, Boise, September 9, 2011

  • Complete reading (59:05): MP3

Appearing on Cross Cultural Poetics #192, "Greats," May 3, 2009

Michael Palmer reads from and discusses his translations of the great Russian poet Alexei Parschikov.
Complete reading and discussion (30:16): MP3

Appearing on Cross Cultural Poetics #175, "Unboundaries," November 2, 2008

Michael Palmer discusses his new book of essays: Active Boundaries: Selected Essays And Talks (New Directions).
Complete program (59:40): MP3

Appearing on Cross Cultural Poetics #155, "Caws/Palmer," December 16, 2007

Michael Palmer, on the phone from San Francisco, reads a new sequence of poems.
Complete reading and discussion (14:51): MP3

Appearing on Cross Cultural Poetics #87, "Two From San Francisco," 2005

Michael Palmer reads from and discusses his new book Company Of Moths (New Directions).

  1. introduction (0:33): MP3
  2. inner coherence in Palmer's work (1:25): MP3
  3. the opening epigraph "Enter the Kingdom of Words as if you were deaf" (1:54): MP3
  4. "And" (1:39): MP3
  5. Palmer's use of the question in "And" (2:05): MP3
  6. the dedication to Walter Benjamin (4:30): MP3
  7. the image of the moth (2:16): MP3
  8. "Company of Moths" (1:36): MP3
  9. poor text (2:37): MP3
  10. "But" (1:11): MP3
  11. Palmer's collaboration with Gerhard Richter and the apocalyptic imagery (3:18): MP3
  12. "Dreaming of a Language that Speaks" (2:12): MP3
  13. the closing image of the book (5:42): MP3

Complete reading and discussion (31:05): MP3

Appearing on Cross Cultural Poetics #3, "Language Under Fire," November 3, 2003

Leading American poet Michael Palmer, based in San Francisco, reads from his work and discusses the dilemma of poetry in the Age of Bush.

  1. Introduction (0:45): MP3
  2. Words and production of meaning (2:21): MP3
  3. Palmer reading from "Autobiography" (3:25): MP3
  4. Russian influence on "Autobiography" (3:45): MP3
  5. Schwartz reading a passage from a Palmer essay (1:43): MP3
  6. Discourse of power and meaning in language (3:54): MP3
  7. Poets' role in war (6:31): MP3
  8. Palmer's view of Poets Against War (4:01): MP3
  9. Palmer reading "Este Mundo" (2:14): MP3
  10. Palmer reading "Untitled, February 2003" (1:10): MP3
  11. Discussing "Untitled" (2:25): MP3
  12. Conclusion (0:59): MP3

Complete Program (33:18): MP3

On EXACT CHANGE Yearbook 1995 no. 1 (ed. Peter Gizzi), Brown University, April 5, 1994

Letters to Zanzotto (8:52): MP3

Reading at the Unterberg Poetry Center, 92nd Street Y, New York, NY, 2000

with Robert Creeley

Introduction by Ann Lauterbach

Reading with Lyn Hejinian, Library of Congress, Mumford Room, November 2, 1995

Full Recording: External Link

Appearing at The New Freedoms, Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, April 9, 1994

  1. Introduction (2:34): MP3
  2. Untitled, September '92 (2:43): MP3
  3. Untitled (for David Shapiro) (1:38): MP3
  4. Under the Perseids (2:04): MP3
  5. Small Night Song for Jacques Roubaud (0:55): MP3

Complete reading with Arkadii Zastyrets (18:44): MP3

At SUNY-Buffalo, November 7-8, 1990.

Poetry Reading, November 7

  1. Introduction by Joseph Conte (2:20): MP3
  2. Six Hermetic Poems (7:21): MP3
  3. In C (1:23): MP3
  4. Eighth Sky (3:21): MP3
  5. SB (0:59): MP3
  6. Recursus to Porta (3:34): MP3
  7. Letters to Zanzotto (10:58): MP3
  8. Who is to Say (0:56): MP3
  9. Poem (0:25): MP3
  10. Books of the Yellow Castle (2:47): MP3
  11. Song of the Round Man (1:15): MP3
  12. This Time (0:47): MP3
  13. As a Real House (0:44): MP3
  14. Sun (5:49): MP3

Complete reading (44:58): MP3

Lecture, "Active Boundaries: Poetry at the Periphery," November 8

  1. poetic activity as it exists in the margins (6:25): MP3
  2. images of elsewhere in the work of Sebastio Salgado (4:25): MP3
  3. Paul Celan's struggle against representation (5:24): MP3
  4. the historical and social dimensions of hermetic speech (1:21): MP3
  5. double texts (4:12): MP3
  6. tensions in Zukofsky's "A" (3:14): MP3
  7. "X/Self" by Edward Kamau Brathwaite and Caribbean anti-colonial thought (1:52): MP3
  8. the arbitrariness of orthodoxy, new poetry, and Pound and Elliott's bigotry (2:06): MP3
  9. Ron Silliman's "The Alphabet" and representing urban social space (5:21): MP3
  10. Susan Howe's interrogation of the first person subject (7:29): MP3
  11. poetry in Leningrad (6:12): MP3

Complete recording (48:14): MP3

Discussion in Charles Bernstein's Poetics seminar, November 8

  1. poetic identity in Russia (1:59): MP3
  2. shortcomings of conservative academic feminist criticism (2:34): MP3
  3. the uneasy pleasure of Salgado's photographs and aestheticization (8:50): MP3
  4. the dilemma of the sublime (4:51): MP3
  5. the sublime in a post-Holocaust world and Paul Celan's Meridian address (4:58): MP3
  6. Kabbalistic thought and poetry that plays with letter and number (10:48): MP3
  7. formal exploration, rhythm and recurrence in Palmer's Notes for Echo Lake (12:00): MP3
  8. the indirectness of poetry as intervention and the return of poetry during moments of upheaval (4:53): MP3
  9. sound and silence (4:13): MP3
  10. the unconscious recurrence of images and speech in Palmer's work (9:53): MP3
  11. symbolic logic, language philosophy and reading Wittgenstein (6:07): MP3
  12. the musicality of recurrence and the decay of the word uttered (3:59): MP3
  13. the "meaning" of the poem and the problem of intention (8:20): MP3
  14. the function of poetry (4:00): MP3
  15. Jackson MacLow and locating intention (3:45): MP3

Complete recording (1:31:40): MP3, RealAudio

"Syntax as Music" Presentation on Zukofsky at SPD, April 22, 1988. With Ronald Johnson and David Levi-Strauss

Recording provided courtesy of David Levi Strauss.

Complete recording (1:47:33): MP3

Kootenay School of Writing New Poetics Colloquium, 1985

  • Reading from Notes for Echo Lake & First Figure on August 21 1985 (27:52): MP3
  • Reading on August 22 1985 (40:19): MP3

Panel Discussion at the Tyler School of Art April 10, 1985. With Clark Coolidge, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, John Yau, and Geoffrey Young

  • Introduction by David Hannah (6:58): MP3
  • Part One (32:50): MP3
  • Part Two (32:35): MP3

    • (Recordings at Tyler courtesy of Rachel Blau DuPlessis)

    1. tenets of Imagism (2:40): MP3
    2. Clark Coolidge on logopeia and the movement of language (4:01): MP3
    3. Rachel Blau DuPlessis on the rejection of "poetic material" and imaging as a site of struggle (3:28): MP3
    4. Michael Palmer on the economy of the poem, the diffusing of Imagism, vorticism and objectification in the body of the poem (11:51): MP3
    5. John Yau on stereotypes of the writer and the structure of images one is allowed to produce (3:45): MP3
    6. on T.S. Eliot and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (4:23): MP3
    7. Rachel Blau DuPlessis on the politics of prosody, the hierarchy of the text and destroying language while using language (3:09): MP3
    8. on the totality of the image (2:55): MP3
    9. on the visual aspect of words on a pagge (6:05): MP3
    10. Michael Palmer on the apparition of visual images in his work (1:40): MP3
    11. John Yau on field verse, the source of images, and cues in language (4:03): MP3
    12. on the source of dreams and the harmony of the work (3:32): MP3
    13. Rachel Blau DuPlessis on being a woman writer, rupturing the images of a culture, and stealing other people's images (5:20): MP3
    14. Rachel Blau DuPlessis on deconstructing socially mandated discourses (3:08): MP3
    15. Michael Palmer on the analytic-lyric (1:02): MP3
    16. Rachel Blau DuPlessis on the place of woman as constructed site and the difference between a feminine and a female poetry (3:46): MP3

    Reading at the Tyler School of Art April 10, 1985

    1. Dearest Reader (2:09): MP3
    2. Prelude (1:05): MP3
    3. Lies of the Poem (1:21): MP3
    4. Prose Poem "All the Words We Once Used for Things..." (1:16): MP3
    5. Edam, For (6:18): MP3
    6. Village of Reason (1:30): MP3
    7. This Time: Another for Sarah (1:38): MP3
    8. Six Illustrations (2:35): MP3
    9. As a Real House (0:58): MP3
    10. Of this Cloth Doll (1:31): MP3
    11. View From an Apartment (1:27): MP3

    "Autobiography, Memory and Mechanisms of Concealment (Part 1 or One Part)," New Langton Arts, San Francisco, July 31, 1980

    From the Talk Series curated by Bob Perelman

    • Tape 1 (45:03): MP3
    • Tape 2 (45:26): MP3
    • Tape 3 (28:32): MP3

    from The World Record: Readings at the St. Mark's Poetry Project, 1969-1980

    Dance of the Bees (recorded March 8, 1978) (0:41): MP3

    Reading at St. Mark's Poetry Project, Unknown Date

    • Complete recording (10:28): MP3

    Michael Palmer on PennSound Daily

    July 25, 2008: Coolidge, DuPlessis, Palmer, Yau, Young: Readings and Roundtable at Tyler School of Art, 1985

    These sound recordings are being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2018 Michael Palmer. Used with permission of Michael Palmer. Distributed by PennSound.