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Michael Palmer

photo: Pieter Vandermeer

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 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

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)

    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

    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

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

    Letters to Zanzotto (8:52): 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

    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 #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 #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 #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

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

    • complete reading (59:05): 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. © 2010 Michael Palmer. Used with permission of Michael Palmer. Distributed by PennSound.