Proemists
always hope their excesses of lingo will be justified by the proem form. With
that admonition in mind let us look at this proem by 1 of the most hailed
proemists/’Experimental Poets’ of the last 35 years: Michael Palmer. MP is
not the worst of this lot, although he is the most well-known. Vaguely
associated, in a fringe way, with the horrid L+A+N+G+U+A+G+E poetasters, he is
generally better. That said, he is guilty of incredible vacuity, excessive
overwriting, & just plain boring work. This is 1 of the most glaring
weakness of all these sorts of ‘Experimentalists’- too often their writing
fizzles out into banality. When their poems inevitably fail to reach an audience
they have the ready excuse: ‘it was the audience’s fault’- either they
were not hip/smart enough, or they were biased against the ‘poet’s’
aesthetic. That the writing was just bad never seems to cross their minds.
Of course,
being part of such a group, disdainful of convention, did not prevent MP from
polishing up his online curriculum vitae:
Michael Palmer was born in New York City in 1943. He is the recipient of two grants from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1989-90. He has written eight books of poetry and is often published in such literary magazines as Boundary 2, Berkeley Poetry Review, Sulfur, Conjunctions, and O-blek. His most recent books of poetry are AtPassages (1996) and The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 (1998), both published by New Directions. He presently lives in San Francisco, CA.
The selected
poem to dissect comes from the mid-1980s when MP & the Languagist hordes
were at their zenith of incomprehensibilty & Academic power. Read it:
Sun
Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them
Write this. A word may be shaped like a bed, a basket of tears or an X
In the notebook it says, It is the time of mutations, laughter at jokes, secrets
beyond the boundaries of speech
I now turn to my use of suffixes and punctuation, closing Mr. Circle with a
single stroke, tearing the canvas from its wall, joined to her, experiencing the
same thoughts at the same moment, inscribing them on a loquat leaf
Write this. There is pleasure and pain and there are marks and signs. A word may
be shaped like a fig or a pig, an effigy or an egg
but there is only time for fasting
and desire, device and
design, there is only time to swerve without limbs, organs or face into a
scientific silence, pinhole of light
A word is beside itself. Here the poem is called What Speaking Means to Say
though I have no memory of my name
Not the best thing you’ve ever read-right? Now, look at the other version:
Sun
Write this. We have burned all their villages
Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them
Write this. We have adopted their customs and their manner of dress
Write this. A word may be shaped like a bed, a basket of tears or an X
In the notebook it says, It is the time of mutations, laughter at jokes, secrets
beyond the boundaries of speech
I now turn to my use of suffixes and punctuation, closing Mr. Circle with a
single stroke, tearing the canvas from its wall, joined to her, experiencing the
same thoughts at the same moment, inscribing them on a loquat leaf
Write this. We have begun to have bodies, a now here and a now gone, a past long
ago and one still to come
Let go of me for I have died and am in a novel and was a lyric poet, certainly,
who attracted crowds to mountaintops. For a nickel I will appear from this box.
For a dollar I will have text with you and answer three questions
First question. We entered the
forest, followed its winding paths, and emerged blind
Second question. My townhouse, of the Jugendstil, lies by Darmstadt
Third question. He knows he will wake from this dream, conducted in the
mother-tongue
Third question. He knows his breathing organs are manipulated by God, so that he
is compelled to scream
Third question. I will converse with no one on those days of the week which end
in y
Write this. There is pleasure and pain and there are marks and signs. A word may
be shaped like a fig or a pig, an effigy or an egg
but there is only time for fasting
and desire, device and
design, there is only time to swerve without limbs, organs or face into a
scientific silence, pinhole of light
Say this. I was born on an island among the dead. I learned language on this
island but did not speak on this island. I am writing to you from this island. I
am writing to the dancers from this island. The writers do not dance on this
island
Say this. There is a sentence in my mouth, there is a chariot in my mouth. There is a ladder. There is a lamp whose light fills empty space and a space which swallows light
A word is beside itself. Here the poem is called What Speaking Means to Say
though I have no memory of my name
Here the poem is called Theory of the Real, its name is Let's Call This, and its
name is called A Wooden Stick. It goes yes-yes, no-no. It goes one and one
I have been writing a book, not in my native language, about violins and smoke,
lines and dots, free to speak and become the things we speak, pages which sit
up, look around and row resolutely toward the setting sun
Pages torn from their spines and added to the pyre, so that they will resemble
thought
Pages which accept no ink
Pages we've never seen-first called Narrow Street, then Half a Fragment, Plain
of Jars or Plain of Reeds, taking each syllable in her mouth, shifting position
and passing it to him
Let me say this. Neak Luong is a
blur. It is Tuesday in the hardwood forest. I am a visitor here, with a notebook
The notebook lists My New Words and Flag above White. It claims to have no
inside
only characters like A-against-Herself, B,
C, L and N, Sam, Hans Magnus, T. Sphere, all speaking in the dark with their
hands
G for Gramsci or Goebbels, blue hills, cities, cities with hills, modern and at
the edge of time
F for
alphabet, Z for A, an H in an arbor, shadow, silent wreckage, W or M among stars
What last. Lapwing. Tesseract. X perhaps for X. The villages are known as These
Letters -- humid, sunless. The writing occus on their walls
Okay- what gives? I thought, Dan, you always said you would only trim TOP poems? Why did you violate your directive & add to that so-so poem? Well, I didn’t. I did the old switcheroo? The 1st version of the poem presented was my trimmed & tidy rewrite. The 2nd version was the original. Huh? Why’d’ja do that? Here’s why: in doing some of these TOP essays & also in my years of arguing that famous poems could have been improved with more vigorous editing & rewriting, I have noticed that even supposedly learned folk in poesy seem to accept flaws in ‘canonical’ poems or poets. That’s why you were- BE HONEST NOW- willing to accept some of the banalities I still have in my version as OK. But, when confronted with the longer, duller, more pompous version the overwriting SCREAMT OUT at you, whereas had I presented it 1st you’d more likely argue that I excised WAY TOO MUCH. But reading them in the reverse order you see how much of MP’s original is banal & utterly superfluous to the core poem/proem. In other words, I reversed things to make the flaws & overwriting patently obvious.
However, I accept that even such a daring move by me may have left a # of
you in the dust. So, let’s go hacking away at MP’s original jungle.
The title, here, is meant to be used as a ‘revealer of truth’, &
what follows is a series of images & ideas designed to dwell long in the
reader’s mind: destruction, occupation, subjugation, war, guilt- we are all
guilty, etc. We then get the act of ‘witness’ with the repetition of images
of writing, taking notes, etc. This is what the ‘good liberal’ strives for
with her/his (note the not too unintentional flip-flop of spoken gender order)
art. This intends to be a political poem but it quickly devolves into a
narcissistic mess. We get the act of questioning- what is being questioned is
really unimportant- the act suffices, & another hodgepodge of ideas, images,
etc. just adds to the welter of confusion- that’s if 1 is still caring enough
to read onward. The appearance of words in the speaker’s mouth is intended to
invoke divinity in art & recognizing ‘The horror. The horror’. Where
would nauseatingly smug left-wingers be without old JoJo Conrad & his slew
of great & archetypal moments & personages to siphon from? We get
references to sex (joined to her, experiencing the same thoughts at the same
moment ), the Vietnam War (Neak Luong), other poets (Hans Magnus), the
ever-reliable Nazis (Goebbels), & mathematics (Tesseract- a theoretical
4-dimensional version of a cube)- all to show MP’s staggering ‘breadth’.
The last line is a snide attempt at inserting a cliché by using a slightly
different word: occus, or occas- which means ‘occasionally’.
Now let’s re-look at my version:
Sun
Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them
Write this. A word may be shaped like a bed, a basket of tears or an X
In the notebook it says, It is the time of mutations, laughter at jokes, secrets
beyond the boundaries of speech
I now turn to my use of suffixes and punctuation, closing Mr. Circle with a
single stroke, tearing the canvas from its wall, joined to her, experiencing the
same thoughts at the same moment, inscribing them on a loquat leaf
Write this. There is pleasure and pain and there are marks and signs. A word may
be shaped like a fig or a pig, an effigy or an egg
but there is only time for fasting
and desire, device and
design, there is only time to swerve without limbs, organs or face into a
scientific silence, pinhole of light
A word is beside itself. Here the poem is called What Speaking Means to Say
though I have no memory of my name
Gone are the excessive needs to ‘document’, & most of the
external jetsam designed to make this ‘proem’ political. Now, the piece is
more of a personal ‘interior monologue’, or soliloquy. I basically just cut
by line- rather than hacking away full-bore. But, as I re-read I see that this 1st
re-write can be trimmed even further:
Sun
Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them
Write this. A word may be shaped like a bed, a basket of tears or an X
In the notebook it says, It is the time of mutations, laughter at jokes, secrets
beyond the boundaries of speech
I now turn to my use of suffixes and punctuation, closing Mr. Circle with a
single stroke
There are marks and signs. A word
may be shaped like a fig or a pig, an effigy or an egg
but there is only time for fasting,
device and
design, to swerve without limbs, organs or face into a
scientific silence, pinhole of light
A word is beside itself. Here the poem is called What Speaking Means to Say
though I have no memory of my name
In the 2nd rewrite we’ve ridded ourselves of the bathos
& melodrama that was still left. Yes, there is still some inappropriate
cutesiness (Mr. Circle), some poor enjambment, etc. But I can’t do it all
without adding too much of myself into the poem. You can tinker with it some
more.
Now, go back to the original version & you’ll easily see that all
that was important in this poem was retained in both succeeding versions, &
heightened. Each version is better than the last. No doubt, if you nip &
tuck a bit more your version will supersede my 2. Now do you understand why I
presented the poems in the order I did? I knew you would.
Final Score: (0-100)