Active Boundaries: Selected Essays and TalksA poet's prosebook, a hymn to the art of the word, here is the first collection of essays/talks to be published by one of America's most important poets (Harvard Review), winner of the Wallace Stevens Award for Mastery in the Art of Poetry. A lifetime engagement with poetry radiates from every page of this distinguished collection of essays and talks that span forty years of a poet's life. Active Boundaries by Michael Palmer offers readers an intimate glimpse into the poetry behind the poetry that, as Robert Creeley once noted, makes possible a place where words initially engage their meanings--as if missing the edge of all 'creations, ' of all 'worlds'. With philosophical grace and conversational ease, Palmer unearths a vanguardist tradition in poetry that permeates languages and cultures, centuries and histories. He investigates an active boundary as it relates to a sense of form as well as, Palmer writes, to a more social sense of poetic activity as it exists in the margins, along the borders and, so to speak, 'underground.' Meditations on poets such as George Oppen, Paul Celan, Octavio Paz, Shelley, and Dante rise to the forefront among a multitude of other voices, like those of Trinh Minh-ha, Anna Akhmatova, Toru Takemitsu, and Susan Howe. Diaristic entries about his mother on her death bed are interspersed with epiphanic fragments; Within a Timeless Moment of Barbaric Thought confronts poetry's relation to memory, war, the War on Terror, contingency, and experience. Pulsing through the heart-lines of Active Boundaries is poetry's renewal. |
Contents
On Robert Duncans Ground Work 2006 | 18 |
On the Sustaining of Culture in Dark Times 2005 | 28 |
Dear Walt 2005 | 45 |
On Dantes Vita Nuova 2002 | 61 |
Forms Mind Some Thoughts along the Way 2000 | 70 |
Poetic Obligations Talking about Nothing | 83 |
Circulations of the Song 1999 | 104 |
The Danish Notebook 1998 | 122 |
On Jesss Narkissos 1993 | 179 |
Some Notes on Shelley Poetics and the Present 1991 | 195 |
Poetry at the Periphery 1990 | 207 |
On Objectivism 1989 | 226 |
CounterPoetics and Current Practice 1986 | 237 |
Autobiography Memory and Mechanisms | 267 |
Acknowledgments | 293 |
Some Notes on Irving | 156 |
Common terms and phrases
aesthetic American artistic become begin Bei Dao Book of Questions Breton Claude complex conversation Copyright course Creeley culture dance Dante Dante's dark death discourse dream echoes Edmond Jabès Eliot Eliot Weinberger Excerpt exploratory eyes fact figure fragments George Oppen imagination Irving Petlin Jabès Jack Spicer Jess Jess's kind language listening literary look Lorca Lorine Niedecker lyric means memory Michael Palmer mirror multiple myth Narcissus Narkissos narrative never night notebook notes Objectivists Octavio Paz once Oppen painter painting paradox pastels Paul Celan perhaps Pessoa poem poet poetic poetry political present published remember resistance resonance Robert Creeley Robert Duncan Romantic Rosmarie Waldrop seems sense Shelley silence space speak speech Spicer story street Surrealism Surrealists talk tell things thought tion tradition trans translation turn vanguardism vanguardist voice words writing Yukel Zukofsky