The Promises of Glass: Poems

by Michael Palmer

Overview

The Promises of Glass, Michael Palmer's first new collection since At Passages (1995), is now available as a paperback. In seven sections this gorgeous book explores language and the "salt sea of autobiographies." His work also examines what Marjorie Perloff has described as "the absurdist 'displacement by degrees' one experiences in the post-urban wold of late twentieth-century America."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811214797
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/17/2001
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Michael Palmer was born into an Italian-American family in Manhattan in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco since 1969.  He has taught at numerous universities in the United States, Europe and Asia, and has published translations from a variety of languages, in particular French, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian. He has been involved in joint projects with many visual artists and composers in the United States and elsewhere and has also served as an artistic collaborator with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for close to fifty years. Palmer's honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and he was awarded the 2006 Wallace Stevens Award. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt

    The White Notebook

But we have painted over the chalky folds,
the snow- and smoke-folds, so carefully,
so deftly that many (Did you bet

on the margins, the clouds?) that many
will have gone, unnoticed,
under. Water under water,

"earth that moves beneath earth."
We have added
silver to the river, dots of silver,

red, figures-which-are-not. Tell
me what their names might have been,
what were last and first, what spells

the unfamiliar, awkwardly whispered, syllable?
And what of the blue rider, the Arab
horseman, the cavalier composed

of two shades of blue, one
from Vermeer's Delft, the other
from that metallic element called

cobalt, Kobolt, goblin? What scene
is he watching? Is it expired space
the fixed eye observes? Is it

the river which has no center, the
whiteness of the city when you say
Paris is white? Is it the arches

of the bridges now narrowed to slits?
Is it the liquid
voices themselves

he watches grow silent?
The voice of closed eyes?
Or the two

impossibly young
in the lighted room
who speak only of rain?

Scene which has no center
or whose center is empty,
elsewhere. The way white is said

rejoining an earlierwhiteness
between the done and the not-yet
rolling off the tongue

almond, almond-eyed,
eyeless, denialwhite
as the zero code, wordless,

a language of rhythm and breath.
(In erasure the chestnut
flowering toward origin

among the names for white:
blanc de titane, blanc de zinc.)
I met her there at the crossroads.

I don't remember who spoke.
Two breaths, two patterns of echo.
We have painted a bridge's eyes

narrowed, its mouth spurting sand,
dots, more dots, bright,
not visible to the eye.

River of dots rising,
stream of sand with no center.
This was both before and after.

Palette knife beside a photograph.
At recess the children's cries
through the studio windows,

station clocktower to the right,
ochre of expanding sound,
tongue to mute tongue, tendrils—

tendons—over rooftops.
Didn't it turn me—
he asks of his eye—

didn't it polish me
like one of its stones,
remingle and remake me

and draw me quickly down
to where each night in sand
the hour sounds?

We met there at the crossroads
near the small arcades.

I can't recall who first spoke,
who said, "the darkness of white."

We shared one shadow.
In the heat she tasted of salt.

Table of Contents

	The White Notebook	1
	The Promises of Glass	7
	Q	47
	Four Kitaj Studies	57
	Five Easy Poems	65
	In an X	75
	Tower	83

Editorial Reviews

[M]aps a multifaceted and ever-shifting constellation of infinitesimal, unconnected dots.

American Book Review

Palmer's poetry is mysterious and some of the most revealing we have.

Bloomsbury Review

[C]onfirms [Palmer's] ability to speak ...'at a distance from oneself and yet with the greatest passion.' —Boston Review

Andrew Zawacki

Palmer [is] the most influential avant-gardist working, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation.
—Voice Literary Supplement

Joshua Clover

Indeed, the works in this book aren't facile, and yet they are enjoyable and accessible enough to make you blink.
—The Boston Book Review

Max Winter