5 Questions with Michael Palmer, author of Little Elegies for Sister Satan
Michael Palmer is an American born in New York City in 1943 and long resident in San Francisco, nearly all of Palmer's poetry is published by New Directions: At Passages (1995); The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972–1995 (1998); The Promises of Glass (2000); Codes Appearing: Poems 1979–1988 (2001); Company of Moths (2005); and most recently, Thread (2011). He is the translator of works by Emmanuel Hocquard, Vicente Huidobro, and Alexei Parshchikov, among others, and the editor of Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics. For over thirty years he has collaborated with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.
His newest book of poems is Little Elegies for Sister Satan (also published by New Directions). Michael Palmer is reading from his new book, along with Erica Hunt (who is celebrating her new book of poems, Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems, published by Nightboat) in our City Lights LIVE! discussion series on Tuesday, May 4th!
Where are you writing to us from?
I am writing to you from a secret location not all that far from City Lights as the Dream Drone flies. In 1963, before I lived anywhere, Allen Ginsberg brought me to City Lights for the first time, where I purchased a copy of Michael McClure’s Dark Brown (Auerhahn Press), shelved then in the locked room among the works subject to possible criminal prosecution.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
I’d like to know who’s accusing me of being sane? I will be taking names.
What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?
As an act of self-abnegation, throughout the lockdown I have limited my reading (and rereading) to bestsellers. It seems that every day, I read at random from Wisława Szymborska’s collected and last poems, Map (translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanisław Barańczak), as well as Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden (tr. Fady Joudah). I am finding my way back through Nate Mackey’s various prose and verse sequences, written across an illuminated lifetime. Of the several hundred other books of fiction, philosophy, writings on art, interviews, poetry, and social and political theory that I’ve begun, perused or read through during the lockdown, I have mostly fond if fading memories, like loves from an earlier life. Oh yes, and one day a week I’ve been reading aloud from The Decameron to friends in my pod. Yesterday we reached Day 8, Story 4.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
I am a magpie in this regard, stealing from my betters, living and gone, as I try in vain to listen to the Book of the World and record its echoes. And when I confront the artificial barriers, the walls, erected between nations by the corrupt and corrupting forces of power, I do my best to fly over them. From Szymborska’s “Psalm”:
Oh, the leaky boundaries of man-made states!
How many clouds float past them with impunity;
how much desert sand shifts from one land to another;
how many mountain pebbles tumble onto foreign soil
in provocative hops!
Need I mention every single bird that flies in the face of frontiers
or alights on the roadblock at the border?
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
Poets should never open bookstores, only patronize them as often as possible, while neglecting what others erroneously consider to be real life. It was in 1953 (I was ten) that Ferlinghetti came to me in a vision and asked whether he should invest in a bookstore with Peter Martin. I warned him in the most strenuous terms not to become involved, that it would be the ruin of him, and that nobody reads good books. And so it came to pass.
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