Active Boundaries: Selected Essays and Talks (New Directions Paperbook) - Softcover

Palmer, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081121754X ISBN 13: 9780811217545

Publisher: New Directions, 2008

Synopsis

A poet’s prosebook, a hymn to the art of the word, here is Palmer’s first collection of essays and talks

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.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 081121754X
• ISBN 13: 9780811217545
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 294