Fidelity to Refusal: On Michael Palmer’s “The Danish Notebook”
Michael Palmer | The Danish Notebook | Nightboat Books | 2023 | 88 Pages
Michael Palmer’s work is often described as austere, the ascetic simplicity of his poems altered only by evidence of a calculated aesthetic revaluation. His three masterpieces, Notes for Echo Lake (1981), First Figures (1984), and Sun (1988), resisted the harshly-lit decade of their composition with a conspicuous withdrawal from overt personal or political address, toward something essential, life at its most breathable. Palmer focused on the page, the material vehicle of meaning where writing is, itself, monumental. This concern is present as early as his first book, Blake’s Newton. In “Among Various” the speaker asks “Among various / things to be signed. / can you still mark each // interval by stars.” The amount of meaning which could be expressed in a poem, and, in general, language, was inconclusive. Language was a material to be sculpted, a naturalistic de-escalation of William Carlos Williams’ poems-as-machines. Its drive—call it poetry for poetry’s sake—certainly was exceptional in American poetry during the culturally confusing times of the late 70s and 80s.
Whereas some poets lift the painted veil from over the clockwork machinations of meaning, Palmer’s work constitutes one of the furthest attempts to resist stable, capturable understanding. Images are abundant, though minimal, stark as catalog inserts, and tonally wood-water-beige. Unattributed pronouns are the closest we get to personages. Rather than rely on a pastiche of cultural references or the mere subversion of literary poetical tropes, Palmer’s poetry cores language of a certain vibrancy that induces the reader to sobriety, an imposed lotus position. From “Notes for Echo Lake 4”:
Who told you these things
Who taught you how to speak
Who taught you not to speak
Whose is the voice that empties
If there is a culture, it’s of the abstract body alone, the eternal relationship between a body and the outside world through sense, though I doubt Palmer even ever hit all five. If there is subversion, it manifests not in aberration of bourgeois taste, but as an aversion to traditional English prosody, an onslaught of assonance so openly repetitive it barely registers to the ear. Against sonority, against speech, Palmer’s poetry tangents toward silence in search of “that nowhere, which allows poetry to function, to encompass the paradoxes of both sight and site,” as he wrote in “Active Boundaries: Poetry At the Periphery,” one of his many hermetical essays on the craft.
Palmer attended Harvard in the 1960s, about a decade after John Ashbery and a decade before Charles Bernstein, poets to whom he would be compared. Brought up in the era of Confessional poetry, he was taught a literary art as the exploration of psychological truth. A poet’s greatness was measured by their ability to minimize the distance between what is addressed in the poem—often a slice of real life—and the addressor—the selfsame poet-speaker whose judgment and self-psychoanalyzing contributed to the sympathetic, humanist thrust of the aesthetic. The great Confessors wore ties and quoted Browning, spoke of morals and their abject failure to uphold them. They rhymed. Thoroughly Modern and personally anguished, they were the establishment. The tropes of formalism and confession would have been hegemonic during Palmer’s Harvard tenure, much in the same way “writing one’s truth” is today. He received degrees in French and Comparative Literature and his interests perhaps already aligned more with innovative visual art and dance than modern poetry in which he felt there lacked a willingness to reach outside the text. Palmer likewise viewed the New Critics, the established critical wing of Late Modernism, as a “relatively reactionary men’s club.” Highly influential on established poets of the time, it was their contention that the poem was a self-contained entity of meaning that should not be sullied by references outside of its compositioned walls.
At 21, Palmer attended the Vancouver Poetry Conference, and fell in with a different men’s club: the poets Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Clark Coolidge, all of whom would become his lifelong friends, collaborators and intercessors. These poets had little to do with Confessionalism, their aesthetic roots stretching back to the 1920s and 30s, the Imagists, Objectivists, poets of the “expanded field,” as Charles Olsen named them, such as George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky whose respect for descriptive brevity competed with their disrespect for traditional print margins.
Duncan had been an integral part of The San Francisco Renaissance, a scene which exhibited a space of play that had been missing on the East Coast. He, Jack Spicer, and others developed a poetics which suppressed the self-same “I” of the confessional subject in service of a more fluid, objective speakerly stance in service of their lived subjective flourishing—Spicer and Duncan were gay in an era none need reminding was inimical to sexual difference. Utilizing techniques such as persona, bare repetition, and enjambment that obscures rather than aids meaning, readers are purposely led to sources outside the poem. The proliferation of different voices, subjects, myths and personas allowed for a more symbolic and unpredictable form of expression. While Palmer didn’t exhibit any of the lived-differences of those writers, their project would come to fit Palmer’s diagnosis of the need for a rigorous poetics in combat to both the stodgy poetics of his upbringing as well as the rising 20th Century forces of cultural stagnation and techno-capitalist torture. On Duncan, he cites in the poet’s later work “the drama of the self’s necessary struggle and undoing in pursuit of the imagination’s Art, its end,” holding counterpoint, of course, to “a serviceable poetic practice, too often content to offer up hors d’oeuvres of the scenic and sentimental.” (“On Robert Duncan’s Ground Work”, from Active Boundaries: Selected Essays and Talks). He remains to this day in search of “not some dim reflection, or reflexive confession, but the actual as it respires in plain sight. Placement of words as the place meant.” (“Poetic Obligations”, from same). This actuality, however, is not some abstract ideal, transcendent of human intervention, huddled within the New Critical shell. Instead, the poem (and by extension, the book of poems) for Palmer is something set equally remote from the author as the reader, whose mutual participation is integral in any meaningful interpretive understanding.
It’s with some irony and agony, then, that in 1994 Palmer was asked to contribute to Danish publisher Iselin C. Hermann’s series of autobiographical “notebooks” from innovative American poets.
Iselin,
You ask me to connect the dots. You ask me if I remember the “old childhood drawings” where you connected the dots until a figure appeared. I remember connecting the dots.
Another poet asked to contribute, Rosemary Waldrop, had relatively little trouble producing a slight work of poetry-cum-diary, as is later recounted by Palmer, whereas he has only produced “notes for the notes.” The book-length poem form was not new. Modeled on the work of Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons or Louis Zukofsky’s “A”, it had since become a way to get around the pat digestibility of the lyric poem, the traditional vehicle constructed to convey meaning as tight as a spring and exact as clockwork. Given that context, poet Bernadette Mayer’s book-length collections of prose observations and poetic recordings from throughout the 1970’s (Memory, Studying Hunger) would have been read as both historically rooted and a novel resistance to dominant trends in contemporary poetry, like narrative epiphany and telegraphed meaning, or “linguistic transparency,” as Palmer will call it, the essence of written language found in letters, easy poetry, and unfortunately to Palmer, notebooks. “I remember… I remember” runs the first entry, as if he were priming the engine for a Proustian explosion that only ever simmers. Memory, however, soon becomes compulsive, not always charged with the potential to unfold onto more bountiful frontiers. No sooner than the book has built an anaphoric momentum, the second paragraph risks everything by invoking a memory of guilt, of a failed assignment. “You remind me that I never wrote about the sun for Brøndum’s Encyclopedia,” he continues to Iselin. This will be no smooth ride. The work will be fragmentary, “paratactic and deliberately haphazard,” as Palmer reflects in the afterword, prose droplets gathered and not even encouraged to coalesce.
Thus is The Danish Notebook, a glacially conflicted and short volume originally released in 1999, now reissued by Nightboat Books in a deep red, paperbound edition. The red cover exudes a misleading humility, resembling the kind of dispensable notebook one takes on vacation. Indeed, these are entries from a poet on vacation (in Denmark, but also Hawaii, and, mostly, Paris), though jetting between distant islands of prose can be churning. Along with a preface by Nightboat editor Kazim Ali, Palmer’s afterword provides much needed context regarding the book’s intentions, or anti-intentions. Palmer remains distant, questioning of the work:
Was I (was the work) however obliquely, constructing something akin to a poetics, or a specter of one, a poetics without program? A plot of sorts emerging, though far from what one finds in conventional narratives, fictional or otherwise?
The convention of non-authoritative form became a trope at the end of the 20th Century along with other bastardized, bachelor-theoretical adages: “There is nothing outside the text,” for example. Although some poets did utilize serial techniques gleaned from the French Surrealists or Oulipian writers of yore, such as Ron Silliman modeling his Tjanting (1981) according to the fibonacci sequence, there was an insistence that all poetry composition occurs, to some degree, beyond the author’s control. The breathing author ducks behind the categorical “author-function,” as Foucault called it in his lecture “What is an Author.” The Greek muse and the Romantic sublime spirit both have been supplanted by a system of functions in which the author is but a relay between the work’s composition and its consumption by the reader. Though Foucault later saw the death of the author less as a revolutionary possibility than a symptom of an evolution in literary critical perspective, its convenience served to bolster, rather than undercut, subsequent authors’ attempts to go on speaking through the corpse’s lips.
Palmer is of a generation that prided itself on its fidelity to refusal, to ignoring the easy paths more mainstream poets took. He harbors a prominent chip on his shoulder, then, regarding the imposed order to write The Danish Notebook. The notebook induces Kafka-levels of anxiety that, to no surprise given the book’s initial framing of failure, shade into self-flagellation.
I accepted your invitation because it seems an impossible thing for me to do, against my nature as a writer. Of course one should never have such a nature. If you discover what you do, you must erase it, as violently as possible.
It’s not unusual for a poetics born of reaction to express itself in such obligatory terms, just as it is not unusual for obligatory terms to become moral imperatives. The avant-garde has always fashioned and been fashioned by its own self-righteousness as fitfully as the status quo has insisted on its God-given stability. I suppose such moments as quoted above could elicit sympathy from other writers themselves, though not every writer is the ideal reader. Insight into the ugly feelings of authorship (I hesitate to invoke the term “imposter syndrome”) is a staple of artēs poetica. “This feeling of things beyond my abilities… a mixture of rapture and, inevitably, regret,” Palmer writes after finishing Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Although, there is a limit to the amount of mercy that can be granted to this low-down author before the evident fact of his traveling from beautiful European café to beautiful European café—sorrows of the flâneur.
Never one to presume a form at the outset, Palmer figures he can use the fatedness of this little book, doomed to be something he doesn’t really do or doesn’t even want to do, as its affective backbone: “I once thought I should find a form for this little book you have asked for, but now it seems to me that unformed would be better, a book at fault.” The final word refers to the geological-topographical term for a cleaving in two, or perhaps just the moment before the cleaving, the blindness of a crack not yet surfaced. Choreographer Margaret Jenkins, a frequent collaborator with Palmer, has used it for the title of their newest dance work together, Fault. The poetry he writes for the project recurs throughout The Danish Notebook. It’s a silent dance, sometimes accompanied by music—Palmer’s words acting as guides for both choreographer and dancers during the planning stages. Fault (the concept) also implies culpability, the cousin of responsibility and guilt, a failure to remain intact when faced with an imperative, say, to deliver a book on time. Fault is assumed, and most often through language, as an affirmation of a search for who was at fault. It’s always the fault’s fault for having surprised the earth by releasing its pent-up conclusion.
Fault is the very catalyst of Palmer’s notebook project, the repeated rupturing wherever flow would threaten the reader with enjoyment. Much is missing, yet all is in recovery of settling down. A lack of aphorism is especially notable given its prominence in contemporary lyrical prose works as well as given Palmer’s own penchant for critical statement. It’s a staple in many books by contemporary authors, for example, including fellow Nightboat authors, Bhanu Kapil and Nathanaël, whose paragraphic works utilize the authoritative statement to ironic ends. Their books, though bound by covers, never seem to end, and bear witness to the necessarily various act of composition; books, in a way, without subject or object. Like The Danish Notebook, in fact, Kapil’s sinewy Ban En Banlieue (2015) dramatizes the composition of a tenuously organized book-to-come, however with much less hand wringing. “The project fails at every instant,” she writes, “and you can make a book out of that and I do.”
Books by these authors bear only a formal resemblance to the notebook that is kept. There is no indication as to whether their entries were produced ex tempore, heavily edited, redacted, or completely fabricated. This is their wager and also their fascination. In ancient Greece, recording one’s day was known as hypomnemata. There’s no precise definition for the root hypomnema, though note or reminder seem to be frontrunners. The voice of such self-writing is distinct from the author-function. Rather than an exercise in style, it was just exercise, an impulse meant to be honed. The written repetition of the day’s interior and exterior vicissitudes became a memory aid that could later be used as a supplement to both speech (the most intimate connection between the brain and language) and instant memory-recall. It was also a way to hold oneself accountable to one’s iniquities, one’s faults, the intention being, of course, that one would improve by being thus reminded. Plato hated the convention, as it took the thinker away from an ideal presence with the preternatural knowledge of the world’s Forms. Follow your heart, not what it memorized. Greeks had a number of other techniques so as to not necessitate the intervention of an archive outside the mind (think of the rhyme one learned to remember the order of planets), but nothing beat good old pen and paper, the notebook.
Nathanaël and Kapil’s books could not easily be classified as hypomnemata. Palmer hews a bit closer to the form. His paragraphs appear sequential in the way one adds to a diary, even when he branches off into epistolary form, or, in one odd stretch, third person narration. However, his greatest inheritance from hypomnemata is the recognition of the self. Specifically, he occupies a somewhat horrified perspective of the self-reading self, to whom the act of reading is as indicting as it is informative. His guilt-telling has no redemptive payoff, thankfully, as in confession, but that doesn’t discount its formal heritage. Even in moments where it would seem Palmer seeks to unburden himself of the weight, his language remains within that orbit of abstract moral responsibility. Remarking on Merce Cunningham’s late dance work Ocean, he cites “its pure, unapologetic sense of movement as its own excuse for being,” vying conspicuously for a similar justifying description. “Excuse” is one of those words for which its Latin roots aren’t hard to surmise: ex causa, that is, being placed away from the site of cause or reason, outside the chain of events. Legally, it can be a tool of exoneration. Translated into the realm of poetry, it brings to mind the acts of psychologization and transcendence operating in the poetry of the Confessionals. To separate one from the case begs the question of why one was being tried in the first place. In such moments of tepidity, it would appear that Palmer never really got over his enemies, perhaps because he refused to, until now, venture anywhere near their territory.
The specter of regret haunts this book, an unconscious center charged by the very apparent anxieties. The speaker’s solitude stimulates “memories and dreams of all the women you have ever been with” which leads swiftly to “the pure experience of loss, limitless regret.” The most unsettling regret pertains to one specific woman of Palmer’s youth. “Two years ago, in the intense heat of August,” he begins, “I was wandering with a friend, the poet Norma Cole, though the streets of Paris… I offered to tell Norma of the incident, of which I had never previously spoken to anyone.” Passing through the Place Dauphine, “the unmistakable sex of Paris,” as Andre Breton dubbed it, Palmer is reminded of a brief summer fling with a dancer from Hungary. After having spent several days with the unnamed lover in Paris-typical sexual ennui, he witnesses, on the other side of a window, her abduction by apparent Hungarian emissaries. The day before, they had approached Palmer in a nightclub to warn of her being in danger, although it’s unclear whether he relayed that to the young woman.
I told the story to Norma as she ate ice cream and I drank a beer, a few hundred meters from where it had occurred. I felt it turning into fiction as I did so and wondered at this betrayal.
His life becoming an episode unnerves him. It’s not even close to approaching the effect of similar narratives in, say, Robbe-Grillet. It strikes me as a very perfunctory gesture. “A mirror sees for him,” he later poeticizes the episode (notably, in third person). The mirroring of Norma, in the current day, with the other woman, now completely lost to time and corrupted in memory further than she was betrayed in reality, happens at a remove of the speaker as he strolls through the “unmistakable” birth canal of the city, out of which this paramour emerged and into which she disappeared. Faithful to his own reactionary poetic tropes, he resists any urge to connect the dots, though certain blindnesses to the sexist tropes of concealment, mystery, and darkness do quite a bit of the work. He is a witness to the uninterrupted movement of poetry, nothing more. The scattered, unattributed citations pertaining to the sun attest to a foreclosure of any possibility to define it, though by its shine it unites many disparate fields: poetry, anthropology, biology, religion. He waxes provocative in the afterword:
Is there a Place Dauphine and was there ever? Can one “define” the sun anymore than one can define poetry? Are such questions for me to answer or for the reader, or neither?
What’s the importance of this passivity and retreat, which purports to confirm the death of the author, other than to alternatively confirm, by the timber of its voice, its indefatigable survival? In fact, there is only ever one entity that escapes illumination: the source itself.
Regarding Palmer’s placement of poetry in a transcendent, non-definitional place, I recall “The Dishonest Mailmen,” a poem from Robert Creeley, one of Palmer’s models and mentors. Famous for its lackadaisical truncations (“I see the flames, etc. / But do not care, etc.”), it constructs a polar distinction between two writing attitudes. “They are taking all my letters, and putting them into a fire,” it begins. Whether “they” refers to the mailmen, disgruntled readers, or the poems as word-vehicles themselves, is left inconclusive for a reason. It’s in the presence of the “poem supreme”—that for which courage is necessary, which is something “quite different” from the mere written poem—that the work of literature finds its justification.
In writing with an eye, or his “I” so to speak, toward a real past, Palmer fears that he is signing his very life away, consigning material that would have otherwise been a tool for either self-recognition or creative recycling to the fire of commodification. Reservation and hesitation become dyssynchronous engines around the project. It’s a wonder it ever reached any degree of completion:
Soon after sending off the contract, I found myself standing with my hands outstretched, held about eighteen inches apart. Someone asked, “What are you doing?” Embarrassed—I had momentarily forgotten there were others in the room—I said, “That’s the Denmark book.”
The notebook as hypomnematic machine, as a technology for self-recognition wrested parts of Palmer’s past and personality out from concealment about which, in his idealistic rejection of the personal, he would have been kept from feeling guilty. Violence is the only viable response to such irruptions, and in The Danish Notebook, Palmer acts out against the very myths of his artistic control. Though surely not the only poets to utilize autobiographical material, none were better than the Confessionals at sublating the awful truth to capital-P poetry’s tried and true formal conventions. Palmer displaces his own anxiety at the loss of purity in giving away his notes to a relinquishing of a secret guilt, specifically his collusive position at the disappearance of another objective purity, the young woman. Maybe he’s right: it doesn’t matter if she ever existed or not, as long as she fulfills the terms of the exchange.
The book’s reissue makes most sense in light of the present thirst for the paratactic autofiction of writers like Annie Ernaux and Herve Guibert, writers with their own hangups about the fealty we pay to form, truth, and convenient meanings. That Palmer included The Danish Notebook in his selection of essays, Active Boundaries, implies that the book, once finished, did become exemplary to something deeper in the author, though probably not supreme. The work certainly confused and exhausted its maker. The Danish Notebook stands as a testament to an artist surprised by the renewal of his own wonder, however ugly the surprise might have been. In that way, it’s instructive.