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Michael Palmer (Artistic Associate) does have a biography, despite
all his denials. He was born, it’s true, despite his denials, and
then he grew up, despite his denials, and those of others. Where did he
grow up? In New York, a bit, in small rooms, and then elsewhere, here
and there. He enjoyed sports, as kids do; he read Beckett and Dante…and…and…as
kids do not. How did he grow? For a very long time hardly at all; he was
very small. He was almost as small as his little sky-blue paperback copy
of Three Dialogues of Plato. And then very suddenly he was not so small.
In fact, he became something like regular size. His trousers then were
often far too short, and his arms stuck way out of the sleeves of his
jacket. He looked at a lot of paintings and listened to Cage and Coltrane
and Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor and Morton Feldman and attended contemporary
dance performances wherever he could find them. He read the new poetry
by the new poets then considered parlous and strange, and disregarded
the rest. He left the country for a while, rather illegally, choosing
to spend some time in London and Paris and Florence and Malaga rather
than killing people in the Mekong Delta region. This caused some problems,
but the problems passed. Along the way he accumulated a couple of degrees
near the Charles River and began to write books, of which by now there
are quite a few. He moved to San Francisco in 1969, for the waters, and
a couple of years later, thanks to his wife, met Margaret Jenkins. Looking
for trouble, Margy asked whether he would like to do some collaborating,
and so he did, and so they have, for thirty years.
(Michael Palmer’s latest collections of poetry include The Promises
of Glass (New Directions, 2000), and Codes Appearing (Poems 1979-1988)
(New Directions, 2001). A new book of poems, Company of Moths, is scheduled
for publication early in 2005. He has published translations from French,
Russian and Brazilian Portuguese, and has engaged in multiple collaborations
with painters such as Sandro Chia, Irving Petlin and Gerhard Richter.
He has received two poetry writing fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts and was a Guggenheim Fellow for poetry in 1989-1990. During
the years 1992-1994 he held a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund
Writer’s Award. In 1999 he was named a Chancellor of the Academy
of American Poets, and in the spring of 2001 he received the Shelley Memorial
Prize from the Poetry Society of America.) |