Michael Palmer

Michael Palmer was born in New York City in 1943. While at Harvard College he edited Joglars magazine with Clark Coolidge. He took his graduate degree in Comparative Literature at Harvard and moved to San Francisco in 1969. Since 1974 he has collaborated on over a twenty dance works with Margaret Jenkins. He has also collaborated with numerous composers and performance artists. His radio plays, Idem I-IV, were produced by Eric Bauersfeld for KQED radio in 1980. Books and chapbooks include Plan of the City of O (Barn Dream Press, 1971), Blake’s Newton (Black Sparrow Press, 1972), C’s Songs (Sand Dollar Press, 1973), The Circular Gates (Black Sparrow Press, 1974), Without Music (Black Sparrow Press, 1977), Transparency of the Mirror (Little Dinosaur Press, 1980), Alogon (Tuumba Press, 1980), Notes for Echo Lake (North Point Press, 1981), First Figure (North Point Press, 1984), Songs for Sarah (with the painter Irving Petlin, Lobster Cove Editions, 1987), Sun (North Point Press, 1988), For a Reading, (Dia Art Foundation, 1988), An Alphabet Underground (After Hand, 1993), and At Passages (New Directions, 1995). The latter received the America Award for Poetry in 1995. A book of prose, The Danish Notebook, was published by Redaktion Brondum in Copenhagen in the spring of 1998. (The American edition was published by Avec Press in the fall of 1999.) The Lion Bridge (Selected Poetry 1972-1995) also appeared in the spring of 1998, from New Directions, and The Promises of Glass, a new collection of poetry, was issued by the same press in the year 2000. He is the editor of Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics (North Atlantic Books, 1983) and translated Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, by Alain Tanner and John Berger, for the same press. He has published a number of other translations, including (with Norma Cole) The Surrealists Look at Art, from Lapis Press. Painters with whom he has collaborated include Micaëla Henich , Sandro Chia, Gerhard Richter, Irving Petlin and Augusta Talbot, among others. His work has been translated into over thirty languages. He has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for poetry and was a Guggenheim Fellow in poetry during 1989-90. He is a contributing editor to Facture magazine and has taught and lectured at many colleges and universities around the United States, in Asia and in Europe. During the years 1992-1994 he held a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund Writer’s Award. Theory of Tables, a translation of the poetry of Emmanuel Hocquard, was published in 1992 by o-blek editions. With Michael Molnar and John High, he has helped to edit and translate a volume of poetry by the Russian poet Alexei Parshchikov, Blue Vitriol, (Avec Press, 1994). An evening-length dance work, The Gates (Far Away Near), in collaboration with Margaret Jenkins, Paul Dresher and Rinde Eckert, had its first Bay Area performances in September of 1993 and was shown at New York’s Lincoln Center in the “Serious Fun Festival” in July of 1994, and has toured throughout the United States and Europe. Another dance work with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Fault, had its premiere in the fall of 1996. With Régis Bonvicino and Nelson Ascher, he edited Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain: 20 Contemporary Brazilian Poets, published by Sun & Moon Press in 1997. It reappeared in an expanded edition, from Green Integer Books, in 2003. In the spring of 2001 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America., and Codes Appearing (Poems 1979-1988) was published by New Directions. From1999 to 2004, Palmer served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2005, the Academy awarded him the Wallace Stevens Prize for Poetry. His most recent academic appointments were as Distinguished Visiting Poet in the graduate writing programs of St. Mary’s College of Moraga and the California College of the Arts during the 2006-2007 academic year. His book, Company of Moths, was published by New Directions in April of 2005. A selected essays and talks, Active Boundaries, also from New Directions, came out in July of 2008. Thread, a new collection of poems, appeared in the spring of 2011 from New Directions. Also in 2011, in conjunction with Palmer’s appointment as Visiting International Poet at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Oxford University Press published Madman With Broom, a selection of poems with Chinese translations by Yunte Huang. During a two-week Paris residency supported by the Tamaas Foundation in June of 2011, Palmer completed a bilingual film script, Notre Musique, with the poet Liliane Giraudon. A new dance work, Light Moves, in collaboration with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, had its premiere at the Novellus Theater in San Francisco in November of 2011, with texts and structure by Michael Palmer. In May 2012, Palmer received the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in June the Northern California Book Critics Award for Thread. In June, he also attended the “poesie festival Berlin” to celebrate the publication of Gegenschein, a selected poems with German translations. His poetry collection, The Laughter of the Sphinx, was published by New Directions in the spring of 2016, followed by Little Elegies for Sister Satan in May of 2021.