The Laughter of the Sphinx

by Michael Palmer

Overview

A powerful, indelible new collection by Michael Palmer—“one of America’s most important poets” (The Harvard Review)

Michael Palmer’s new book—a collection in two parts, “The Laughter of the Sphinx” and “Still (a cantata—or nada—for Sister Satan)”—contains 52 poems.

The title poem begins “The laughter of the Sphinx / caused my eyes to bleed” and haunts us with the ruin we are making of our world, even as Palmer revels in its incredible beauty. Such central tensions in The Laughter of the Sphinx—between beauty and loss, love and death, motion and rest, knowledge and ignorance—glow in Palmer’s lyrical play of light and entirely hypnotize the reader. The stakes, as always with Palmer, are very high, essentially life and death: “Please favor us with a reply / regarding our one-time offer / which will soon expire.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811225557
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	06/28/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	497 KB

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.

Editorial Reviews

The poems in this coruscating two-part collection wander there like tragicomic masks, raging at the idiocies of the world or probing how meaning is made when answers escape us. In Palmer's work a "song could mean anything" or "the song might mean nothing," so readers have permission to make what they will out of his words. And the music in these verses never exhausts itself, as a single breath contains generous space for paradox…Like a troubadour witness…Palmer recomposes the measures of poetic song for our time…

The New York Times Book Review - Benjamin Hollander

06/20/2016
In his latest work, stalwart avant-gardist Palmer (Thread) makes use of repetition in sonic textures, word choice, and themes to let the varied elements of his poems echo and reverberate, creating a sense of meaning and movement amid what is seen and felt. “Mineral light and whale light,/ light of memory, light of the eye,” he writes in a sequence prepared for a dance collaboration. The collection’s two-part structure complicates such binaries as creation and destruction, life and death, and momentum and inertia. Palmer toes middle ground in order to demonstrate the fragility of modern life. “Let us/ write without meaning/ to” he exclaims, cleverly breaking his lines. His poems advocate for being both present and grounded, yet remaining capable of dreaming into the future. The work also points toward the hope of tuning in to a common frequency: “to dwell/ to dwell upon/ to dwell among” in order to become fully cognizant of one’s surroundings. As he writes in the second section, “Still”: “Things get lost/ things whose words/ can no longer be heard// Still we try to find them/ and place them/ inside the silences.” Palmer chooses to dwell among the limitations of his medium to find the beauty that fleetingness creates. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"Palmer is among America’s most elegant—and abstract—heirs to modernist poetry."

The Believer

"Palmer’s poems can suggest multiverses, silent but spectrally there."

Hyperallergic - James Gibbons

"Magnificent … an astringent blend of surrealism and symbolism."

The New York Times Book Review

"Depending on the poem, the laughter here is by turns bitter, wistful even playful, but typically inflected by a sense of enigma. Returning again and again to songs and singing, to voices and voicelessness, Palmer continues to push the boundaries of poetry with dream songs that explore the place of poetry in a surreal world 'where headless horseman sing/fevered songs/of self and war.' Palmer writes with uncanny precision about this world, a world that this book finds to be as beautiful as it is violated, and his poetry often achieves an ecstatic pitch, but one in which pain is rarely absent."

Free Verse - Jon Thompson

"The most influential avant-gardist working, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation. His genius is for making the world strange again."

Village Voice

"Exemplarily radical."

John Ashbery

"The music in these verses never exhausts itself […] Palmer recomposes the measures of poetic song for our time."

Benjamin Hollander

"Palmer manages to cut deep into the unknowable appeal of the best poetry, some of which Palmer can claim to have written."

Flavorwire - Jonathon Sturgeon