SOURCE: Palmer, Michael, and Keith Tuma. “An Interview with Michael Palmer.” Contemporary Literature XXX, no. 1 (spring 1989): 1-12.

In the following interview, which took place in 1986, Palmer discusses some theoretical influences on his poetry.

Michael Palmer was born in New York City in 1943 and educated at Harvard, where he received an M.A. in comparative literature. His books of poems include Blake's Newton (1972), The Circular Gates (1974), and Without Music (1977) from Black Sparrow Press, and Notes for Echo Lake (1981) and First Figure (1984) from North Point Press. He lives in San Francisco, where he is on the faculty of poetics at the New College of California.

Palmer writes a poetry which foregrounds problems of language and signification. While this has led him to be identified with the so-called Language Realism poets, his work actually predates the critical polemics and journals responsible for that much-abused rubric. As early as Blake's Newton, for...