Notes for Echo Lake

by Michael Palmer

Book by Palmer, Michael

Genres: Poetry

93 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Michael Palmer is a poet associated with the Language Poetry movement; he is also a translator and has worked on art with painters and dancers.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

I sort of distrust Michael Palmer’s poetry the way I distrust goth kids wearing cowls on summer days. Is the world really so puzzling and impenetrable, language as full of smoke and aporia as Palmer’s image horde suggests? Or does he just like the clothes? While not exactly ersatz, there’s a feeling of something reverentially borrowed in his verse—from Celan, from the French modernists—and turned not to light a new room, but to mood-light the one others have already shown us.

Still, like those summer goths, there’s a tenacity in Palmer’s commitment to his pose, which he’s stuck to through every weather whatever the reigning fashion, that’s hard not to admire. What I think of as pretentious in his verse seems increasingly like a rearguard action against the loss of room for the serious in mainstream American culture and poetry. I’m coming to like the torn pages and flaming boats in his poems like I learned to like the elf songs in Tolkien; as assertions of a single-minded devotion to the interior world one’s created, charged with the plangent ambience of a vanishing age that never was.

[W.B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Half of this book is rather tepid throwback surrealism. The other half varies from good to great poetry. Palmer's position in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E pantheon has always been rather marginal. One wonders if the language poets were jealous of his assimilation into the culture...which seems to have been much easier for him than for the inner cadre of more formalistically intrepid writers. This faster assimilation was no doubt due to the fact that he was basically writing in a received tradition and just importing certain shared modi operandi (disjunctive methodology, linguistic concerns,etc.) He basically writes a lyric poetry rich in surreal imagery, which means his writing was more recognizable as poetry to obtuse people when it appeared. He's at least half French and his warm friendships with French poetry (famously Hocquard and Albiach) are more than personal...they are cultural. He is a bridge figure as such and interesting in that regard also. Poems that I love in here would include "Song of the Round Man," many poems from the titular sequence, and the tiny but powerful "A book of." There are others. It's worth owning. And it has great cover art by Irving Petlin, creepyasfuck. I like the recent poetry I've been seeing by him and really want to pick up that Company of Moths book (is that the title?). I love when he writes those tiny knifelike poems that reflect the world with their cold metallic surface. A difficult art to master!

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Every time I take a look at this book, I'm amazed at how one starts a book like this. Michael would probably kill me for saying this, but it's much like Ginsberg in that he was taking his life and making it epic. Michael does this in a much quieter way, a more personal way, but it is no less demanding than Homer. I'm humbled and in constant awe. A remarkable set of poems.

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps my favorite Palmer book...it's absolutely gorgeous and one of my top ten poetry books of all time!

[Phoebe · Rating 4 out of 5]

My ears ache from all the echoing, the lake's illusions of depth and reflections and distortions. "As water below thought below object."

And the emptying voice. The emptying words.

It's hard not to read the recurring spiral as something past its moment - nearly everything else manages to avoid that sense for me.

[Kate C · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a tattoo of a line from from "notes for echo lake 4" it says "whose is the voice that empties." It is wonderful reminder for me. This book really meant a lot for me while I was struggling through some rough things in college.

[Matthew M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential part of my summer 2008 reading.

[Jeremy Allan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have enjoyed other Michael Palmer books more. In this case, I became frustrated with a certain regularity of sentence structure. Maybe I was just spoiling for a fight.