The Laughter of the Sphinx

by Michael Palmer

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 “Please favor us with a reply / regarding our one-time offer / which will soon expire.”

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published June 7, 2016

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

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mostly found these poems strange and inaccessible; I’ve come away with no clear sense of what they were about or what techniques the author used. My two favorites were “Shrine” (which reads, in its entirety: “The plastic / bodhisattvas / outnumbered us on the climb / to enlightenment”) and “After” (“to write a poem amidst the dust / amidst the dust / storm of history is barbaric”).

[Chelsea Duncan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful, darkly haunting book of poems with really stunning visuals and rich language. Only one star less because, as with any poetry book, not all the poems resonated with me personally.

[Jerrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm still learning about poetry and seeing my thinking about it develop. For this collection, I found it a little uneven. There are some great poems in this collection, but there were also quite a few that felt disjointed and nonsensical. I would, however, read more by this author if I came across it.

[Jebediah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Musical, precise, inexplicable.

[Louis Cabri]

These poems provide very good examples that show why poetry and sentimentality often characterise different ontological states of perception.

Added later:

To try to say what is extraordinary about Michael Palmer’s book: an analogy I have at hand now, the circumstance of the Near-Death Experience. Science appears to have confirmed there is such an event as the NDE and it can include out-of-body experience. NDEs infer that consciousness is a sort-of electromagnetic aura generated and unique to but separable from the material body. It allows a man who has suffered a heart attack and has even been declared dead to step out of his body while doctors continue working on it and to go over to see what his wife is up to a mile away from the hospital but then get back in time to be revived. It is as if Michael Palmer’s book has been written after the finality of a cultural death event of massive, even civilisational, proportions has occurred. Regret for this situation, yearning for what is no longer, precious prophetic tropes and curses, all sentiments are completely absent from this book. The poems have a hush over them. The book terrifies and it is perhaps because the poems assume and indeed articulate truth as experience, which is scarce in poetry any more.

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If you're wondering whether there is any "beyond" or "escape" from being trapped within superficial narrative logics of successful sequential formalisms (New American Poetry --> Language Poetry --> Conceptual Writing, or pick your own strand for or against this one), and one that is not exhausted before it even begins to repeat itself as a poetic re-run, then Palmer's symbolism and use of metaphor may read as astonishingly fresh and courageous.

[Haines Eason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not Company of Moths by any stretch--nevermind what Paul Auster thinks--but a feat, surely. Feat's really a low bar of a word, though, when you consider what Palmer, at his best, can do... When he transcends, which is more often than most, he reminds you that there are heights yet and forever upward to which any artist must aspire.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first time reading Palmer and I'm into it. Maybe not the best place to start but I'm glad I jumped in here. "Poem Devoid of Meaning" instantly became a favorite.

I have removed my heart
and placed it on the deck

the better for all to examine it

[hesione · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guiltily (because a bunch of the poets were dicks), I love modernist poetry. Michael Palmer being described as the heir to modernist poets is accurate.

[Minā · Rating 3 out of 5]

Does the kingfisher on a wire tell a tale?

[C. Varn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even for a poet so deeply linked to Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Charles Olson, Michael Palmer can seem intimidatingly enigmatic. Yet, it is not that his language is necessarily difficult nor that his references are hyper-obscure. It is rather how Palmer plays with silences and ekphrasis that makes his poetry so different. It is how Palmer can make one claim, and then later cut against it, leaving the reader to figure out the meaning from what Palmer cuts away. The Laughter of the Sphinx, his most recent collection, continues with this thread of development: it’s not inaccessible but it is difficult, and Palmer’s references, dialectical inversions, and strategic use of elliptical reference and silence abound through the collection.

The Laughter of the Sphinx works by contrast between movement and sound, life and death, light and dark in dialectical tension. This is seen immediately in the series “Light Moves (1-6)” which is based on a collaboration with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company and is a set of poems designed to be performed. The pairings continue when he writes in that sequence, “mineral light and whale light / light of memory, light of the eye” in a poem about movement and expressed in sound. The simple language actually plays to emphasis the complication of the poems.

Palmer has no small amount of meta-commentary embedded in his work as a guide to reading and understanding it. In the title poem of the collection, Palmer’s narrative states that “sad-eyed scholars and mournful scribes” listen to the “the laughter of the Sphinx/ endlessly reading, endlessly echoing.” Reflection, a mild pessimism and confusion pervade the work. The reader also realizes that what is not said is as important as what is.

The importance of silence and complexity is maintained through the book. In “Poem (Oct-Nov 2013)”, Palmer writes “It is true / that we do not, / that a measureless silence / writes in our place.” This shows up again in “Untitled (27 vi 2013), “unwording —/ he thought // the page / swept clean.” Yet Palmer still sees writing as important even is incorrect or impossible, in “Proposition,” “To write as perfectly as Euclid / was always the goal / even as he turned out / to be perfectly wrong.”

Again one can see that these highly complex poems are underscored by short and sparse lineation, repetitive themes, references to light, and simple vocabulary. This continues to guide the reader through even the most emotionally or metaphysically complex poems in the collection. In “Still (A Cantata—or Nada—for Sister Satan):

And the children, with their knowledge of death

place sound upon sound

stone upon stone

fire upon fire

Palmer’s narrator has children confront death symbolically, and in simple language, Palmer indicates that those children continue to build regardless of knowledge of death. Palmer, however, doesn’t let this sentiment sit easily, in the poem “After,” he states “And to write a poem / beneath the sickle moon / is barbaric” referencing both Basho and Adorno. One cannot tell if it is the beauty of the light of the moon or the unyielding gaze in light of horror that renders the act barbaric.

This book is not sure how to address the horrors that are referenced or alluded to in its pages, which include 2011 Fukushima disaster and the impending changes in the natural world. In the poem “In the Memory of Ivan Tcherepnin,” another ekphrastic work, Palmer states “So many sounds flower but are not flowers” suggesting the impossibility of capturing ideas in sound and sounds in ideas . We cannot truly represent nature even if we are both part of it and mimic it. Our building and actions of creation, for Palmer, are paradoxically both a resistance against death and often the cause of it.

The Sphinx laughs because there is no answer to the riddles and Palmer wants us to dwell in those complexities awhile mainly by considering what can’t be said and what can’t be expressed. Yet Palmer resists total nihilism in his poetry by celebrating the act of creation itself even if it is “perfectly wrong.”

Published originally at Hong Kong Review of Books.