Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988

by Michael Palmer

Codes Appearing combines in a single volume three seminal and long unavailable collections by Michael Palmer. This volume rescues from limbo three of his most beautiful poetry Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure , and Sun (1981, 1984, 1988). Making available a great deal of Palmer's most influential, exciting, and stunning work, Codes Appearing is a landmark volume. The significance of his writing is every day more recognized. "It is impossible," as The Boston Review noted, "to overstate Palmer's importance." "Michael Palmer,'" as Joshua Clover declared in The Village Voice , "is the most influential avant-gardist working, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation.... And his books, including the essential '80s triptych of Notes for Echo Lake, First Figure , and Sun , are organized not by story but by a dreamland of calculus and sway....[Palmer's] genius is for making the world strange again."

Genres: Poetry

254 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2001

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

[Patrick Duggan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Michael Palmer is the Depeche Mode of poetry.

For someone like me, growing up on the East coast, with the only bookstore in one hundred miles being a Barnes and Noble, I thought the poetic world revolved around James Tate, John Ashbury, Charles Simic, and Jorie Graham. When I was first handed Michael Palmer's "Sun" it was a much needed and bewilderingly amazing bridge to Language, Post-language, and the greater intellectual possibilities inherent in verse.

If Ted Berrigan and Bruce Andrews had a son (God help us), he might be Michael Palmer. Palmer presents his life and his periphery with room enough in the words and style to make, as readers, our own. There is freedom for everyone within the pages of Codes Appearing. There is no extraneous within Palmer's language, every color makes sense, every turn of phrase, every image builds on the fragment and suggestion surrounding it.

In his "Baudelaire Series" Palmer writes for and after the heavy weights of poetic history. He pays homage but also builds and brews his own voice, using the shreds of history and tradition to build his own platform on the heads of giants. He moves swiftly from Rilkeesque verse to Oppen's sparse line, to prose poems worthy of Edson and Wright, all written in the same searching vein of consciousness.

He pairs a bare-bones approach to verse with seeming plays and monologues, with found text, with implied text, and creates whole short stories embedded with one or two lines. His play with form and space, taking breath or inflating it, alter our perception of the possibility of verse and intellect. His use of refrain, something amateur hands easily squander, is both masterful and adds to the layers of word and intent. Poetic history is colored sand from a tourist trap, and Michael Palmer's Codes Appearing is the glass jug encasing it.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m sure one of the reasons people like Palmer’s poetry is that it seems rigorous and open at the same time. There’s a rich, many noded structure within which to make meaning. However, the syntax and lineation of First Figure felt frustratingly closed, free of gaps that invite the reader to fill them. Instead, it felt like the unlooping of the same circular thought over and over across the line breaks—“There is interest in being able to feel what you see / an unparalleled achievement of the imagination / even in January, and then to fall back / from the effect of an ancient tent / or text called the Suburban Blend / onto a patterned carpet.” Or “From the speaker’s place of speech there’s nothing / a headless man, woman, or dog / at the foot of the cliff perhaps / or the assignment: to describe the sea / as best you can, the sound of the drip / then return to where it began / amid the errors and incomprehension.” This is to say that in First Figure Palmer in almost every poem manages to hold a mirror to the reader’s own act of attention, proposing meaning as not something received but the filling of a structure by the reader etc etc blah. But here this isn’t brought into relation to much else—and this is exactly what Baudelaire Series succeeds so brilliantly at. The smaller syntactical units, shorter lines and repetition allow several things to happen.

...with the mechanism of the larynx
around an inky center
leading backward-forward

into sun-snow
then to the frozen sun itself...

Palmer lets the image have its own space—the words are a thing congealing before he pulls the rug out from under them. Transformations here seem more improbable and even as things are taken away, repetition piles ghost on ghost.

...Now it is a house
Now it is a vacant house
(It will ask something of song)
Now it’s the liar’s burning house

It’s turbulent, dynamic—gave me a reason to invest in the poems. Wish I had more time to do so. And thanks to Jason L for lending me this copy.

[Eric Phetteplace · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am stunned that this is the highest rating book here I've read. It's good postmodern poetry but lacking in places, some failed experiments and some word juxtaposition that are more random than insightful. But overall Palmer was one of the people who convinced me that poetry doesn't have to be incredibly boring descriptions of flowers and women's hair.

[Melzanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

michael palmer is a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet with sparse, yet thought provoking poems...which i love and aspire to...while a lack of humor does permeate the collection, palmer's deftness detracts from the semi-arid tone. he's kinda kick ass.

[Kevin Holden · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite poetry collections

[Brooks Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

FANTASTIC POETRY. Changed the way I thought about syntax and uses absence as a way of showing presence. Notes for Echo Lake in particular f——in rules! Love love love the weirdness, let's keep it up y'all.

[Wesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notes for Echo Lake (03/27/2023)

First Figure (03/28/2023): Really like “Echo” and “Book of the Yellow Castle.” They’re similar to a certain vein of my own work. Kinda uncanny.

Sun (03/29/2023): “Sun” is very good.

[Zoe Thorman · Rating 3 out of 5]

beautiful and playful and nonsensical but a little too esoteric even for me!