First Figure

by Michael Palmer

Poems deal with nature, symmetry, travel, fiction, music, illusion and reality, communication, and memory

Genres: Poetry

79 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

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

[Tristan]

This was a really fantastic collection of poems (now if only I could remember which book of literary criticism dealt with it). I loved every minute of the book, although I think my favorite poem was probably the fascinating and polyvocal Idem 1-4 which "narrates" a series of conversations that deal with travel and place and self and art. This is a book about speaking and about communication and about language, but it doesn't enact the separation of language from speech (and from communication) that much LANGUAGE poetry does, even as it embraces nonsense and wildness and the complication of incoherence and power and the slippage of meaning even as we create it over and over again. Every single poem feels communicative--the text never gets away from you and makes you ask "Was there even meaning in what I just read?" even as you ask "What did it mean?"
As an example, we can look at "Sign," which begins

Are you asleep M. Valdemar
The survival is untenable
an impossibility of dying
the way smoke rises and comes to rest
overhead, about the light--
that impulse to tell you intimate things
among the floats in a foreign place
projecting oneself into the details
the a of anvil for example, anterior,
atopia, at the particular unstable moment

and which ends

Language paralyzes the tongue
and before morning the father is gone
I was born with no right hand
below the street of diamonds
in a city of constant groans
Experience cannot be described
except by us. We
fled down the marble steps
We spoke the prime sentence and dissolved
Everything of smoke was ours

This poem latches on to the idea of the sign and takes it into a space where the poem itself can be allowed to signify "sign" and the making of signs plays out on the sound and the mystery of the poem so that when it declared "Experience cannot be described / except by us" there's a poignancy and a hope in that and in its complement "Everything of smoke was ours" where we can lay claim to the ephemeral nature of communication itself. The logic of breaking words down into parts is narrated and enacted, giving it an additional layer of meaning that allowed me to slow down and actually read it--especially helpful when we reached the poem immediately after "Sign", "Left Unifinished Sixteen Times" which is a more obvious enacting of the theory just felt (if not understood) when reading "Sign":

I is the director of three letters and the dead director.

And I is the reader's "not yet" within the letter.

I includes the one incapable of mentioning death in the event, or else the director or else the dead letter.

(This could be said not to be written.)

For the purposes of examining the book as something about words and signs and signifying, I also especially like the triad of poems "Echo", "Echo (alternate text)", and "Echo (a commentary)" as well as "Musica Ficta," "First Figure", "Six Illustrations," "Dearest Reader," "Lens", "(Overheard at the) Mayakovsky Station", "French for April Fool's", and "The Theory of the Flower". (Idem 1-4 is also probably in this group.) The other poems are about a wide variety of topics, including music, loneliness, place, travel, interpersonal relationships (writ large and in specific, although the actual specifics are tantalizingly absent), and the body. Each poem has a tendency to reach into a bunch of these subjects repeatedly and fluidly so that it becomes difficult to tell the difference between speech and music, people, and places, speech and writing. These poems make me want to put the whole of the book in my review, so I think I will give a few short passages from some favored poems.

"Idem 1": "Let's see. how cold you describe this to a listener? How can I describe this to our listeners? My head s in a steel vise I have been on a long voyage--a sea voyage--I have been travelling, sailing in a white ship, the weather is perfect surface of the water calm I am a woman or man over seven feet tall emerald green in color, malachite blue actually, tourmaline, carnelian, opal, I have been on a long voyage . . . "
"Idem 3": "Tree and book and book and tree and book. Music we refuse to forget"
"Echo": "which resounds. Re-sounds. Where first / would follow. The letter he had lost reap- / eared in his palm. Identity was the cause"

The whole book is an astonishing work.

[Jane]

If you like Ashbery you must read this - not that it's so like Ashbery, I just think that might be an index of who would like it, though I guess I know some people who don't like Ashbery who love it too, so never mind. Anyway slight, light, unbelievably beautiful.