In that pulse between orality and literacy, the history of thinking and breathing, something forced—to hurl. Somewhere someone is apologizing for existing.

Sideline aside, talk just to say, speak just to hey, sound just to chorus. Take long sustain sounds, remove the attack & decay to assemble tones. Lower & raise pitch, make the levels consistent, string together a long-ass DRONE.

And yet, like poetry, wrestling too is a practice of excess, of the unjustifiable and the unnecessary: the costuming, the tanning, the crafting of a distinct style in service of a vision of what becomes necessary in order to get through the day or death. 

It’s with some irony and agony that in 1994 Palmer was asked to contribute to Danish publisher Iselin C. Hermann’s series of autobiographical “notebooks” from innovative American poets.

You’re a poet who’s been at it for a while: you’ve published ten or fifteen books over thirty or forty years, and you’ve won prizes. You’ve had critics call you an Influence. But not lately.

“Next Year” can still be exciting to us because of how it occupies the material it’s made with, and what that kind of occupation might have to say about the way we read both poems and calendars.

In terms of words that slice two ways, “graphic” is distinct.