[To learn what to say to unlearn]

By Michael Palmer b. 1943 Michael Palmer

To learn what to say to unlearn

The order of islands here

The number of fingers

made from ideas

certain Bulgaria anywhere

grounds stairway statement

normal nature cases

Visitors from the Dog Star

filling up the house

Words for are and were not

If I knew it it’s what I thought

it was

Michael Palmer, "[To learn what to say to unlearn]" a part from The Book Against Understanding from The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995. Copyright © 1998 by Michael Palmer. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: The Lion Bridge (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1998)

Biography

Michael Palmer was born in New York City and educated at Harvard in the early 1960s, where he encountered Confessional poetry. His opposition to Confessionalism found root in a developing poetics when he attended the landmark 1963 Vancouver Poetry Conference, a three-week gathering where he met Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Clark Coolidge. Correspondence with those three poets greatly influenced Palmer’s early development . . .

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