Prose 22

By Michael Palmer b. 1943 Michael Palmer

Plan of the City of O. The great square

curves down toward the cathedral. The

water runs out into night where the patron

saint still maintains his loft. He enters

from the lower level and pulls up the ladder

after him. The woman and children and

most of the old men spend their time painting

pictures of the ladder. The rest lay the

three kinds of stone or type the performance

for the eastern quarter. There the first

colony left its box-shaped mark. But

the sun always goes down in several places,

so the clocks serve as maps. And at the

end of the nearest mountain stands the

larger and less perfect box.

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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