PEN Georgia Interviews Michael Palmer

For the PEN Georgia project, "Writers on Social Issues," Michael Palmer speaks with Nuka Ghambashidze about poetry and social activism. "It can be said that you are the true 'bastion' of literature and poetry, mastering the expression through word and art," Ghambashidze begins. From there: 

Do you believe in the impact of artists’ loud engagement in social activism?

MP: A complicated question, and obviously one that has been debated virtually since the origins of the arts in organized society, and one that depends greatly on specific historical moment and place. Let us say that “loud engagement” is often part of the picture, occasionally effective, often silenced, and often effective, ironically, by virtue of its suppression. We must also not underestimate the power of quiet refusal or resistance, the silences that are also part of poetry’s measures, and that are anything but passive. Does poetry make anything happen? Auden grieved that it didn’t, but it was and is something happening among other things happening. We must insist on its good faith when it calls out for justice and the truths of the creative imagination. As to the arts in the United States, and poetry in particular in our wildly materialistic society, we must always ask: Is anyone listening? Is anyone responding? In this case, both yes and no are correct answers. That is, we dwell in paradox, which is always interesting, even if it leaves us dwelling as well in uncertainty. “Instrumental Poetry,” poetry designed to directly effect change, can sometimes produce results, but it also risks succumbing to that debased language of power it aims to challenge. What I’m struggling to say is that it can mimic all too well that very discourse it hopes to counter, mutate into agit-prop, and thus be coopted and neutralized.

PEN: What are the artistic forms and mediums that you work with, and how do you choose what to channel through them? Is it the message that defines the form, or rather the purpose?

MP: I don’t work with preordained forms. Rather, I allow the form to announce itself as I converse with the poem about its desires, or our shared desires, and the apparent necessities of expression. At the same time, I work in an echo chamber where formal measures and historical forms come forward, announce themselves, and enter the picture. Thus my “Little Elegies for Sister Satan” (to appear in my next book), converse with the various forms of elegy we receive from classical letters, yet diverge to find their own voicings and purpose and moment. I imagine them as polyvocal responses to the madness of our time, the rampant, corrupt authoritarianism, and the schizo-ravings of those in power. I suppose they contain an element of satire, and certainly of absurdism as inspired by the Russian absurdist, or oberiu poets and prose writers, as well as many others before them in that noble tradition. (You can also find variations on the sonnet form throughout my work, to cite only one other instance.) What interests me is “active form,” form that informs the work under hand and guides it along its path toward some opening, some awareness of things as they are and things as they might become.

Continue reading at PEN Georgia.