I found “The Laughter of the Sphinx” by Michael Palmer on one of our bookshelves a couple of days ago. I finished it today. Back in the early 80’s while still an undergrad at UTAustin, I spent an inordinate amount of time in the Half-Price Book store which was then located at 15th and Lavaca (now torn down and replaced by a bank building, like much of Austin). I would spend hours going through the record albums, or poetry section, both of which were rather large. (Poetry is no longer a very large section in any of the Half-Price book stores nowadays). Emily Dickinson wrote that she knew something was poetry when the back of her head exploded when she read it. In the early 80’s, while my head did not explode, I would feel the words thicken on the page, taking on a physicality which went beyond the page. This would happen even if I could not understand what the poem was saying. I felt this when I read Pound and Ashbery for the first time, and still happens whenever I read Dickinson. It happened when I read Michael Palmer’s “Notes for Echo Lake” standing in the cold aisle of the poorly heated Half-Price Books. Over the years I continued to read and buy copies of Palmer’s work. I’m not sure he has gotten easier to read, or I am not as shallow a reader as I was in my early 20’s, but I did find more to hang on to than I did in my youth. If you have not read Palmer, “The Laughter of the Sphinx” would be a good place to start. It is an abstract and surrealistic delight, while sometimes taking on the concrete feel of the Objectivists. Perhaps I’ve been reading too much George Oppen lately, but several times in “The Laughter of the Sphinx” the poems read like Objectivist pieces. In an interview I read with Palmer decades ago, he said he did not like the term avant-garde because it assumed a direction. I love getting lost in his poetry.
(February 22, 2025)
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