29:2 Autumn 1977

MICHAEL PALMER

The Meadow

“The Meadow” appeared with two other poems by Michael Palmer in the Autumn 1977 issue.  Palmer tells us:

“The Meadow” was written as homage both to Francis Ponge (“Le Pré”) and to Robert Duncan (“Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” the opening poem of his The Opening of the Field).  A homage, then, to the “field of resistance and attraction,” both linguistic and political, that poetry at its most challenging represents.  Besides citing Ponge and Duncan, and deriving its form from the particular seriality of Ponge, the work quotes from von Franz’s The Dance of the Bees as well as Géza Róheim’s Magic and Schizophrenia, two books important to both Duncan and me.  The poem or poem-sequence eventually appeared in Without Music (Black Sparrow Press, 1977), my third collection of poetry.  I imagine it could well be read as a small, personal ars poetica for that moment in time.

[DN, 1996]

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