Michael’s Palmer’s short biography sets him apart from the Language School of poets as one who still uses lyricism because he believes that narratives are inevitable in poetry. In his poem, “I Do Not” however, we still see the kind of evasion of directness that puts him firmly in relation to this school, as the epigraph and first lines are clearly a comment on language and its limitations. While the speaker in this poem claims to “not know English,” the poem itself communicates a story to the reader alone, while the speaker remains alienated from his surroundings. This is an unique play as far as language poetry goes, in that it does not alienate the reader from the writer, but rather the speaker from his listeners. This idea speaks to Lyn Hejinian observation of how relationships are dependent on common language and “personhood inevitably raises the issue of using language for thinking and socializing” (Perril 228).
From the start the reader is aware that speaker ultimately wishes to communicate something about the latest war, and yet as the poem goes on it seems that life his happening around him. There are other, more common things he can’t communicate as well. “When hungry, can do no more than point repeatedly at my mouth…cannot seek the requisite permission / as outlined in the recent protocol // Such as: May I utter a term of endearment.” Basic needs are not readily communicated and therefor more readily met – to eat and pursue romance – because of this loss of language, of which the origins are as yet unknown to the reader. The reader gets as sense for the tension between the person being at once accessible and yet not at all, even on the line level as Perril observes, when the speaker says that without English there is “No way to speak of my past or hopes for the future, of my glasses / mysteriously shattered in Rotterdam.” In this case a seemingly trivial fact follows a more abstract thought that cuts to the anxiety of the speaker’s heart.
This trend continues as the speaker swings between the pendulum of not being able to communicate preferences – as in which paintings he prefers or the jokes he likes to tell – but then the communication gap in letters to presumable old friends, and then the eerie image that leaves the reader wondering: “the almond-eyed face that peered from the well.” But then back to his experience of a rose and the continued games, but suddenly a village disappears – another deeply affecting line, one that the speakers is unable to communicate.
The final turn in the poem brings us back to the war he is unable to address, and we get the sense that, given the many names he’s been handed, “Mr. Twisted, The / One Undone, The Nonrespondent, The Truly Lost Boy, and Laughed- / At-By-Horses,” that the speaker is a victim of the war, that his inability to communicate is a result of his involvement in it. The second to last line seems the most important one. “They have named it The Ultimate Combat between Nearness and Distance,” which says something both about the war, but also about the experience the speaker now has of actually having known English at some time, but now unable to use it to express himself and communicate his needs. He intones again, one last time, “I do not know English.” Because Palmer sticks to a lyrical form we get a story here, of a man’s life, and yet the subject matter of a man who loses language is a comment on language poetry in itself.
A question the Language Poets have brought up for me, one that holds for many of the schools we have read this semester, is how and why being deliberately incommunicable gives an author authority. I suppose that’s why I am drawn to Palmer because while the language in his poems is beautiful, they still attempt to communicated something comprehensible to the reader. While I can appreciate what an poetry like Silliman is doing, I don’t enjoy reading it as much, and someone less familiar with poetry certainly wouldn’t. Yet the goal in their goal in writing thus is to deepen a reader’s relationship to language, which will inevitably fail if they alienate the reader.
From reading these Language poets, I’ve had the same feeling as you: “Yet the goal in their goal in writing thus is to deepen a reader’s relationship to language, which will inevitably fail if they alienate the reader.” Language as an institution to be either rejected or accepted is one thing; but to completely disregard clarity for the sake of politicizing the poem and alienating the reader to engage the reader is nonsensical. I can see where this can work in some of the poem’s we’ve read this week, but mostly the opacity is as you’ve said–it prevents the reader from connecting to the work and from making sense of its import.
A question the Language Poets have brought up for me, one that holds for many of the schools we have read this semester, is how and why being deliberately incommunicable gives an author authority. I suppose that’s why I am drawn to Palmer because while the language in his poems is beautiful, they still attempt to communicated something comprehensible to the reader.
The obscurity, purposeful in cases like this, I think adds to the level of reader involvement that many of the language poets called for, to engage with a poem critically instead of just consuming it, capitalist style. I bet we wind up explicating one of these poems tonight in class and it will be exhausting.
Another thing is that if the author is “deliberately incommunicable” like you say, they get their authority through purposely denying us as readers easy access to what we want. By the very withholding of easy understanding, they by necessity hold something over on us, and therefore achieve their authority.
Some of the schools we’ve studied seem to have a very loose organization, but you’re absolutely right, some of the language that these poets in the language school use, though not lyrical in form, are occasionally beautiful in content and specifically diction choice.
“A question the Language Poets have brought up for me, one that holds for many of the schools we have read this semester, is how and why being deliberately incommunicable gives an author authority. I suppose that’s why I am drawn to Palmer because while the language in his poems is beautiful, they still attempt to communicated something comprehensible to the reader.”
Should be in quotes 😀