Palmer - Lunch Poems - Berssenbrugge

Lunch Poems - Michael Palmer
2006

Michael Palmer is one of the poets I go back to most often, and usually when I go to the Internet to see what he’s up to these days, I come up with “Michael Palmer” the pulp fiction writer. That in and of itself is an interesting journey. But I’m happier to find the Michael Palmer I’m looking for (above). I think of his work (I've said some version fo this a million or so times now) as a sort of “betweening,” which I suppose isn’t much different than the current notion of “hybridity” that’s finding some purchase. He’s both wedded to the lyric, the music of language and thinking, and focused on the action of language happening as overt subject matter. Even as all that sounds a little cumbersome, his poems sound utterly conversational to me, equal parts speculative and humanly voiced.




Lunch Poems - Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge
2005

I’m continually interested in Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. She investigates what I guess I could term the “poetics of error” where the words of science are sprinkled, within the logic of grammar but not of "sense," through her sentences that mostly investigate family and friendship. It creates a fascinating kind of prism where any possibility of “truth value” is thwarted, but still a sort of “truth of desire” rises.