Contemporary Poetry

48 contemporary poetry

confl icting possibilities of poetry – as an act of recovery and an act
of unthreading – are, in effect, mutually dependent strategies:

To recover the telling, the human, we must unwind the tale,

unbind the tale, the present seems to say. And to recover

meaning, we must resist its simulacra, cajolings and screens.

We must allow the voice – the work – its plurality, its silences,

its infi nite, pleated body.^42

Palmer proposes that compositional techniques must always be
given an alert, if not sceptical eye. His perspective on the writing
and reception of poetry considers the poem as a site of enquiry,
an enfolding of infi nite variations and a constellation of voices.
The poet’s role in Palmer’s matrix is to scrutinise the mechanics
of language, to reaffi rm the importance of the personal utterance.
At its most basic this ‘unthreading’ of the tale told forces us to
refl ect upon how meaning may be constituted and recovered. Since
meaning is almost always a battleground for establishing authority,
we could add that this attention to the structures of language has an
implicit political and cultural angle. Voice and linguistic indeter-
minacy intersect in contemporary poetry to generate what Palmer
refers to as ‘nobody’s voice’.
Palmer has often stated that his ambition is to create a composi-
tion that has ‘nothing at its center’.^43 Indeed, Palmer’s essays and
poetry gesture to the lyric as the articulation of ‘nobody’s voice’.
But ‘nobody’s voice’ is not just the voice of ‘no one’. In explain-
ing what this phrase suggests, Palmer places us directly within a
context of European lyricism and a tradition that he identifi es as
‘the analytic lyric’. The poet Paul Celan becomes for Palmer a key
fi gure in this examination of the lyric self in language:

His response to the discourse of totalitarianism is to create

out of the German Expressionist tradition a body of intensely

concentrated lyric poetry which addresses the reconstruction

of human speech. I was... very much moved by the sense

of the dispersal of the subject, but also the reaffi rmation, the

fact that it was nobody’s voice and yet it was, also, something –

again and again and again.^44