Summary: On this Lit Show, award-winning poet Michael Palmer speaks with hosts Dan Poppick and Jessica Laser about his work. Born in 1943, Michael Palmer has written twenty books of poetry, most recently Thread (New Directions, 2011). Known as the "foremost experimental poet of his generation, and perhaps of the last several generations" (citation for the Poetry Society of America's Wallace Stevens Award, which he won in 2006), Palmer accepts language in all its imperfection—fissures, breaks, echoes, inability to sound like a singular utterance—because he trusts that a fragment can communicate a possible whole, or a number of wholes. Words may be slippery, exceeding our reach, yet, in Palmer's work, it is through this very distance that we reach words and call them home.
