Active Boundaries

A poet's prosebook, a hymn to the art of the word, here is the first collection of essays/talks to be published by 'one of America's most important poets' (Harvard Review), winner of the Wallace Stevens Award for Mastery in the Art of Poetry. A lifetime engagement with poetry radiates from every page of this distinguished collection of essays and talks that span forty years of a poet's life.Active Boundariesby Michael Palmer offers readers an intimate glimpse into the poetry behind the poetry that, as Robert Creeley once noted, 'makes possible a place where words initially engage their meanings—as if missing the edge of all 'creations,' of all 'worlds'.' With philosophical grace and conversational ease, Palmer unearths a vanguardist tradition in poetry that permeates languages and cultures, centuries and histories. He investigates an 'active boundary' as it relates to a sense of form as well as, Palmer writes, 'to a more social sense of poetic activity as it exists in the