There is an unfortunate irony underlying Michael Palmer’s Little Elegies for Sister Satan. The real elegy involves himself. Yes, the opening series of poems offer elegy to “Sister Satan.” A figure who embodies an intensely dark cynicism about contemporary life. If reality in the 2020s feels dark, deserving of its own elegy, imagine conjuring a figure named “Sister Satan,” who is there to usher a dark present further into its darkness. The poems draw from an insistently depressive note akin to the the tortures described in Daniel Borzutzky’s The Book of Interfering Bodies. Where each action poses an equal and continuing action describing cruelty delivered by the state and testing the body’s limits of pain.
Unfortunately, “Sister Satan” is not the real subject of Michael Palmer’s book. The real elegy he’s delivering is for himself. A tragic irony, where the poet recognizes his mortality. How would it feel to understand you have a finite number of words you’ll use in this life. For Palmer, it makes words fewer and seemingly meaningless. It frames the section that’s dedicated to midnights. Conceptually, the elegy has often posed a complicated dedication to silence. Using language, it expresses what is lost when language can’t be shared with someone dear, because they have died. And consider the further tragedy when many of those friends are themselves poets. And the tragic fact is that Palmer can anticipate his own death as he lives with theirs. Silence is everywhere in the book. And where language is finite, whatever words might be available to the poet feel like they’re paving a road that will inevitably discover a terminal point—where all writers come to their end. In their most successful moments, poems figure silence in landmarks, and people he’d considered his familiars.
The concept lends itself to an additional irony—making silence out of language. Like a darkness descending on the poem while you’re reading it. But there’s a challenge when relating poems to darkness, especially when darkness enters the poems so quickly. It can feel redundant. Or reductive. Many of the poems in Little Elegies pull the reader away from a forward momentum established in the first few lines, shifting the language to small rhetorical eddies where the poem revisits a single word. This is a familiar repeating device that can tease out shades of meaning, like what a villanelle can do for phrases over the course of a poem. However, many of the poems outside the “Sister Satan” series aren’t drawing a sentiment or notion out of a single word. They’re emphasizing how language represents little but its inert factness on the page. The word is enunciated, and that’s the extent of its performance.
I can imagine the film we imagined
though there’s nothing strictly speaking
that I can imagine. That is to say
I can imagine nothing, but nothing more,
or nothing, but nothing else.
(from “Notre Musique”)
The poem, “Notre Musique,” touches on the deadening aspects of nostalgia. What it might mean to maximize its sentiment, basing the sentiment on its sentimental performance (a reach to make sentiment present in your life) rather than anything you imagine to be sentimental about. The word play here between “imagine” and “nothing,” however, levels the poem to bones of concept. Arguably, this is a device Palmer has often used in his poems. In this instance (and in other instances in the book), the repetition feels like it’s been extended too far. “That is to say / I can imagine nothing” loses the play that had appeared in previous imagined moments.
And while the book, as a whole, might counter this criticism, explaining itself through similar repetitive plays on the word “word” (a device Palmer had used in other books, like Company of Moths or Promises of Glass). Telling the reader explicitly that words just don’t have the full quantity of meaning anymore. The result in Little Elegies feel more like I’m being talked at. And it’s not recognizing the fine art necessary to really land a criticism of words that’s using words adequately. This is a circuitous situation for the book. Words are blunt instruments, it says. And ultimately a reader has to concede that they must feel like that for this poet. Thus, casting the reader more as witness to this tragic comment on mortality rather than actual reader.
Whatever your sense of darkness, the figure you might assign it, and what that figure might say about foreboding and pessimism and generally ominous judgment on the present moment, this is Michael Palmer’s “Sister Satan” in his series of elegies for her. Where, instrumentally, the elegy serves as welcome to this Satan character, and commemoration for whatever world people though they were belonging to otherwise.
The following tags are a purely subjective approach I’ve used for reading this book. Tagging, for me, acknowledges that slotting a book into hard categories or “schools” can be elusive when it comes to 21st Century poetry. In response, I’ve developed tags whose lenses operate from subject matter, identity poetics, and stylistics.