Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Michael Palmer's "Tomb of Baudelaire" is an intricate, fragmented poem that operates at the crossroads of language, emotion, and identity. Palmer, often regarded as an experimental poet, captures a multilayered experience that mirrors Baudelaire's own complicated relationship with language and reality. This poem, like many of Palmer's works, is more cryptic and less linear than Baudelaire's, but it can be read as a kind of homage to the 19th-century French poet, particularly in its focus on the ineffable, complex nuances of human consciousness and desire.

The poem oscillates between various vignettes or narrative moments. It opens with "At the end of the bridge is a state of prison," a phrase that reappears multiple times throughout the poem, reinforcing a sense of entrapment or limit. The idea of the prison can be seen as both literal and metaphorical, embodying existential themes of confinement and liberation. The words "it goes back into my throat drying my throat" introduce a personal physicality, linking speech or silence with a kind of internal imprisonment.

The poem's imagery of voyages, change of forms, and colors, along with references to "calm and order of an autumn sky," offer glimpses of ephemeral beauty and transformation. These could be seen as fleeting escapes from the 'prison'-yet they remain trapped within the text, just as the characters remain ensnared by their limitations, fears, or desires. Palmer uses disjointed, almost discordant scenes and phrases to recreate the complicated inner worlds that Baudelaire often described, where juxtaposed elements like calm and chaos, beauty and grimness coexist.

There's a recursive focus on language itself in "It doesn't matter what you say but how you say it. By pronouncing the words they become different." Language here is both a means of expression and a form of entrapment. This duality mirrors Baudelaire's own themes, particularly the tension between the artist's quest for expression and the limitations imposed by words. Palmer explores how words can morph and how their meanings can change, bringing attention to the unstable nature of language, much like Baudelaire did in his time.

Unsettlingly, the poem veers into conversations about political resignations and domestic scenes, blending the ordinary with the extraordinary, the profound with the profane. Palmer appears to capture the contradictions and complexities of human experience. There's a sense of dislocation and multiple layers of reality that speak to a modern, fragmented experience, but which find roots in Baudelaire's poetic expressions of malaise, confusion, and complexity.

Towards the end, we encounter "Plato's admonition against telling stories about being," which could be read as a warning against the inherent limitations and possible deceptions of language and narrative-a theme that Baudelaire would likely have appreciated given his own nuanced relationship with language and representation.

"Tomb of Baudelaire" doesn't offer straightforward answers but acts more as a labyrinth of ideas, emotions, and images. In weaving together these disparate threads, Palmer pays homage to Baudelaire's project, encapsulating the continuous struggle between confinement and the human thirst for freedom, between the ineffable interior world and the intractable limitations of language to capture it. It is, in essence, a modern voyage into many of the same territories that Baudelaire mapped in the 19th century, updated for an audience grappling with the fluid realities of the 21st century.