Eliot Cardinaux: Blue Flowers for Michael Palmer

That the poet Michael Palmer’s is not a household name demands the question, “what is a house or a household.” This homage or anti-homage plays off the undefined nature of Palmer’s work, his tropes that allude to nothing, his sinister music that nonetheless opens passages into a world inside the world, whose future is its living past. Eliot Cardinaux’s short cycle of poems for Palmer, collected here in chapbook form, are nothing short of elusive, incorporating gestures from influences as diverse as René Char, Mette Moestrup, Clarice Lispector, Marguerite Duras, Charles Mingus and Max Roach. These poems inhabit several worlds simultaneously, and somehow manage to run the dialectic to its logical end.

Eliot Cardinaux is a poet, pianist, composer, and translator working at the intersection of the lyric and improvised music. The author of On the Long Blue Night (Dos Madres, 2023), Cardinaux has also produced over a dozen albums of original music, including, most recently, Imminence (self-released, 2024), with American percussionist Gary Fieldman. He is the founding editor of The Bodily Press.