While some reviewers or readers may value Palmer's work as an "extension of modernism",poetry reading at "Small Press Traffic", San Francisco introductory remarks made before his reading on December 10, 1999 they criticize and even reject Palmer's work as discordant: an interruption of our composure (to invoke Robert Duncan's phrase).Robert Duncan, from his "Introduction" to Bending the Bow (New Directions, 1968) Palmer's own stated poetics will not allow or settle for "vanguard gesturalism". In a singular confrontion with the modernist project, the poet must suffer 'loss', embrace disturbance and paradox, and agonize over what cannot be accounted for. It is a poetry that can, at once, gesture toward post-modern, post-avant-garde, semiotic concerns even as it acknowledges that
