What makes a poem a poem? Is it the line breaks, the rhythm, or the imagination? Or is it the weight of lived experience sculpted into something sharp enough to cut through memory? For poets Michael Palmer and Philip Levine, the answer differs—not in opposition, but in intention.

Both are celebrated figures of contemporary American poetry, each writing with control and purpose. But where Palmer seeks to expand the boundaries of language, often stretching logic into abstraction, Levine grounds himself in the textures of working-class life. One prioritizes poetic form—shape, musicality, artifice. The other privileges poetic function—testimony, memory, emotion.

The contrast between them is not simply one of style. It is a difference in what their poetry is for.

Michael Palmer: Language as Architecture

Michael Palmer’s poems often refuse narrative. They are more interested in rhythm, fragmentation, and thought made strange. His poem “Song of the Round Man” is a looping, dreamlike exercise in image and contradiction. The character of the “round man” puffs cigars “as if he were alive,” while the speaker—his interlocutor—admits to failing sight and a memory fatigued by imagining the unseen.

“My eyes have grown sugary and dim / from reading too long by candlelight.”
“My memory has grown tired and dim / from looking at things that can’t be seen / by any kind of light.”

There is no resolution, no destination. The poem is recursive, like a children’s rhyme composed by a metaphysician. It enacts the limits of sense as much as it plays within them. Even its title suggests self-conscious artifice—a “song” without melody, centered around a character both archetype and absurdity.

Palmer’s “Sun” follows a similar logic. Its sentences break rules. Its phrases are instructions, observations, and demands. Some lines end abruptly; others run breathless. There is no narrative, but there is movement—an elliptical pulse that suggests thought in motion rather than thought concluded.

Palmer’s poetry thrives in the space of uncertainty. Its form is its function: to destabilize, provoke, and reinvent the reader’s relationship to language. In his work, poetry is not a tool for conveying experience, but rather is experience itself—shaped by sound, silence, and the architecture of the page.

Philip Levine: Memory Given Structure

If Palmer writes from the mind outward, Levine writes from the body inward. His poems are rooted in autobiography, labor, and the quiet dignity of memory. Yet his verse is often indistinguishable from prose—until you listen to it as you read it aloud.

Take “You Can Have It”, a tender elegy for a brother worn down by work and time. The poem is direct, unadorned, but not without rhythm. Its stanzas are deliberate and its voice is measured. There’s little metaphor, no surrealism, and no linguistic play. Instead, there’s intimacy:

“Give me back my young brother / hard arms and neck / strong back, shoulders wide / and a smile that would take me in.”

This is not poetry as ornament, but rather poetry serving as witness. The emotional weight comes not from dazzling language, but from the simplicity of the speaker’s plea. Levine’s craft lies in his restraint—in how he shapes ordinary experience into something with emotional clarity.

Though he flirts with prose in structure, Levine’s work feels like poetry because of its attention to cadence, silence, and emotional resonance. His function is not to push language’s boundaries, but to let language bear witness to life’s.

Form vs. Function—Or Something Else?

The temptation is to see Palmer and Levine as exemplars of two poetic camps: the experimental and the confessional, the abstract and the autobiographical. But this does both men a disservice. What matters isn’t which mode is more legitimate. What matters is what each mode asks of the reader.

Palmer asks for surrender: to language, to form, to the irrational. His poems are games, dreams, spells. Levine asks for presence: to memory, to pain, to the moments we forget until a line restores them. His poems are letters, elegies, meditations.

Comparing these two American poets forces us to ask ourselves how poetic legitimacy is constructed—through sound and experimentation or through narrative and memory. From a rhetorical standpoint, Levine persuades through shared experience; meanwhile, Palmer disorients, forcing a new angle of approach. Both reveal how poetic form can direct or deflect meaning.

Aesthetically, Palmer treats language as sculpture. Levine treats it as a vessel. Both understand rhythm as essential—Palmer in sonic pattern, Levine in emotional tempo. Yet, philosophically, each poet engages the same question: How do we shape experience into language—and what is lost or gained in the process?

Poetry is not divided by genre, but by intention. Michael Palmer’s intention is to show us how strange language can be. Philip Levine’s is to show us how deeply it can carry the ordinary. Both succeed, because both trust poetry to do what prose cannot—not by definition, but by design.

~ Amelia Desertsong