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Michael Palmer on what attracted him to “the openness of culture” in San Francisco. And on changes in his recent work: “It probably looks less unusual on the page. And I’ve been interested in the infinite, ingathering potential of the lyrical phrase—not confession, but the voicing of selves that make up the poetic self, from Greek lyrics to the Italians, to modern poets like Mandelstam. It’s a parallel development to empire, to materialism, but provides both a counter-voice and an echo chamber of other poets you’re overwriting. ‘Circulations of song,’ Dante called it in his homage to Rumi; voices that pass through us, rather than the notion of a singular psyche.”