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Biography of Lamont Palmer
Lamont Palmer was born and raised in Maryland, where he still resides. He wrote poetry in his teens, but left it as an adult, and did not write anymore poetry for 20 years. In his late 30's, feeling the artistic urges moving him, he returned to poetry, again, as a way to vent his feelings. However this time he began to see his writing as actual art, a craft, something to be taken seriously, a more than simply unloading his feelings bluntly onto the page. He cites as his poetic influences the work of the English masters, Milton, Wordsworth and Keats and 20th century lyricists such as Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, James Merrill, W.H. Auden, and John Ashbery. Palmer's poetry is a poetry of meditation. It ponders the world quietly, with the usage of, often, densely packed language. In his poem, 'Kent Island Bird' he watches closely the flight of an osprey and says the view is:
but more than pictures or placards or dismissed
matters. It is worthy of the shared spaces,
laying out arcs, between each cold, white wing.
Your bird-self is the swift balance of you;
your quest for sky is my quest for permanence;
indulgent feathers fixed in the ample air.
In the poem, 'At An Oak Desk' he thinks about the death of Norman Mailer. It is a tribute poem more or less but also one that seems to be sorting through the idea of death in general:
Touched by the curmudgeon's loss: there was loss.
On a novelistic level, the plot grew sad,
as the protagonist withered with the shrubs,
leaving a hole where polemics grew, a tough form
of grass, yet supple in the ways of ideas.
Resilient, one thinks he may be seen again,
or merely felt as a force or an electric blanket
of electrified words, knife and all, in the
emotion. This is what I contemplate:
Mr. Mailer at his oak desk of exposition;
the campfire eyes, the yellow legal pad,
all used, to degrees of oldfashioned usage.
In one of many poems referencing his father (he often writes about his parents) , Palmer talks about a telescope he once owed as a child, tying it in to his adult life and perspectives:
On my porch at night is where I would sit as a child
with a silver, sleek telescope my father bought,
brown eye to clear lens, lens to sleepy sky, like something
up there could save us, something living in the blackness.
It all flourished, from Annellen Road, to Kings Point Road,
to timelessness drowning emblems in rural seas
starting in Carroll County, where skies throw open themselves,
to gape at what is heavenly as it is large,
as it is ours, and whose eternal craters on its face
are the craters in our bland theories that sleep.
Though this is an insular type of poetry, Palmer frequently writes outside of himself, producing a more public poetry concerned with issues, as in lines from 'Statistics':
Percentages rise
on the backs of blondes,
and brunettes falling down staircases,
to the social side of dirty hallways.
Numbers add up to myriad demises and cold summations.
Or pondering the mild, nearly dismissed irony of being a black man in a old, rural town in Maryland getting gas one night:
A police car? A banshee siren strips the calm.
A misplaced image of black and white,
of red lights, of breaking quiet towns into noise-
filled burgs; truth be told, streets are painted in
the glorious past tense, and I am here, reflective
as the furtive glimpses of staid moonlight, swimming on.
The cop slowed in this colonial prototype.
He stopped someone else. He was not after me.
Lamont has published poetry in online magazines including, Some Words, Ariga, Red River Review, and Strange Roads. In addition to poetry, he also writes fiction and has completed one novel which he is in the process of trying to get published. He is fond of describing himself as a 'nonsmoker, nondrinker, nondruguser who's bright, witty, loves his parents, never been to jail, can't swim, is nervous of air travel, dislikes movies with too many car crashes, is musically eclectic, and would die without Cable TV.' He lives with his fiancee, Bonnie, and in his spare time he enjoys reading, playing Scrabble, following politics, and sometimes just staring into space in deep thought. Though Lamont would love to win a National Book Award for his work someday, he still primarily writes poetry for the release and the creation of a legacy, of sort. He writes, 'I don't have kids so I see my poems as my offsprings; perhaps even better reflections of myself than a child would be. I hope people will know my poems and enjoy them, now, and long after I have said goodbye to the world.' ..
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