The formal accomplishment of Michael Palmer’s poetry is in tension with one of his recurrent themes: the limits and slippages of language. A poem dedicated to the trumpeter and composer Wadada Leo Smith concludes: “It must not flow, / must come out wrong, / since such is song.” I can almost imagine Palmer giving these injunctions to himself—something like Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (“It must be abstract”; “It must change”)—pushing himself to work against his unmatched fluency, trying to hit an off note given his perfect pitch. For it can be wrong to get song right…