Palmer has repeatedly stated, in interviews and in various talks given across the years, that the situation for the poet is paradoxical: a seeing which is blind, a "nothing you can see", an "active waiting", "purposive, "sometimes" a music", or a "nowhere" that is "now / here". For Palmer, it is a situation which is never over, and yet it mysteriously starts up again each day, as if describing a circle. Poetry can "interrogate the radical and violent instability of our moment, asking where is the location of culture,