As a way out of this seeming double-bind, or to his admissions that poetry is, as Pound observed, "news that stays news", that it remains an active and viable (or "actively situated") principle within the social dynamic, critics and readers alike point to Palmer's own avowals of an emerging countertradition to the prevailing literary establishment: an 'alternative tradition' that just slipped under the radar as far as the Academy and its various 'schools' of poetry are concerned. Though not always so visible, this counter-tradition continues to exert an underground influence. Poetry, as critique or praise, can perhaps in its reach exceed the grasp of modernism and procure for us as visible again, that which is all or nothing except for the 'ghostlier demarcations' of the social wager within sight of the "shipwreck of the singular" (as George Oppen characterized it) which denotes or delimits the very idea of the social, if not the very idea that there is a "definition" of the social other than this : the community of those who have no community. Indeed, the unavowable community (to borrow a title and phrasing from Maurice Blanchot).