Introducing Palmer for a reading at the DIA Arts Center in 1996, Brighde Mullins noted that Palmer's poetics is both ""situated yet active"". Palmer alludes to this himself, perhaps, when he speaks of poetry signaling a "site of passages". He says, "The space of the page is taken as a site in itself, a syntactical and visual space to be expressively exploited, as was the case with the Black Mountain poets, as well as writers such as Frank O'Hara, perhaps partly in response to gestural abstract painting."