This July–August 1963 Poetry Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia spanned three weeks and involved about sixty people who had registered for a program of discussions, workshops, lectures, and readings designed by Warren Tallman and Robert Creeley as a summer course at the University of B.C.

[5] Joglars (Providence, Rhode Island) numbered just three issues in all, published between 1964 and 1966, but it extended Palmer’s correspondence with fellow poets begun in Vancouver.

The first issue appeared in Spring 1964 and included poems by Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Fielding Dawson, Jonathan Williams, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Kelly, and Louis Zukofsky.

Palmer published five of his own poems in the second number of Joglars, an issue that included work by Larry Eigner, Stan Brakhage, Russell Edson, and Jackson Mac Low.

The confessional poets struck me as people absolutely lusting for fame, all of them, and they were all trying to write great lines.”[8]Palmer is the author of fourteen full-length books of poetry, beginning in 1972 with Blake's Newton and most recently in 2021 with Little Elegies for Sister Satan.

Other notable collections include Company of Moths (2005) (shortlisted for the 2006 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize), The Promises of Glass (2000), At Passages (1996), Sun (1988), and Notes for Echo Lake (1981).

In the spring of 2007, a chapbook, The Counter-Sky (with translations by Koichiro Yamauchi), was published by Meltemia Press of Japan, to coincide with the Tokyo Poetry and Dance Festival.

Palmer’s work has appeared in literary magazines such as Boundary 2, Berkeley Poetry Review, Sulfur, Conjunctions, Grand Street and O-blek.

My own hesitancy comes when you try to create, let's say, a fixed theoretical matrix and begin to work from an ideology of prohibitions about expressivity and the self — there I depart quite dramatically from a few of the Language Poets.”[9] Introducing Palmer for a reading in 1996, Brighde Mullins noted that his poetics is both “situated yet active.” Likewise, Palmer himself speaks of the poem on the page as signaling a "site of passages": "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.

"[10] Elsewhere, Palmer observes that "in our reading we have to rediscover the radical nature of the poem" and search for "the essential place of lyric poetry" as we delve "beneath it to its relationship with language".

Palmer has repeatedly stated, in interviews and talks over the years, that the situation for the poet and/or the poem is parodoxical: a seeing which is blind, a "nothing you can see", an "active waiting", "purposive, sometimes a music", or a "nowhere" that is "now / here".

With Michael Molnar and John High, Palmer helped edit and translate a volume of poetry by the Russian poet Alexei Parshchikov, Blue Vitriol (Avec Books, 1994).

Early dance scenarios in which Palmer participated include Interferences, 1975; Equal Time, 1976; No One but Whitington, 1978; Red, Yellow, Blue, 1980, Straight Words, 1980; Versions by Turns, 1980; Cortland Set, 1982; and First Figure, 1984.