The Academy of American Poets has announced the recipient of the $100,000 2006 Wallace Stevens Award, Michael Palmer. Palmer, characterized as an “avant-garde poet”, joins ranks with such notables as Mark Strand, John Ashbery, Anthony Hecht and Adrienne Rich, all past recipients of the prize, which is given annually to “recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry”. Palmer”s works include Company of Moths (New Directions, 2005), Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988 (2001); The Promises of Glass (2000); The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 (1998); At Passages (1996); Sun (1988); First Figure (1984); Notes for Echo Lake (1981); Without Music (1977); The Circular Gates (1974); and Blake”s Newton (1972). His 2005 book Company of Moths was shortlisted for the Canadian Griffith Poetry Prize.

The Stevens Award is only the latest in a string of honors for Palmer, who has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Prize and a Lila Wallace-Reader”s Digest Writer”s Award. He was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1999.

The judges for the award were poets Robert Hass, Fanny Howe, Susan Stewart, Arthur Sze, and Dean Young. Robert Hass, on selecting Palmer to receive the award, wrote:

Michael Palmer is the foremost experimental poet of his generation and perhaps of the last several generations. A gorgeous writer who has taken cues from Wallace Stevens, the Black Mountain poets, John Ashbery, contemporary French poets, the poetics of Octavio Paz, and from language poetries. He is one of the most original craftsmen at work in English at the present time. His poetry is at once a dark and comic interrogation of the possibilities of representation in language, but its continuing surprise is its resourcefulness and its sheer beauty.

Over his years – the poet has been writing since 1963 – Palmer has formed unusual collaborations outside the world of poetry, mingling his words with dancers and visual artists to create textural pieces that lift beyond the page. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential poets of the last century.

Palmer will be the featured speaker at the Academy of American Poets Award Ceremony & Reading on November 8, 2006. This event, held in New York City and open to the public, will provide those on the East Coast a rare opportunity to hear a poet who has shaped American poetry for decades.
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