Michael Palmer, CCA's spring 2007 writer in residence, has been selected as the recipient of the 2006 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. The $100,000 prize recognizes proven mastery in the art of poetry. 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," Hass continued. "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."

Palmer will give a public reading at CCA in February 2007 as part of the Graduate Lecture Series.

About Michael Palmer

Michael Palmer was born in New York City in 1943 and has lived in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including "Company of Moths" (New Directions, 2005), which was short-listed for the Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize; "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). He is also the author of a prose work, "The Danish Notebook" (Avec Books, 1999).

Palmer's work, which is both alluringly lyrical and intensely avant-garde, has inspired a wide range of poets working today. Palmer draws on many disparate poetic traditions to create a new voice, a voice that has opened ways to write out of the confines of specific schools of poetry. Palmer has brought his powers of synthesis to his collaborations with artists in several mediums. For over 30 years he has collaborated with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, and he created the text for their piece "Danger Orange." Visual artists he has collaborated with include Gerhard Richter, Micaëla Henich, Sandro Chia, Jess Collins, and Augusta Talbot.

Palmer has also translated work from French, Russian, and Portuguese. He edited and contributed translations to "Nothing the Sun Could Not Explain: Twenty Contemporary Brazilian Poets" (Sun & Moon Press, 1997) and "Blue Vitriol" (Avec Books, 1994), a collection of poetry by Alexei Parshchikov. He also translated "Theory of Tables" (1994), a book written by Emmanuel Hocquard, a project that grew out of Hocquard's translations of Palmer's "Baudelaire Series" into French.

Palmer's honors include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, and the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

About the Award

The Wallace Stevens Award is given annually by the Academy of American Poets (www.poets.org) to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Established in 1994, the award carries a stipend of $100,000.

The previous recipients are W. S. Merwin, James Tate, Adrienne Rich, Anthony Hecht, A. R. Ammons, Jackson Mac Low, Frank Bidart, John Ashbery, Ruth Stone, Richard Wilbur, Mark Strand, and Gerald Stern.