Michael Palmer has been awarded the 2006 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. The $100,000 prize recognizes outstanding mastery in the art of poetry. Judge Robert Hass said of Palmer: '[He] 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…one of the most original craftsmen at work in English at the present time.'
 
Born in New York and educated at Harvard, Michael Palmer has lived in San Francisco for more than 30 years. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Lion Bride (Carcanet, 1999), which includes the poet's own selections from seven of his collections, including Blake's Newton, The Circular Gates, Without Music, Notes for Echo Lake and At Passages. Click here to order your copy with a 10% discount and free p&p.

'Company of Moths' by Michael Palmer

We thought it could all be found in The Book of Poor Text,
the shadow the boat casts, angled mast, fretted wake, indigo eye.

Windows of the blind text,
keening, parabolic nights.

And the rolling sun, sun tumbling
into then under, company of moths.

Can you hear what I'm thinking, from there, even as you sleep?
Streets of the Poor Text, where a child's gaze falls

on the corpse of a horse beside a cart,
whimpering dog, woman's mute mouth agape

as if to say, We must move on,
we must not stop, we must not watch.

For after all, do the dead watch us?
To memorize precisely the tint of a plum,

curve of a body at rest (sun again),
the words to each popular song,

surely that would be enough.
For are you not familiar with these crows by the shore?

Did you not call them sea crows once?
Did we not discuss the meaning of "as the crow flies"

one day in that square station of exile under the reddest
of suns? And then, almost as one, we said, It's time.

And a plate shattered, a spoon fell to the floor,
towels in a heap by the door.

Drifts of cloud over
steeples from the west.

Faith in the Poor Text.
Outline of stuff left behind.