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Posted by: David Bunch

Michael Palmer has won the $100,000 Wallace Stevens award for outstanding poetry.

Avant-garde poet Michael Palmer has won the Wallace Stevens Award, a $100,000 prize given annually for "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Michael Palmer is the foremost experimental poet of his generation and perhaps of the last several generations," according to a statement issued earlier this week by the Academy of American Poets, which gives the prize.

I admit it. I have never heard of Michael Palmer. But a quick search over at Poets revealed some interesting biographical information and a few poems by the guy.

Michael 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, anf the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. In 1999, he was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He lives in San Francisco.

Here is a poem by him entitled "Dearest Reader".