The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language. The winning poets receive $65,000 (Cdn) each and an additional $10,000 (Cdn) goes to each shortlisted poet who reads at the annual Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist Readings in Toronto, Canada.
Michael Palmer, Griffin Poetry Prize 2006 International Shortlist
Michael Palmer was born in New York City in 1943. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Codes Appearing: Poems 1979-1988 (2001), The Promises of Glass (2000), The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995 (1998), At Passages (1996), Sun (1998), First Figure (1984), Notes for Echo Lake (1981), Without Music (1977), The Circular Gates (1974) and Blake’s Newton (1972).
Palmer’s work has appeared in literary magazines such as Boundary 2, Berkeley Poetry Review, Sulfur, Conjunctions, and O-blek. His honours include two grants from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. In 1999, Palmer was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. He lives in San Francisco.
Palmer was the 2006 recipient of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. The $100,000 (US) prize recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.
Judges’ Citation
“‘How listen, where dwell?’, asks Michael Palmer in a book whose continuous questioning only ever opens out to the surprising generosity of a kind of equivocation. That is, more questions, rather than a rectitude, follow from reflection, and they are the kinds of familiar questions we pose to a companion we love: ‘what of what wolfhound at full stride?’ ‘Did the glare bother us?’ ‘can you hear what I’m thinking …?’ His sequences shimmer on the edge of the surreal, scattering the suggestions of a symbolic plenitude pertains to a life lived with a dexterous consciousness of the necessity of transience. This is the world in its multiple thing-ness, with no gratuitous attitudinizing.”
Michael Palmer reads The Dream of Narcissus and Dream of a Language that Speaks
The Dream of Narcissus and Dream of a Language that Speaks, by Michael Palmer
The Dream of Narcissus
The dream of Narcissus, that there would be a silence loud as time
The dream of the writer, that there could be a silence loud as time
The dream of time, that rest might come
The dream of rest, that unrest might arise
The dream of the palm, that pilgrims would enter the village
The dream of the village, that they depart with their fronds
And the house dreaming of its leveling, and the exile of his well
The dream of night, that the day would be purified
The dream of day, that the dark would be lifted
And the dream of the dream, but who’s to speak of this
Dream of a Language that Speaks
Hello Gozo, here we are, the spinning world, has
it come this far? Hammering things, speeching them,
nailing the anthrax to its copper plate,
matching the object to its name, the star to its chart.
(The sirens, the howling machines, are part of the music it seems
just now, and helices of smoke engulf the astonished eye;
and then our keening selves, Gozo, whirled between voice and echo.)
So few and so many, have we come this far?
Sluicing ink onto snow? I’m tired, Gozo,
tired of the us/not us, of the factories of blood,
tired of the multiplying suns and tired of colliding with
the words as they appear without so much as a “by your leave,”
without so much as a greeting. The more suns the more dark -
is it not always so - and in the gathering dark
Ghostly Tall and Ghostly Small making their small talk
as they pause and they walk on a path of stones,
as they walk and walk, skeining their tales,
testing the dust, higher up they walk -
there’s a city below, pinpoints of light -
high up they walk, flicking dianthus, mountain berries,
turk’s-caps with their sticks. Can you hear me? asks Tall.
Do you hear me? asks Small. Questions pursuing question.
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