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NEW YORK — 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.

"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."

Palmer, 63, is the author of"Company of Moths,""Codes Appearing"and numerous other collections.

Previous winners of the Stevens award, which was founded in 1994, include John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich and W.S. Merwin.

http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2006Sep06/0,4670,BooksStevensPrize,00.html