Peter Balakian | Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 2016

The Ozone Journal by Peter Balakian, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, DONALD M. AND CONSTANCE H. REBAR PROFESSOR IN HUMANITIES; PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH at Colgate University







"The Latest: Plight of refugees among the themes of prize winners" The Washington Post

"What you need to know about Peter Balakian, the new Pulitzer Prize-winning poet" from The Washington Post

2016 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Poetry

"When History and Poetry Collide" from Publishers Weekly

Interview with Peter Balakian on NPR


Here and Now
The day comes in strips of yellow glass over trees.
When I tell you the day is a poem
I’m only talking to you and only the sky is listening.
The sky is listening; the sky is as hopeful
as I am walking into the pomegranate seeds
of the wind that whips up the seawall.
If you want the poem to take on everything,
walk into a hackberry tree,
then walk out beyond the seawall.
I’m not far from a room where Van Gogh
was a patient — his head on a pillow hearing
the mistral careen off the seawall,
hearing the fauvist leaves pelt
the sarcophagi. Here and now
the air of the tepidarium kissed my jaw
and pigeons ghosting in the blue loved me
for a second, before the wind
broke branches and guttered into the river.
What questions can I ask you?
How will the sky answer the wind?
The dawn isn’t heartbreaking.
The world isn’t full of love.
from “Ozone Journal” by Peter Balakian, published by the University of Chicago Press. 

Van Gogh's Garden of the Hospital in Arles


Peter Balakian from The Washington Post
“'I’m interested in the collage form,” Balakian said. “I’m exploring, pushing the form of poetry, pushing it to have more stakes and more openness to the complexity of contemporary experience.'
He describes poetry as living in 'the speech-tongue-voice syntax of language’s music.' That, he says, gives the form unique power. 'Any time you’re in the domain of the poem, you’re dealing with the most compressed and nuanced language that can be made. I believe that this affords us the possibility of going into a deeper place than any other literary art — deeper places of psychic, cultural and social reality.'”

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