Peter Balakian, Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

The 2016 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday, with Peter Balakian, the author of Ozone Journal (University of Chicago Press), taking it home for Poetry. "The title poem of Peter Balakian's Ozone Journal is a sequence of fifty-four short sections, each a poem in itself, recounting the speaker's memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists in 2009." The Washington Post's Ron Charles writes today about Balakian, noting that he has "published seven collections of poetry, but readers are more likely to know his nonfiction, particularly his writing on the Armenian genocide, such as 'The Burning Tigris,' published in 2004." More:

Those who know Balakian’s work are thrilled to see him get this new recognition.

Chris Bohjalian, whose 2012 novel, “The Sandcastle Girls,” was about the Armenian genocide, said, “Peter is one of the most gifted poets and memoirists and historians we have. I revere him as a writer and as an Armenian-American, and I am so grateful for all he has done to raise awareness around the world of the Armenian genocide.”

Don Share, the editor of Poetry magazine, was surprised but pleased with the Pulitzer committee’s choice. “This book seemed slightly overlooked,” he said. “And yet Balakian has been a fine poet — and prose writer — for decades, so it feels very just.”

Share went on to describe the innovative nature of Balakian’s collection: “I think Americans are well used to seeing images of conflict in news stories — less so in poetry, which they expect to be lyrical. What’s so notable about Peter Balakian’s work is its argument that, as he put it recently in prose, ‘the poem that ingests violence also provides us with a form for memory that captures something of the traumatic event that has passed.’ In other words, his poems return the everyday human voice to those endlessly traumatic events that might otherwise have silenced it.”

Randolph Petilos, Balakian’s editor at the University of Chicago Press, said, “It’s interesting how sometimes people are known for their prose or novels, but in one sense, they’re sort of doing all that other stuff so that they can write poetry.” He cited Thomas Hardy and Victor Hugo as classic examples. “Hugo wrote in every genre that was available to him at the time, but he really wanted be known as a poet.”

What Petilos appreciates most about Balakian’s verse is that “he takes contemporary events and connects them to our ancient past in inventive and surprising ways.” He mentioned, in particular, the way Balakian recalls working in the World Trade Center in the 1980s to produce an elegy to those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks. “It’s just so immediate,” Petilos said. “It’s absolutely accessible. That’s probably why the Pulitzer committee picked this book.”

Read it all at The Washington Post.