Don Wellman and Michael Franco

Don Wellman’s most recent publication is Albiach / Celan: Reading Across Languages (Annex Press, Spring 2017).   He will read from recent translations of the work of Roberto Echavarren and Néstor Perlongher, both are crucial poets with respect to the development of experimental or neobarroco poetry from Latin America. He will also read from a new unpublished manuscript, Essay Poems and Other Exercises.

Donald Wellman is a poet and translator. As editor of O.ARS, he produced a series of annual anthologies including Coherence (1981) and Translations: Experiments in Reading (1984). He has translated books of poetry by Antonio Gamoneda, Emilio Prados, Yvan Goll, and Roberto Echavarren. Albiach / Celan: Reading Across Languages is from Annex Press (Spring 2017). His Expressivity in Modern Poetry is forthcoming from Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. His poetry has been described as trans-cultural and baroque. His collections include Roman Exercises (Talisman House, 2015), The Cranberry Island Series (Dos Madres, 2013), A North Atlantic Wall (Dos Madres, 2010), Prolog Pages (Ahadada, 2009), and Fields (Light and Dust, 1995).

Michael Franco is a poet, playwright and artist. He has been contributing editor for lift magazine, and a member of the poetry panel for Agni magazine. For ten years he directed the Word of Mouth Reading Series in Cambridge Ma. In the fall of 2016 he inaugurated a new series, Xit the Bear in the Press Room at Oxford Street.

His previous publications include: The Library Of Dr Dee, [dromenon press for Pressed Wafer 2006], How To Live [Zoland, Cambridge Ma. 1998]. The Journals of the Man Who Kept Bees (complete second Circumference, [lift 1996], Tales from the Portuguese, dromenon press, 1996], A Book of Measure, (opening circumference) [dromenon press 1993], Parallel Lines [dromenon press 1988], Narration [dromenon press, 1985], Conferences [ dromenon press1986] and Ancient Art and Ritual [1977].

Forthcoming: From the Library of A Book of Measure:“The Marvels of David Leering” [Fall/Winter 2017, Pressed Wafer, Brooklyn].

He lives and works in Somerville Mass. with his wife Isabel and son Thomas.

___________________________ABOUT A book of Measure ::

For close to 20 years I’ve been reading in manuscript and in small published batches Michael Franco’s ongoing field of activity: A Book of Measure. How wonderful to have Volume One in print for a larger reading public.  This long evocative and provocative poem in prose is a unique work, a verbal collage in the manner of Jess in which perceived and imagined realities meld to create a whole that is more than the sum of its individual parts. Franco’s unique kaleidoscopic achievement is about Mind, interlacing entrances and exits, moving landscapes in both time and space, and above all about the very act of reading and writing, or in the words of Rilke, “Everything is gestation, then bringing forth.”

Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno