Fall Reading Series: Donald Wellman
Thursday, December 1 @ 7 PM
126 East Main Street
Free & open to all
Parking available nearby on Chapel Street and at the North Shore Arts Association
New Hampshire poet Don Wellman returns to the GWC to close out our fall reading series! Followed by a reception.
Donald Wellman is a poet who lives in Weare, NH. He has recently been seen skulking through outlying districts of Spain and Morocco. Wellman has nine books of poetry to his credit. He translates from several languages, German and French as well as Spanish. Originally a medievalist, his academic expertise lies now in twentieth century and contemporary poetry and poetics. His research and scholarship have concentrated on the works of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and figures associated with Black Mountain College. He writes on transnational literature, including the literature and culture of the Caribbean. At Daniel Webster College, where Wellman was a Professor of Humanities, he taught Creative Writing, History of Modern Art, World Literature, Caribbean Literature and a Seminar on Censorship and Self-expression. The college closed in 2017.
Wellman’s work first came to the attention of the international poetry community with the publication of O.ARS, 1981 to 1994, a series which published anthologies of poetry, visual poetry, experimental prose, criticism and commentary. From its inception O.ARS published literary works associated with the international avant-garde, as well as the poetry that has come to be known as language-centered writing. O.ARS is strongly identified with poetry and poetics in the Black Mountain College tradition. Notable volumes include Coherence, Perception, and Translations: Experiments in Reading. Throughout its history O.ARS received financial assistance from the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. It has been collected by major university libraries throughout the world.
In both poetry and prose, Wellman’s work, as scholar and as poet, engages a field poetics, using tropes like margin, frame, or overlay to explore the ways in which cultural hybridity and liminality produce meaning. His poetics derives from Charles Olson’s practice of open field composition and explores the phenomenology of perception. Wellman’s Albiach / Celan: Reading Across Languages (2017) engages translation as an act of reading that helps to reinvent the relation between the home language and the language being translated. Editing O.ARS, 1981-1993 (Among the Neighbors, The Poetry Collection of the University Libraries, University at Buffalo) was released in October 2018. Wellman’s Expressivity in Modern Poetry was released by Fairleigh University Press in 2018. This study draws heavily on the influence of poets in the Pound-Williams-Olson tradition as seen through a lens provided by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and his Spinozistic theory of immanence.