About the Book
Eclogs are most often set in the countryside. That is where these poems begin. Pastures and dilapidated barns, small homes and brooks that carve the forest into jigsaw puzzles before descending to the sea, abandoned factories. This is a landscape created by European settler populations as they explored the rivers that traverse the land. One model poet for my thinking has been Frederick Hölderlin. In my youth I lived in the Neckar valley as he did. That as well as the high hills and low mountains of a once agricultural New Hampshire and Maine have shaped my feeling for landscapes. The language owes much to objectivist poetics. The poems range from conversations among settlers to the recognition of others who reside in a baroque past that originates with reflections on the cosmos made by nomadic populations and that continue among today's refugees who live in Gaza or the Sudan under the shadow of a continuing holocaust.
The poems usually follow a three-step pattern. The first stage includes narrative or historical material, the second is reflective, and the third a conclusion that much like the ways in which sonnets do, concludes with an image that propels one onward. The method is baroque. Individual poems participate in a series, clusters or thematic runs, interspersed with lyric fragments. The aura of history is built without specific standards of authenticity (inventive, autobiographical, or historical). My goal has been to make an accessible lyric poetry in which individual elements are parts of an emergent whole. The work then is a holistic enterprise wherein shifts of perspective are cumulative. The work is riverine and baroque. It engages the cosmic landscape underlying observable phenomenon, its flow and its silences. This book is to be read from the first page to the last, continuously, as if it were a story or a fable.
About the Author :
Donald Wellman is an American poet, editor, essayist and translator. Wellman, was born July 7, 1944 in the industrial town of Nashua NH. His childhood was spent in Nashua and on Cranberry Island in Maine. His father, Donald F. Wellman, was career soldier, his mother, Frances Louise (Bunker) Wellman, from a navy family with roots on Cranberry Island. His background was working class. He attended the University of New Hampshire and graduated with a BA in English Literature, minors in German and Theater. In 1968 he was drafted into the U.S. Army and served in Germany. He then studied at the University of Oregon, taking a Doctor of Arts in modern poetry(concentrations on Ezra Pound and Charles Olson). He joined the faculty of Daniel Webster College in Nashua NH in 1984. Wellman currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Wellman first came to the attention of the literary community in 1981 with the publication of Coherence, the first volume of O.ARS, a series which has functioned as an outlet for experimental work by writers such as Andrei Codrescu, Robert Creeley, Dick Higgins, Richard Kostelanetz, Rochelle Owens, Ron Silliman, Gilbert Sorrentino, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Lyn Hejinian. O.ARS was received as a breakthrough work in both modern fiction and poetics, receiving praise from the Olson scholar, George Butterick and Welch Everman [3]. Wellman's early influences Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams led to association with poets of the avant-garde of 1970s and 80's. Olson's influence on Wellman has been remarked upon by critic Mark Scroggins: "There are a number of confirmed Olsonians, poets whose work is deeply invested in Olson's mannerism and habits of thought, such as Donald Wellman, Gerritt Lansing, and Don Byrd...among others Susan Howe." Wellman's work The Cranberry Island Series employs Olsonian techniques to delve the histories of a particular geography and embed it with his own poetic and existential concerns. The degree to which the art of translation has altered Wellman's approach to literary creation sets him apart from other poets associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine, like Barrett Watten, Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein. His approach is closer to that of writer / translators such as Jerome Rothenberg[5], Keith Waldrop and Rosmarie Waldrop. Wellman's poetry is serial in form with linked images and resonances forming clusters of varying lengths. This technique derives from the Cantos of Ezra Pound. It has similar features to the overlay of palimpsestic materials found in the works of H. D. and Robert Duncan. His pursuit of serial structure with embedded historical and lyric fragments is distinctive. Today, Wellman is one of the more widely read American experimental poets and translators. His translation of the Spanish poet Antonio Gamoneda's Grave Stones, University of New Orleans Press, 2009, along with Gamoneda's Description of a Lie introduced the writer to English language readers. [6]. As Cole Swensen remarked, "Wellman effectively erases the distinction between text and translation..." His most recent work, Unwinding Alphabets: a Book of Citations, was published by Dos Madres, 2022.
Review :
Donald Wellman wonders how the pastoral might speak to a time when the sheepish cede their powers over the present to the rapacious. The wonder of it is that his eclogues, wherein he ponders the afterlives of poetry, are still about horizons, are still, as he puts it, antiphonal choirs. These meditations and provocations are, in the end, "neither elegy nor melancholy," but ways of being, even in a world gone wrong. -Aldon Nielsen author of Black Chant and Heat Strings
With the publication of his august new collection, Eclogs, Donald Wellman takes his place in a tradition of pastoral poetry that goes back to Virgil and includes his own inspiration, Hölderlin, as well as fellow New Englander Charles Olson. Wellman infuses the ancient form with his empathic objectivist poetics. The book opens with stories drawn from local histories of European settlement and displacement of indigenous peoples in the Eastern Woodlands, but later poems extend his meditations to refugees today, the human tragedies unfolding in "the shadow of a continuing holocaust." Wellman's brilliance and humility dower these radiant poems with genius. -Cynthia Hogue, author of instead, it is dark
The eclogs were, under Virgil's plow, extracts of a landscape that represented a nostalgia for the present, a commons undergoing Heraclitean (and Augustan) transformations in the wake of power. In Donald Wellman's hands, the Eclogs are revived as shimmering extractions of the multitudinous landscapes of the embodied mind. Wellman's meticulously layered poems shimmer like an "index of hallucinations" that fold us into the Whitmanesque wilds of an American Baroque. More than just pastoral reminiscences, these poems are eco-logs that record the inner landscapes of one poet's journey across the outer zones of the "intracranial," in what might be called steps toward an ecology of the lyric mind. At once objectivist in its materiality, and romantic in its Hölderlin-inflected lens on the cosmic, Eclogs stand as a testament to Wellman's rich body of work. -Jose-Luis Moctezuma author of Place-Discipline
