A perceptive take on Ahadada author Donald Wellman from David Rich:

Donald Wellman, James Cook, Ewa Chrusciel and Zachary Martin: The New Prose Poets & a Neo-Baroque
“The nature of my involvement in the subject of Gloucester keeps me always in Ward 4 and in Heaven simultaneously.” — Charles Olson to Joseph Garland

“If one thought in terms of sacrament (and as a child Charles had absorbed an awareness of sacrament) it was a kind of sacrament of the ‘chance’ presentation of existence that he met anew every day.” — Gerrit Lansing, concerning Olson

Donald Wellman, James Cook, Ewa Chrusciel, and Zachary Martin write verse- and prose-poems of attentiveness, drama, complexity, persona, care, cartography, and performance — tuned to an urban sacrament of chance — by turns soliloquy, gazetteering, hagiography, legend, hearsay, rumor, myth, city hall debate, protest, lament, eulogy.

To start with, Donald Wellman, editor of O.ARS, the journal of poetics and phenomenology, author of Prolog Pages (Ahadada 2008), and two new series, “A North Atlantic Wall” and “Urika.” His work appears as eighteenth-century travelogue, as gazette; but Wellman enters into his observations, although he is an outsider he approaches with sympathy and imagination, collapsing (to the extent one can) barriers of self to other, observer to observed, through persona the ego can subside; he is no imperial agent, no colonial traveler, but a refugee, a self-exile, sharing, as he wrote, bread and cheese of the refugee by the beach-fire.

Wellman, too, has a kind of neo-baroque method: mapping cities; patterns that fold in on themselves, repeat, shimmer, combine and recombine; using persona, history, medieval bestiaries; and more. His poems do not pare away specifics, do not corral away the particulars life draws richness from. Rather than practice a slender poetics of ellision, a poetics often quiet, narrow, and bourgeois, Wellman is a poet of excess in the best sense — a poetics of the wide embrace — an embrace, given how wide the arms and mind must extend, an embrace that dispells, exorcises the will to power (although there is, as Wellman has written, an oar and a steersman).

The rest of the review can be found at: Rich’s Gloucester Boat Train Blog: http://gloucesterboattrain.blogspot.com/2009/08/let-me-draw-attention-to-four-poets-who.html

Donald has a busy schedule of readings lined up for the immediate future.

Jesse