Donald Wellman teaches cultural studies and writing at Daniel Webster College. He was born in Nashua NH but has an affinity for place names in “M”: Maine, Morocco, Mexico. Fields, a selected poems, spanning twenty years of work, appeared in 1995 (Light and Dust). Wellman has translated from French, German, and Spanish. As editor of O.ARS, a series of anthologies devoted to postmodern poetics and practices, he derived personal satisfaction from the use of punctuation à la dada. His recent poetry engages emerging forms of identity among mixed and indigenous peoples. Notebook: Cuaderno de Costa Rica is the first of these projects. Others include Diario mexicano and Prolog Pages. Excerpts from these projects can be found in various on-line and print media: Selections from Prolog Pages, including the poems "Previously," "Ensaladas," and "Madrid" in BlazeVOX: Post-avant Poetries and Fiction (2005). "Marriages" and "La Cabra Mecanica," from the "Granada" section of  Prolog Pages in The Dead Caesars, Winter 2006. Seven poems from the "Andalucía" section of Prolog Pages and  translations of "Insomia" and other poems by Emilio Prados in Fascicle, Winter 2006. Poetry: "Tangier," "Organic Form," "Men Who Sublimate," "Granada," "Capileira," "Bizcas," and "The Cartuja of Granada" and the photograph, "Arabesques," in the on-line and print editions of the journal, Arabesques Review (Chlef, Algeria), March 2006. Poetry, translations, prose and photographs from Diario Mexicano in Xcp: Streetnotes, Winter 2006. Wellman has written on American poetry (Pound, Williams, Olson, Creeley), as well as world poetry. Drawn to praise the use of hybrid forms, he has just completed a series of articles for The Companion to Twentieth Century World Poets and Poetry. Selected criticism: "Field Poetics," "Blaise Cendrars," "The Prose of the Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Little Joan of France" (Cendrars), "Yvan Goll," "Dream Grass" (Goll), "Jean Sans Terre" (Goll), and other articles forthcoming in Companion to Twentieth Century World Poets and Poetry, ed. R. Victoria Arana (New York: Facts on File, 2006). "Emergent Subjectivity and the Transgressive Text," Bridges Across Chasms: Towards a Transcultural Future in Caribbean Literature, ed. by Bénédicte Ledent. Liège: L3 -- Liège Language Literature, 2004. "The Maximus Poems [of Charles Olson]" in Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry (New York: Facts on File, Inc.), ed. Burt Kimmelman. 2005. "Cultural Cannibalism" in Assembling Alternatives: Essays on/against reading postmodern poetries transnationally.  Ed. Romana Huk. Middleton: Wesleyan U P, 2003, released Fall 2004. "A Complex Realism: Reading Spring and All as Seminal for Postmodern Poetry" in William Carlos Williams and the Language of Poetry, Burton Hatlen and Demetres Tryphonopoulos, Editors, Orono: National Poetry Foundation. 2004. Wellman writes, concerning his practice, “In both my poetry and my prose, I engage a field poetics, using tropes like margin, frame or overlay to explore the ways in which cross-cultural contact and different modes of liminality produce meaning. My current practice is deeply influenced by my readings in anthropology and art history. What I am doing has been, in several respects, enabled by Olson’s Mayan Letters”

Concerning Wellman’s Fields, Robert Creeley wrote: I am fascinated by the persistent formal invention of the attack, the attempt to locate and thus make hold a thing, things, in mind. Don Wellman’s brilliant variousness is complex of the world’s. He has done his singular work with dedicated mind and heart—it is a very solid book and should make a useful splash. John Perlman speaks to the interrogative overflows of address.... the text(s): provisional, polyvalent, expansive, contractile, transgressive, reciprocal ... ranging, arranging of the active multiplicitous possibles, the quick of things and un-things. “Poet” itself linked to “investigator.” Cynthia Hogue asserts that Wellman cannily resists a myth-making (mystifying) defamiliarization of the everyday concrete by materializing "the familiar" in and of language. The transformations Wellman's poems achieve are linguistic, verbal, oral: Not myth / mouth. One thing (image) becomes another; words mutate--throughout this collection--into other words. Sometimes the verbal shifts result, oddly and even unpredictably, in an erupting awareness of the materiality of language's form. On The House in the Fields (Room 1992), Nico Vassilakis has written Wellman's work is concise. His images evoke a crisp awareness. Here we have 21 poems, each flawless, forming a chain of thought. ... Tangent thought becomes the spearhead of intention--the ruminations of an observed periphery makes this read a challenging construction of poetic staring.