Donald Wesling's Personal Site

Donald Wesling’s Portfolio

Completed during the Pandemic of the last few years, the following books of poems below are not yet accepted for publication:

Getting From Here to Here: The Buddhist Dailies of Thomas Marshall, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Donald Wesling. TM, KSR, and DW were in the same class in 1972 at University of California, San Diego: DW was the writing instructor, but the three of us have long since become friends and we corresponded quite heavily during the Pandemic.  The correspondence was organized as poems called dailies whose purpose was to try to touch the moment of perception, what Merleau-Ponty somewhere called a recovered naïeveté. This book of 80-90 pages is organized in roughly chronological order, 2021-2023, with author’s names given in the table of contents but with author’s contributions mingled without ID in the text.

A single-author long poem by DW, focused on a San Diego military cemetery, titled The Fort Rosecrans Elegies. There are ten elegies: a deliberate tribute to RM Rilke’s Duino Elegies which were first published in German exactly a century ago. It’s partly a response to Rilke and Propertius and Paul Valéry and other elegists, an elegy for them; also a set of commentaries on a hospital and a cemetery in the same United States city; a remembrance of feminist sculptor Louise Bourgeois; a response to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia which is still going on. While this makes the rounds of publishers and prizes, the book exists in the form of a pamphlet, in 125 copies, so this can be sent to anyone who asks.