Ellen Welcker

Ellen Welcker’s aesthetic inclinations range from engagement of the lyric to narrative and prose poems. Her work is concerned with ecological desperation, the parent-child relationship, and the concept of ‘deep humanity’ as an animal state. Her influences include feminism, translation, fairy tales and myths, and specifically the work of poets Juliana Spahr, Inger Christensen, and Don Mee Choi. She received her MFA in poetry from Goddard College in 2010, and lives in Spokane, where she works for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry and organizes literary events locally for Spark Central.

Ellen Welcker received 2016 GAP funding for “The Pink Tablet,” a 29-page poem she began (on a pink legal pad) in a trance-like obsession with the modern fairy tale. The first several sections came out basically finished, down to form, and set the tone for the rest of the piece. Her goal is to expand this into a book-length poem of publishable quality. “The Pink Tablet” is concerned with the mutability of borders and boundaries real and imagined, imposed and inherent. The poem wanders throughout a labyrinth of wilderness and femaleness, wherein (like the fairy tales it echoes) adults are incapable, unwilling or averse to protecting children—girl children in particular—from the dangers they face by fact of their own existence in the world.