Jack Collom, a poet, poetry teacher and author of more than 23 published books and chapbooks, reads from his work at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 17, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Presented by the Language Arts Live Series at Bates, the lecture is open to the public at no cost. For more information, contact this jskinner@bates.edu or this eosucha@bates.edu.

Collom’s visit is made possible by a Bates College Learning Associate Grant. Language Arts Live, featuring contemporary authors reading from their works, is sponsored by the Bates English department, the environmental studies and Spanish programs, the Learning Associates Program, the Bates Humanities Fund and the John Tagliabue Poetry Fund.

Born in 1931, Collom grew up in small-town Illinois and Colorado. A nature lover, he studied forestry at Colorado Agriculture and Mechanical College. After four years in the U.S. Air Force as a clerk-typist, he worked in factories for 20 years while developing as a poet.

For the past 30 years, Collom has worked as a freelance poetry teacher, and has also taught in the writing program at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo.

Collom’s latest book is “Situations, Sings” (with Lyn Hejinian; Adventures in Poetry, 2008) and “Exchanges of Earth & Sky” (Fishdrum, 2006). His book of selected poems, “Red Car Goes By,” was published by Tuumba Press in 2001. He produced three books on and of writings by children, and has received two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Additional events in the Language Arts Alive series this fall include:

Poets Tessa Nicholas, former editor of the Carolina Quarterly, and Arielle Greenberg, author of the collections “My Kafka Century” and “Given,” read from their works at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 1, in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

Poet and playwright Chris Vitiello, a founding editor of Proliferation magazine, reads at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 12, in Skelton Lounge at Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

Poet Bill Berkson, author of 16 books and pamphlets of poetry, and the 2004 Distinguished Paul Mellon Fellow at the Skowhegan School, reads from his writings at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 19, in Skelton Lounge in Chase Hall, 56 Campus Ave.

Poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña speaks at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 2, in the Benjamin Mays Center, 95 Russell St. Additionally, a premiere screening of Vicuña’s film “Kon Kon” takes place at 4:15 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 3, in Room 104, Olin Arts Center, 75 Russell St. For more information on the artist’s work, see www.ceciliavicuna.org.

Finally, the prolific poet Theodore Enslin of Milbridge, Maine, appears at 7:30 p.m. Monday, Nov. 30, in Skelton. His 119th volume, the prose collection “I, Benjamin, A Quasi-Autobiography,” appeared this year.

Gu, one of the most important artists to emerge from China in recent decades, will perform Wenda Gu’s Wedding Life #6. The piece, says museum Director Mark Bessire, is an important new chapter in a series of performances, the most recent of which was held at the opening of the Guangzhou Triennial last year at the Guangdong Museum of Art, in China.

In a collaboration unusual for Maine’s academic museums, the Bates museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art, Portland, jointly presented Gu’s “From Middle Kingdom” this year. The museum installations and the performance piece reflect the artist’s belief that eventually the “biological millennium” will bring all races together into one mixed group, thus ending cultural conflict.

In Gu’s performances he symbolically weds a partner from another culture or ethnicity. Gu and his “bride,” performed by Sagaree Sengupta, of Lewiston, will arrive at the museum in a white limousine, welcomed by young people dressed in red. The couple will exchange wedding vows under the guidance of a justice of the peace, performed by Bessire.

Each participant will consider the creation of vows and then write the program together. Using huge ink brushes and sheets of paper spread on the floor, the bride and groom will write or draw important aspects of their life leading up to the marriage. After the vows are exchanged, they will draw together their aspirations for the future.

The performance will be presented around and under the Upper Gallery installation “united nations — 7561 kilometers.” The installation, 21st in a worldwide series, is a collection of hair from around the world brought together into a monument that symbolizes the unification of cultures, to be further intertwined through science and the “biological millennium.”

Meanwhile, showing in the Lower Gallery are New Acquisitions: Local and Global Contemporary Photography, which closes next May; and Marsden Hartley: Image and Identity, which closes Dec. 18 and is the focus of a museum symposium Nov. 5-6.

Gu was active in the Chinese avant-garde before emigrating to the United States in 1987. He mines tradition and pursues innovation in works that explore globalism, diasporic art and transculturalism to present an idealized unification of humanity.

“Wenda Gu’s work is timely in its ambitious attempt to address in artistic terms the issue of globalism that dominates discussions of contemporary economics, society and culture. The enormous scope of his vision — conceiving of his artwork as existing over time and space and not constrained by convention, language or national boundaries — is remarkable,” Bessire writes in the exhibition publication, the first major scholarly publication on Gu (MIT Press).

Bessire edited the publication and, with counterparts at museums in Kansas and Texas, co-curated the exhibition. The project was supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Museum admission is open to the public at no cost. It is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and is closed Sundays and major holidays. For more information, call 207-786-6158.

A high-resolution image for publication of a 2000 performance of “Wendu Gu’s Wedding Life,” taken at the Utsunomiya Museum of Art, Japan, may be downloaded at this URL:
http://www.bates.edu/pix/Gu_Wedding.jpg