“L.A. Unified is typical, man. Down there where I was at, nobody hardly made it out of there. Only a few of the cats made it out of there. It’s an isolated situation. You’ve got to keep going on your own without the so-called encouragement that you get in so-called upper-class schooling systems. I meet you, I meet other people, it works, but individuals have to do a lot of their work by themselves—be that lone figment that magnetizes other lone figments in order to commence alchemical communication.”
~ Will Alexander (Colloquy At The Abyss: A Fugitive Amalgam, with Harold Abramowitz, Insert Blanc Press 2020)
Will Alexander is not necessarily a “protest poet.” Though I often experience a form of protest within his poetry. I often experience the reverberating NO within Will Alexander’s poems. Will Alexander is not necessarily known or revered as a lyrical poet, though his poems are often musically layered, nuanced & lyrical. This is just to say that Will Alexander is a breaker of boundaries, his poetic seems to scoff at or laugh in the face of labels.
It is because of my observation here, that I hope I can safely posit that Will Alexander seemingly breaks all barriers and transcends all labels within his poetry practice, it is because of this that I feel all poets need to read & experience the work of Will Alexander. It was said in the Ron Carter documentary on PBS that anybody who is interested in Jazz needs to go back & study Ron Carter. Because of his immensity, because of the multitudes of connections to a plethora of musicians, to each era and decade of Jazz—to each evolution of music itself—Ron Carter is absolutely vital to Jazz & to music. Without trying to compare these two artists, I will say with absolute certainty that this can be said of Will Alexander as well—
If you are interested in poetry, either as a poet or as a fan of the form, or both—you need to tune into & study the work of Will Alexander. And his latest book DIVINE BLUE LIGHT (City Lights 2022) is a great place to begin (or continue) one’s journey with his poetry.
One thing I need to say, when writing about, or reading, the work of Will Alexander, is that I can only share what I see from my own subjective & very relative vantage point. I can only see what I can see. And I’m inevitably going to miss some things, especially in a review like this. Aye, se la vie. This is the predicament for nearly all modes of communication, sure, and with a poet of depth & magnetism to the degree of a Will Alexander; one needs to be particularly keen in holding the facts close within one’s perception. There are so many layers, so many avenues of possible exploration & discovery in Will Alexander’s poetry, that it can be difficult to synthesize or try to focus on a single essay-length set of observations. I think there’s goodness in the attempt though, so here it is in any situation, my initial observations & reactions to Will Alexander & his latest book of poems, DIVINE BLUE LIGHT.
Because Will Alexander writes & works in the realm of the possible. And I perceive Alexander as a poet who can reveal possibilities of language, and thus of this world, possibilities of this life; possibility in relating to this world & this life in a way that isn’t confined to language. Language is our gateway, our open door, as a species; into the creative process, into creating our world(s) & forming a mind which can begin to grip & peel back the layers of meaning which can ultimately lead us to our own salvation. For our freedom, we speak! For our freedom, we write. So yes, Will Alexander being a poet of possibility, with DIVINE BLUE LIGHT, I found a similar spiritual richness in my reading as I find with, for example, my listening to Coltrane’s The Night Has A Thousand Eyes—and I don’t think Alexander has illy thrust himself into a conversation linking his poetry & Coltrane’s music as much as it feels like the poet is driven or impelled by an inner connection to Coltrane, an inner connection which is so sincere, vast & real, that when expressed outwardly, it can be hard to distinguish between the spiritual implications of, say, Blue Train, and, say, the spiritual implications of Alexander’s poems from DIVINE BLUE LIGHT, which remain as “simultaneity alive.”
My first, perhaps subconscious, connection to Will Alexander’s work was not via Coltrane at all, in fact…these two spiritual seers occupied perceptibly different universes in my mental space (before encountering DIVINE BLUE LIGHT for the first time), but instead my first connection to Will Alexander’s poetry was via the stoics. More specifically, the stoic idea that uncertainty is possibly not a human flaw or weakness. This idea that uncertainty is the grounds for discovery, for curiosity to grow & evolve…this idea that we can sometimes & often do think our way out of & through hardship as pre-requisite to action—after all, it was a Black, American (perhaps) stoic, Richard Wright, who wrote that dreaming is the prelude to action— that we can use our human minds to generate some form of intangible power(s) within our midst capable of transcendence, that our minds are perhaps the frontline of action…which is no small detail & a rich dreamlife & friendship with one’s subconscious mind could in fact be the grounds for a marvelous poetry practice (& life) to flourish. Riffing here, as well, from Lucille Clifton’s philosophy that poetry, to her, is a way of being in the world. Having a bit of knowledge of Will Alexander the man and Will Alexander the poet; it becomes clear, even through the mystery & unknown aspects of these, that Alexander’s poetry practice is his way of being in the world. And with this idea posited by Seneca that one should…Think your way through difficulties: harsh conditions can be softened, restricted ones can be widened, and heavy ones can weigh less on those who know how to bear them.
For example, in DIVINE BLUE LIGHT, the fact that this is a poet who grew up in South Central Los Angeles, during a time when the first gangs were being formulated as a communal defense mechanism on the part of the neighborhoods, against the oppressive police presence within those communities—that Will Alexander grew up under seemingly endless hardship, and indeed learned how to flourish in spite of the oppression & destruction aimed at his being—these facts need not be a spotlight to Alexander’s poetic, rather, these facts instead can be felt more deeply as the backdrop for an undeniably sound & innovative poetry to manifest & take shape.
So that when his poetry observes: “A continent / that has made a covenant with its own ruin / has made the skies starved / has made stone momentarily disadvantage itself...” there is a sense of experience, there is a sense that Alexander’s vision within & on this “continent that has made a covenant with its own ruin,” has grown beyond geographical confines & is not at all guided by an attachment to the systematic oppression, to the propaganda machine that seems to grow in stature on the daily. Alexander is an outsider to all this, it is clear that he has found a source of strength within, and that this source of strength emanates without attachment to the phenomena he labels, names & in turn is positioned entirely against within his poetry.
One thing I learned from Will Alexander's connection to Uche Nduka's poetry: I can often become suspicious of protest poetry, because protest poems can sometimes lack in providing alternatives, they can lack in providing or building towards something different. I mean, I don’t think it is enough to stand against oppression, it is not enough for one’s voice to grow in opposition to a wicked & corrupt system of control. We need to be more. The poets need to be more. Poetry needs to be more than a set of complaints about the present reality of oppression, suppression & regression.
We, people of good conscious & desire, need something more, we need to be actively creating a world simultaneously worth striving towards, when presented with the world we are striving against, as peoples, as a species. So, when I read Will Alexander poems, these are rich in alternatives (live within!), Will’s poems are deeply ingrained in the building of, the movement towards a more just & compassionate world for all of us. Sometimes the diagnosis comes first, and sometimes the medicine isn’t allowed to arrive until the diagnosis is wholly sounded out.
So that, Will Alexander’s poetry is concerned with that “being [that] conjoins with itself as aboriginal revelation.” This facet of Will Alexander’s poetry, this providing of a diagnosis & medicine often in the same poem, simultaneously connects him to great & brilliant Black poets of the past, as well as connecting him to brilliant & great Black poets of the present moment. I see Alexander’s poems establishing an authentic communion in the present moment with, say, the poetries of Tongo Eisen-Martin, Uche Nduka, Darius Simpson, Aja Monet, and Mahogany L. Browne; to name only a few.
With some of this in mind, it seems that Will Alexander is thee poet who connects us (readers/poets) to the past and simultaneously to the present. It was Alexander’s connection to Philip Lamantia, for example, that thrusted me forward into my first reading of Kaleidoscopic Omniscience (Skylight Press 2013)… more than a few years ago. Amiri Baraka’s Black anger, Black genius and keen eye for seeing his place in this predicament is present within the poetry of Will Alexander. This is not to say that Will Alexander “borrowed” from Baraka, more so that Will Alexander & Amiri Barka (and others) seem to be intrinsically connected via a spiritual vitality, a spiritual point of view that never truly dies. And of course, we need not be confined by the mental or otherwise real blockades of the borders of the United States either. Will Alexander’s poetry is intrinsically connected to the surrealists of older days as well, specifically & most apparently to that towering poetry of Aimé Césaire.
With the release of DIVINE BLUE LIGHT, it appears that Will Alexander has made another successful effort in reinforcing these authentic connections to past & present poets, to past & present poetries, to the realm of the possible. And indeed, this is a poet who reaches through time, who sees through time; a poet who is a living manifestation of Black & surrealist genius which has not ever been absent from the world of poetry, if not severely neglected altogether by the American mainstream consciousness.
To bring this all back to the stoics, which in a weird way, I find Will Alexander’s poetry also intrinsically connected to—Will Alexander is a poet who deeply cares about the human trajectory, the fate of the human being, the strength & vitality of the human mind & spirit…because it feels like with Will Alexander’s poetry, we are gifted a compass, an esoteric map leading to the promised land…the promise of peace & justice, the promise that any answers worth repeating, any good news worth sharing & any light worth bearing will be found on the inside, any solace or sense of direction is to be found within your very being. And it is true that this is the message of the great prophets before us as well—this is the message older than time itself—that the human heart & the human psyche is the place to be! What we’re seeking is seeking us, what we truly need is to be found by inquiring within our very being—the answers we seek are to be found & created within the being of the human—quoting now from Marcus Aurelius: How can the general rules by which we live perish unless the particular circumstances which they govern cease to be? […] Understand this and you have nothing to fear: It is in your power to restore life simply by reviewing the life you’ve lived. This is what it means to live again…bear in mind that the measure of a man is the worth of the things he cares about.
Mantric Blizzard as Space
A continent
that has made a covenant with its own ruin
has made the skies starved
has made stone momentarily disadvantage itself
Its circumstance deeper than tremors remains equational habit
miming itself
via counted tablets of time
not a mantric blizzard of space into empty air
but every piece of ice as mathematical symbol
not a living quotient
but a dazed nutrient gone awry
a dark veering
stumbling over its own loins
& because
I am at nerves’ end
I can only breathe mantras
& live within
Click here to order your copies of Will Alexander's DIVINE BLUE LIGHT (for John Coltrane), via City Lights Books.
From City Lights Publishers:
Against the ruins of a contemporary globalist discourse, which he
denounces as a “lingual theocracy of super-imposed rationality,” Will
Alexander’s poems constitute an alternative cartography that draws upon
omnivorous reading–in subjects from biology to astronomy to history to
philosophy–amalgamating their diverse vocabularies into an impossible
instrument only he can play. Divine Blue Light is anchored by
three major works: the opening “Condoned to Disappearance,” a meditation
on the heteronymic exploits of Portuguese modernist Fernando Pessoa;
the closing “Imprecation as Mirage,” a poem channeling an Indonesian
man; and the title poem, an anthemic ode to the jazz saxophonist John
Coltrane. Other key pieces include “Accessing Gertrude Bell,” a critique
of one of the designers of the modern state of Iraq; “Deficits: Chaïm
Soutine & Joan Miró,” in homage to two Jewish artists forced to flee
the Nazi invasion of France; and “According to Stellar Scale,” a
compact lyric that traveled to space with astronaut Sian Proctor. The
newest installment in our Pocket Poets Series, Divine Blue Light confirms Alexander’s status among the foremost surrealists writing in English today.
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