Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright and visual artist. He has won a PEN Oakland Award, A Whiting Fellowship for Poetry and a California Arts Council Fellowship. His latest book is The Sri Lankan Loxodrome, published last year by New Directions.
Will Alexander writes from the “German East Pacific.” He writes of “pharmaceutical calculus” and “birds beneath the sea” and “exploded viral doves.” His poems have a “violet insomnial structure” and sing of “writhing dunes.” His palette is garish, esoteric and infinite, composed of “steam from the pores of mirages.” Will Alexander’s work has a “rudderless coherence”; he has access to the “4 or 10 dimensions” unavailable to the rest of us. Reading his work requires work on our part; his mind operates differently from our minds and he sees beyond the world of our simple concerns. And that is what Will Alexander is: a seer, our own William Blake, who with The Sir Lankan Loxodrome’s title poem has given us a 21st century answer to Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Are you ready for Will’s ecstasies? I doubt it—but, at least, start today, open your imagination to a man who is both the weirdest and the sanest artist among us.
The
Impalpable Brush Fire Singer
No
he is not an urn singer
nor does he carry on rapport
with negative forces within extinction
he is the brush fire singer
who projects from his heart
the sound of insidious subduction
of blank anomaly as posture
of opaque density as ash
he
distanced from prone ventriloqual stammer
from flesh
& habit
& drought
the performer
part poltergeist & Orisha
part broken in-cellular dove
part glance from floating Mongol bastions
where the spires are butane
where their photographic fractals are implanted with hypnosis
because he allegedly embodies
a green necrotic umber
more like a vertical flash or a farad
posing like a tempest in a human chromium palace
therefore his sound
a dazed simoom in a gauntlet
a blizzard of birds burned at the touch of old maelstroms
because he gives off the odour of storms
this universal Orisha
like a sun that falls from a compost of dimness
out of de-productive hydrogen sums
out of lightless fissures which boil outside the planet
yes
he sings at a certain pitch
which has evolved beyond the potter’s field
beyond a tragic hummingbird’s cirrhosis
surmounting primeval flaw
surmounting fire which forms in irreplaceable disjunction
under certain formations of the zodiac he is listless
he intones without impact
his synodic revelations no longer of the law
of measured palpable destinations
because he sings in such a silence
that even the Rishis can’t ignore
as though
the hollow power which re-arises from nothingness
perpetually convinces
like a vacuum which splits within the spinning arc of an
intangible solar candle
such power can never be confusedly re-traced
because
it adumbrates & blazes
like a glossary of suns
so that each viral drill
each forge
casts a feeling
which in-saturates a pressure
bringing to distance a hidden & elided polarity
like a subjective skill
corroded & advanced
he sings
beyond the grip of a paralytic nexus
where blood shifts
beyond the magnet of volume
where the nerves no longer resonate
inside an octagonal maze
stung at its source by piranhas
No
he is not an urn singer
nor does he carry on rapport
with negative forces within extinction
he is the brush fire singer
who projects from his heart
the sound of insidious subduction
of blank anomaly as posture
of opaque density as ash
he
distanced from prone ventriloqual stammer
from flesh
& habit
& drought
the performer
part poltergeist & Orisha
part broken in-cellular dove
part glance from floating Mongol bastions
where the spires are butane
where their photographic fractals are implanted with hypnosis
because he allegedly embodies
a green necrotic umber
more like a vertical flash or a farad
posing like a tempest in a human chromium palace
therefore his sound
a dazed simoom in a gauntlet
a blizzard of birds burned at the touch of old maelstroms
because he gives off the odour of storms
this universal Orisha
like a sun that falls from a compost of dimness
out of de-productive hydrogen sums
out of lightless fissures which boil outside the planet
yes
he sings at a certain pitch
which has evolved beyond the potter’s field
beyond a tragic hummingbird’s cirrhosis
surmounting primeval flaw
surmounting fire which forms in irreplaceable disjunction
under certain formations of the zodiac he is listless
he intones without impact
his synodic revelations no longer of the law
of measured palpable destinations
because he sings in such a silence
that even the Rishis can’t ignore
as though
the hollow power which re-arises from nothingness
perpetually convinces
like a vacuum which splits within the spinning arc of an
intangible solar candle
such power can never be confusedly re-traced
because
it adumbrates & blazes
like a glossary of suns
so that each viral drill
each forge
casts a feeling
which in-saturates a pressure
bringing to distance a hidden & elided polarity
like a subjective skill
corroded & advanced
he sings
beyond the grip of a paralytic nexus
where blood shifts
beyond the magnet of volume
where the nerves no longer resonate
inside an octagonal maze
stung at its source by piranhas
© 2010
Will Alexander
Will Alexander was a Featured Poet who read his poetry at the December 2010 Second Sunday Poetry Series
Will Alexander was a Featured Poet who read his poetry at the December 2010 Second Sunday Poetry Series