The Water Dog
The dog is the species most accustomed to accompanying early travellers by land and sea…
Thor Heyerdahl
Born under butane & water
under snapping fire of icebergs & razors
like a compass
pointed at the fact of combustible granite
pointing far beyond
the panorama of glaciers & icy landlocked schooners
to Anatartic labouring blisters
to special atmospheric codes
where ice sends up a smoke
like an exploded measuring jar
those expanded zodiacs of lightning
his tongue
crystal & fog & fire
his power
like a galaxy of anteater’s rabies
a noxious weather vane of lions
pointing
Zambian kangaroo
the isle of Wight
the beautiful moraine of Bermuda
pointing to arcane solstice mountains
seeing like a cenobite
into the glassy fires of the Caspian Sea
into the blackened imaginary fires of the Sahara
a tense perilous compacting of weathers
in a unit of diamonds
cracked
on sandy Egyptian mountain ranges
filing its neurological hearing
so that the poles of Venus
connect
with the Gulf of Castellammare
with the curving throat of Sicily
like a ruthless intentional steam
marking in the Mongolian steppes
with his hierohlyphical paws
of intuitive malachite & sunstroke
an Ibis in Genoa
a linseed spiral
part Damascus
part of the Swiss Thunersee & Paris
,
the grown dog amounts
the magical snout alignments
gazing
at threads of Amazonian life
at its headwaters rotting
pointing
kabbalistically to its bottoms with his breath
pointing
to the asteroidal fields of Ceres
the darkened pre-globar entropies with
mesmerized
with howling & starlight
with magic geometries of panic a diviner
analogous
with landscapes of darkness
briefly dazzled
by starlight & pumice
who seizes every particle of ground
his breath pointing
to butchery shelters & loneliness
like a telepathic pine juice
seething
microbiology & vineyards
howling
at those sacred iguana Dawn’s
looking magical cracks in the skin of space
sucking in eclipse & lightness
the principle force of ice balloons
a wave of lotus junctures
all the sundown bluing
all the nucleic barium breathing
across asteroidal isles
across the proton- neutron
of this life
of this present profusion
the force
of bays & winds & stars
the deep mercator blankness
the mutant compass spinning
the anti-osmium sussurations
issuing from his electrical skull
from the musical stride of his forceps’ blackness
because of his fierce navigator’s bonding
Asiactic
etheric
his wayward nitrogen calendar
his stupendous rose war ignitions
because
he is the water dog
the dog
between non-being being & being
able to distinguish the flux
between Graham Bell Island
& the Bay of Biscay
between
Revillagigedo in the Mexican Pacific
& the inland flames of Ulan Bator
the dog angel
at the origin of hydrography & fire
at the genesis of arc-light & magnesium
the dog angel
the water dog on fire
the synonymous Arctic star
the occult illuminal wire
smelling
the blood
the spaces the cunning ammonia
of cyclic ambrosial dimensions
Extracted from Impulse and Nothingness (available in Kaleidoscopic Omniscience, 2013, Skylight Press)
The Blood Penguin
“I am the carnivore
the hounded night walker
searching for my wings scattered under glass
they claim I should return to monomial transfixing
to exhibit A & no further
to some
I am six foot & lizard
to others
I am considered a mange lamb
returned from the tropics
I am never given due as to sum or proportion
I am seen as the source of something leprous
as no longer the, motive of who I was thought I was shaped to be
I who live as mislaid damage
as part of pointless verbal ejecta
there are no nouns to ensnare me
to fish up my blood so as to summon consensus
I am never that condition within the fire of conjoinment
I am never to be
the human boy genius
the archivist
the bartered child contending with study
I am none of the above
none of the aforesaid compendium
I am the animist
the vertical lion tundra
the diamond bird who burrows under snow
because of my leaning
I know the stark Egyption soma
much as would a blinded cemetary scribe
& because I understand
ones basic neural unravelment
I a, seen as piacular
as spectre
as both standing & freezing
being of some other form from other planet
as clinical moral addendum
this contains in itself
blackened scrawl marks from Moravia
from squandered quanta from the Sunda Islands
from quaking dogs from Santiago
they say I suffer I suffer from powerful deafening by resistance
my eyes & infectious with lapses
the attention span blunted
the astrological paralysis shifted
so they say the unknown is the trigonomic
is the transcended nucleus
the born educational spell
according to the flaws in universal summoning
I am ancient pantomime
who cannot transgress his inherited Ladino
as to Mayan glyphs & squares
I am plummeted
I am without the means to conduct my own prism
to take on the culpable mean
at circumstantial limit
I exist through negated practical limit
through parallel sub-causes
without knowing the desire
to seek the enzymes in living
I am without & without & without
I who create doubt & the genetics of perpetual conflict
I could be strange as a human half wrought
who poses himself as Illario Pozuelos
& what is claimed against me
is not unseasoned
is not the treason of post-fanatics
instead
it is a curious treatise on circumstantial exhibit
it says
my values are possessed by distance
like someone humbled or plauged by a treaty
my dispossessed senses
described by these methods
under the forms of the treasonous
it tells me I am lifeless blood equipment
that my Gene’s are not useful
that my mind is simply stricken or exposed
yet such a chronicle loses spores in the glaciers
it says
I am of Ghana & the Seychelles
of insular breakage near the Azores
yet it states my non-placement
my cavern
my debilitating refuge
not even a dwelling beneath the stars
as etheric camp base on Saturn
such is the ether climb
the sub-revelation as dialectical cartography
conjoining with the ocelot swimming across the prisms of Mauritius
or simple flatland in Manchuria
these are seen as soils no known warrior can claim
because I readily announce my resistance
my tone as carnivorous scarring wandering beyond pervasive death concussives
claimed by genetic dis-logistics
by anarchic ruin
by genetic sibling serosas
I cannot describe by cursory enclosure external motivation
or any rotary or back-flowing water attainment
it is described as similar
as ghost data
as hibernation through pillage
non-specific
post-necrotic
partaking in part as Jonquil & longevity the
of course the cells blaze
infinity evolves
the monsoons project through containment
yet nothing revolves
nothing forbears & is clement
I exist
as steep electrical ice
asking of myself spells
of pointless dominating fuels
within this agnostic current
I describe
myself as one who’s hellish
who’s buried his weight with double insistence
who seems to sleep in a brazen cylinder of peril
then after a pause in listening calling myself The Blood Penguin embraced by squalls
by an oily & misshapen blinding”
Extracted from Compression and Purity (City Lights, 2011)
http://www.citylights.com/book/?GCOI=87286100977770&fa=author&person_id=5968
Though his work is frequently described as “surreal,” Alexander does not fit any clichéd image of the generation of avant-garde poets that began publishing in the 1970s and ’80s. The son of a World War II veteran, Alexander was influenced by the revolutionary struggles that first inspired his father during a military tour of the Caribbean. Alexander’s father found there was a sharp contrast in how Black Americans lived in the United States as compared to other countries, according to Harryette Mullen, writing in an issue of Callalloo that included a colloquium on his work. “There, the elder Alexander was impressed to see black people in positions of power, and his story of that experience left a distinct impression on his son, who counts among his culture heroes Césaire of Martinique and Wifredo Lam of Cuba,” Mullen noted.
Alexander’s influences include Bob Kaufman, Octavio Paz, Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo, and Philip Lamantia. According to Clayton Eshleman, writing in American Poet, Alexander was probably first published in 1981 in the small press literary journal Sulfur. Since the mid-1990s, he has given readings of his work and held artist-in-residence posts at various colleges.
Alexander’s first work to attract critical attention was Asia & Haiti (1995). Writing on the collection for Sulfur, John Olson commented, “Poetry and politics make peculiar bedfellows. One is private experience made public, the other public experience made private. In Will Alexander’s Asia & Haiti … poetry writhes like a wounded snake in a miasma of brutality and oppression.” He added, “Shelley called poets legislators and prophets, visionaries who drew their authority from ‘that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.’ This is what gives Asia such tremendous pathos, taking China’s invasion of Tibet as point of departure. It is a poem with a surrealistic aperture, oracular lens and Delphic tripod.”
In discussing a passage from Alexander’s Towards the Primeval Lightning Field (1998), Eshleman wrote, “The desire in such writing is for a paradise of language, for the creation, in language, of a reality that uses particles from the observational world to foment interlocking nonsequitor constellations that ignite new constellations as they burst.” As Alexander wrote in the first paragraph of the work, “It is not with the steepness of vultures that I seek to procure an arcane stability in the void, but by the blending of halts and motions, like the vertical equilibria of fire, brought to an incandescent pitch of value.” In his introduction to Towards the Primeval Lightning Field, Andrew Joron pointed out that Alexander’s imagination is imbued with the pre-Romantic idea of imagination as “the link of links”: “Here, the energy of the imagination has not yet been harnessed (as it would be in Romanticism) to the goals of bourgeois subjectivization. It can never be a matter of ‘possessing’ this imagination, but only (as in the communalistic spirit of voudou) of being possessed by it. Imagination is the conductor of primeval lightning, the fiery trickster leaping between frozen and fragmented realia, the universal translator of the multitude of tongues (both human and inhuman) emitted by the Signal of signals.”
In American Book Review, Mark Scroggins stated that Alexander is “acutely conscious of the issue of poetic voice, and is unwilling to let poetry’s potential for ventriloquizing or exploring the voices of others be subsumed in an impersonal écriture or ultimately homogenous montage. He seems as well interested in the spiritual dimension of poetry, especially in the degrees to which poetry can give us access to spiritual or emotional states beyond those we normally experience.” Alexander has likewise described poetry as literally transportive: “I think of myself, the poet,” he wrote in “On Anti-Biography,” “sending signals into mystery, and having them return to me with oneiric wings and spirals, so much so, that I forget my prosaic locale with its stultifying anchors, with its familial dotage and image reports, with its dates inscribed in trapezoidal faces. I am only concerned with simultaneity and height, with rays of monomial kindling, guiding the neo-cortex through ravens, into the ecstasy of x-rays and blackness.”
Critics have observed that Alexander reaches for entirely new lexicons while making use of the inferences of the language he has at his disposal. Mullen explained, “Although Alexander resists discussions of the technical aspects of writing, it would be useful to have a fuller account of his process of lexical selection and combination; to understand how his reading habits and writing practices overlap in the intertextuality and diverse vocabularies incorporated into his poetry; to appreciate how certain rare, unusual, specialized, foreign, or archaic words are used in the poem for their precise denotative meaning, connotative meaning, metaphorical resonance, aural or phonemic qualities, or all of the above.” In the surrealist tradition, Alexander works through automatic writing, trying to achieve a state of trance, as Mullen pointed out. His preference for the British spelling of English words adds a whole dimension to his use of language. Mullen concluded, “His literary influences connect him to an international avant-garde, just as his experience as an African American connects him to a black diaspora, and to the political struggles of Third World people.”
In a piece on the book Above the Human Nerve Domain (1998), Mullen wrote: “The domain of poet Will Alexander’s nervy curiosity ranges from the icy Himalayas, to African savannahs, from physics, astronomy, and music, to alchemy, philosophy, and painting. Orishas, angels and ghosts all sing to this poet, instructing him in their art of verbal flight. This is a poet whose lexicon, a ‘glossary of vertigo,’ might be culled from the complete holdings of a reconstituted Alexandrian library endowed for the next millennium.”
Alexander’s recent work has continued to mine the visionary depths and lexical heights of his work from the 1980s and 1990s. He has written across genres, in novels such as Diary as Sin (2011), the story-like collection Sunrise in Armageddon (2006), the play At Night on the Sun (2017), and theater pieces collected in Inside the Earthquake Palace (2011). Other essay and philosophical writings are included in Mirach Speaks to his Grammatical Transparents (2011). His essay collection A Cannibal Explains Himself to Himself was published by The Elephants in 2019.
Facilitated by / Giorgia Pavlidou And Mohsen Elbelasy
giorgia.dewitte@gmail.com
mohsen.elblasy@yahoo.com
