Will Alexander
    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




© 2010 Will Alexander
Will Alexander was a Featured Poet who read his poetry at the December 2010 Second Sunday Poetry Series