Mister Mystagogue: to Will Alexander

Will Alexander, Poet and Essayist: A Special Section

Not the containment of tokens sealed

in bullae, but the leap of signs into

transmuted splendor.

—Will Alexander

Should you hazard to strain your chords so as to quiz him regarding the recital of his ink’s stunning tonality, Will Alexander, Mister Mystagogue, waves a splay of his emerald hyperborean baton confirming suspicions of his observance of contraband with the unsuspected. Stunned, you instantly task to tackle the haunted and mysterious scales of the writing, its polyrhythmic chant, its arcane campanology, like a diaphanous orchestration of triboluminescence, in the spirit of Lautreamont’s “fortuitous encounter upon an operating table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.”

The lingual flux is like a quickened virtuosity, where the Mystagogue in tenacious reverie, envisions futures of “transmuted splendor.” Yes, you are stunned by its accelerated solar spin, like luminous mandorlas, now a choral of abducted emeralds, now a viridian of murderous oudes. And as you frantically grope for its horizon’s illusional scale, in your mind, Myrmidons burst in “like an eruption of bears for Labrador.” But the preciseness of the rhythm allows your focus to strike home, like spiral ballet, or the occulted fusion of a blazing minuet.

The writing, not ethical, but vatic, incessantly exploding the prosaic. Not an exercise in the vampiric, but spiraling into a bewitching abandonment. Of course, not reduced to self-mirroring, or hobbling over the 7th border of imaginal rattle-bone smuggling, but like a belligerent glare in a plaza flaying laurels and guano.

You think of lexical scarabs, of glissandos slurred on an unfettered Lhasa bassoon, his intuitive trance piercing the “sickened mental digestion” of a spent out sun. What transpires is then flotation “above exploded dialectical ennui” humming “in the registers of fever.” It allows you to “ponder cryptic obsidian” and attune yourself to its “imaginal cryptology,” yourself then being immersed in its “turbulence of actual Harmonies.”