Will Alexander's "Transmundane Specific"

Will Alexander, Poet and Essayist: A Special Section

The quagmire don’t hang out no signs.

—Folk Aphorism

. . . I’ve been banished and slandered by those in my general purview, by those who protest the sum of my arcane methodologies.

—Will Alexander (Towards the Primeval 19)

If it is an oddly futuristic arcana that Will Alexander invokes in his poetry and prose, it is at the same time the most familiar form of defamiliarization. Looking into the drawings that often accompany his texts, those scorings of his “Mime Tornadoes” and “Psychotropic Squalls,” often produces the same sort of vertigo felt when looking into deepest space through the most advanced of telescopic technologies. Our sense of being at the edge of the new is tempered by our knowledge that the light reaching us images ancient events. Alexander’s science is a fiction that presents us with ancient evenings reflected “in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets” (Stratospheric 33). His is a future anterior that comes to us out of a tradition of African-American re-imagining. Sun Ra devoted a lifetime to telling us of “other planes of there,” “other worlds they have not told you of,” worlds that seemed placed simultaneously in ancient Egypt and deep in the future. The Art Ensemble of Chicago has built a career around their motto, “Great Black Music, Ancient to the Future.” Amiri Baraka’s album of poetry and music It’s Nation Time billed itself as “Afrikan Visionary Music” and carried cover art in which the ancient inscriptions of black Africa gave onto a futurist dawning of a new day past the pyramids. Each of these artists has contributed to a history of pan-African modernity, an internationalist, African-inflected surrealism that leads directly to Will Alexander’s front door.

There is seldom mention of these traditions in the few public discussions of Alexander’s work that have appeared in the past. Precisely because Alexander’s writing is such a “seeming nightmare idiom” (Stratospheric 69), critics and blurb writers have approached it as if it were a dream of their own, deeply rooted in their own anxieties. And those anxieties have had to do often with arguments that are not necessarily Alexander’s. In the effort to establish a footing for a “post-language school” poetics, which is not at all a bad thing to do, some writers have attempted to enlist Alexander’s works in their cause, overlooking in the process both his age (it’s hard to argue that a poet born in 1948 is part of a generation that comes after Ron Silliman) and the long record of his writing and publication. Eliot Weinberger, equally unsympathetic to “language” poetries, enrolls Alexander in a party of one in opposition to all that Weinberger himself finds distasteful. Hence, and here I must admit to being both a professor and a poet, Weinberger introduces a selection of Alexander’s work in the journal Sulfur with a slam at “the professors—or worse, the poet-professors—talking about ‘marginalization’” (227). For Weinberger, it is important that Alexander is “almost totally hidden from other poets,” that he “lives entirely outside of the pobiz world of prizes, grants, readings, teaching positions,” that his “work resembles no one’s,” and that he “has appeared in exactly eight magazines.” The fact that Alexander had appeared in one of those magazines, Nathaniel Mackey’s Hambone, at least four times might seem to take some of the force from this last observation. Indeed, as Weinberger notes, this was Alexander’s second appearance in the well-circulated Sulfur, which must have made it difficult for Alexander to remain “almost totally hidden from other poets.” And it is greatly to be hoped that Will Alexander’s poetry will still prove of value to Weinberger, and newer readers, now that Will Alexander has become considerably less hidden, has been invited to give an ever-increasing number of readings and, god help him, has actually been observed teaching writing students at more than one campus. One can only rejoice that Alexander is finally receiving a modicum of the attention he has long...