No. 1 - January 2024
Author's Note: I had read about the African-American poet Will Alexander's work in a magazine, and an interview with him, probably The New Yorker. I've also been writing occasional book reviews for Fifth Estate, most of them not works of poetry. So last winter when they asked what I wished to review, I suggested this relatively new volume. I had just picked up the paperback somewhere. I find his work both challenging and rewarding.
“Divine Blue Light: for John Coltrane,” by Will Alexander Published by City Light Books, 2022
Reviewed by Robert Knox Will Alexander tells us that his latest poems, collected in “Divine Blue Light: for John Coltrane” and published near the end of 2022, “remain parallels to nanograms as dazzling wattage.” A nanogram, a billionth of a gram, is light on its feet, and the poet is asking the reader to be similarly nimble in responding to his lines, images, and appropriations of vocabulary from the sciences, mathematics, and non-Western dialects. A Pulitzer Prize finalist for a previous collection, Alexander’s new book is described by his publisher City Lights Books as “a kinetic explosion of language that emanates from the intersection between surrealism and afro-futurism where [Black poet] Cesaire meets Sun Ra.” If you have heard the ‘new music’ orchestra Sun Ra perform live, you will probably not forget the experience, though it’s not a dish for all tastes. In comparison, John Coltrane (who died in 1967) is nearly a crossover figure. Many jazz buffs love his classic appropriation of Rogers and Hart in the LP “My Favorite Things,” for instance, but the Coltrane to whom Alexander’s cosmic ray-gun word-blasts are dedicated was more likely the star-climber of 1963’s LP “Ascension.” What I am implying here is there is nothing conventional about these poems. It’s hard to go more than a line or two without encountering a challenge to the reader’s vocabulary, and most stanzas will send you at least once on a Google search. If you believe that poetry “should be accessible to all readers,” a standard I have heard articulated by some poets, this is not the book for you. But if you’re up for a challenge, you’ll find a worthy one in “Divine Blue Light. Let’s start at the beginning, with one of collection’s major poems, “Condoned to Disappearance: for Fernando Pessoa.” The Lisbon poet who published almost nothing in his own lifetime, Pessoa created scores of heteronyms for his imaginary poets who wrote in different styles and voices. His journal-like manuscript, titled “The Book of Disquiet,” describes an existence tailored to his preference for solitude, “inertia and withdrawal.” Alexander however finds the beauty and integrity in what appear to most as Pessoa’s self-defeating choices: “flowing from various forms rife with altering your personality human microbial filtration as anonymous fantasmic shift of various lingual maturation being high art as cinder as itinerant breathing codes that range from susurrant of inaudible deafening” As Pessoa did away with personality in his own life, only to create a multitude of voices in his verse, Alexander does away with capitals and punctuation and familiar standards of syntax, spelling and vocabulary. You can see the attraction. Translating, in the lines above, the concept “personality,” into microscopic components suggested by the phrase “human microbial filtration,” Alexander’s verse turns “high art” to “cinder.” The poem is full of striking images. Pessoa’s fictional identities are not enemies, the poet tells us, but voices “that glisten in themselves/ because you understood that the void continued to blaze…” Alexander may be suggesting here an image for his own poem: a “void” that continues “to blaze.” Because its subject is clearly the eccentric and, to Alexander, courageous life choice of a now celebrated literary figure, readers may find this poem, as I did, among the more easily accessible in this volume. Pessoa invents new selves. Alexander invents new meanings; and in some cases new words. In a later poem, “Language: Replete with Transformative Monsters” we are faced at once with “Language/ as scaled erisma” – a word that defeats me – and yet the poem as it unwinds itself in chemical chains of metaphor is irresistible: “as amplification that burns & activates its own neter or principle That blazes via written skill or utterance & sonically blinds with its own display …” Alexander repeatedly uses the word “as” to suggests a kind of comparison, similar to the more commonly found “like” in ordinary language, but these poems are all about unlikely comparisons. I tend to read “as” in this volume to mean “as in the manner of.” A poem that addresses the nature of language does so almost entirely by showing its protean characteristics, its range of possibilities. As a writer, an obsessive user of language, I am entranced by this approach. One thing to be said in favor of Alexander’s poetry is that you will not mistake it for prose. I found working my way through a four or five-page poem in “Divine Blue Light” more rewarding, if more challenging, than similar length works by more conventional poets. In a long poem dedicated to Coltrane – the creative divinity invoked at various points in this volume – titled “Divine Blue Light: Sudden Ungraspable Nomadics,” the verse consists of strings of ineffable comparisons opened by the word “as.” In fact, the pursuit of the ineffable might be a way to describe the missional quality of these poems. Here we have the “divine blue light” of Coltrane’s music or, perhaps, inspiration, poetically characterized “as quantum as perpetual as Inter-Dimensional Kindling …” Later in the poem, in lines addressed directly to ‘Trane,’ we read: “it was your sonic grammar that climbed & now registers as sonic echo far beyond gregarious misnomer Not as a dazed mercurial haunting Or as plague Or as sound that roams as superstitious poltergeist But as anthem of itself As profoundly philosophical altering of itself.” I don’t believe I’ve ever read anybody write about music this way, as if the words themselves came from inside the sound. At the poem’s end the poet raises the idea of ‘symbols’ suggested by the music’s ‘sonic grammar.’ Not as ‘quotidien measurement,’ Alexander writes: “but as suns that extend & measure themselves Never confined to the testament that is reason… But as the highest drama that specifies complexity …” Anyone looking for that kind of linguistic drama will find it in Will Alexander’s “Divine Blue Light.” If anarchism in literature involves breaking down conventions of thought and expression and exploring new ways for words and ideas to rub shoulders, set off sparks, and make beautiful music together, then Alexander may be its prophet.
© 2024 Robert Knox
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