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Other Planes of
There Divine Blue Light
(for John Coltrane) Will Alexander City Lights, Pocket
Poets No.63, 2022. ISBN 978-0-87286-870-0
I first came across
Will Alexander’s writing in an Anthology called Hydrolith:
Surrealist Research and Investigations (2009) published by a
co-operative publishing outfit based in Berkerley, California. I
quickly followed up this imprint which appeared to be the most
visible outcrop of Alexander’s poetry and prose. I was thus shocked
last year to see a collection of his, Refractive Africa,
published in the UK by none other than Granta, a publishing house I
have always shied away from as Brit-centric and formally
conservative. What was happening? Well, it seems after 30 years in
the fecund margins Alexander had gained the dubious distinction of
being shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. It was this that surely
brought him to the attention of Granta as English publishing has
long held forms of surrealist writing in a kind of frigidaire
contempt. Or, could it be that Alexander’s output, a continuous
accretion of dissonant intrusions and lingual jouissance, had made
of his oeufre an almost geological force that had risen-up as
an unchartered terrain in the mid-Atlantic? Rooted in the
rhizomatic tradition of maverick Bob Kaufman and other Bay Area
beats who embraced surrealism, such as Philip Lamantia, Alexander
seems to have pursued poetry as “phonemic density” (p.30) to the
left of the left of the left field. This is, perhaps, in no small
part due to one of the major shared inheritances of surrealism: that
a writerly practice can and should be opposed to a literarity that
reifies language just as much as it reifies its readers, lodging
them into the ‘super-imposed rationality’ (p.xiii) of a
loded-culture ruled by an accumulation of commodities, an abstracted
labour, that utters its deathly whisper into the ear of infants in
the womb. Such a rationality cannot abide that which escapes its
grasp and Alexander’s writing, full of “psychic fracas” (p.4) and
“maniacal translocations” (p.11), most definitely opens up a vista
not so much to an irrational-to-be-feared as to the panoramic
rejection of an overdetermined cognition; modes of thought that
restrict us to endless unnuanced repetitions of the same:
“suppression has cast its lot on our neurological realm.” (p.21) That the habits of
thought and thoughtless habits have been unsettled by surrealism may
have been dulled in surrealist image-making by the likes of Salvador
Dali (= Avida Dollars). Such paintings and collages have become
commonplaces employed by advertising and attention-seeking (self)
publicists. However, surrealist writing, especially that at its
margins, has, I feel, maintained a consistent sense of the uncanny
and estrangement because whilst not all of us can make viable
images, all of us need language to communicate and thus words become
a currency of all kinds of exchange that extend from the performing
of a job to the lalangue of the unsaid. Alexander’s
unsettling of language – from unusual usages and dissonant
compactions to drawing upon a wider vocabulary than the
self-referential literary – unsettles the smoothness of an
untroubled exchange (social realism with its lack of ‘internal
murmur’), revealing, as does this book by Alexander, a “lingual
ravine” (p.7) into which we, as practicing readers, fall. But we do not fall
into the void by entering this book. We fall, or ascend, into
“microbe warrens” (p.15) into “a solar force 25 trillion miles from
our momentary continents.” (p.43) The void which “blazes and gives
strength” (p.4) is only the dwindling twilight of our knowledge, the
limits of how we conceive of our ‘self’… and so we should welcome
Alexander’s urging of us, his readers, to no longer be a ‘subject
that knows’. We must, and indeed as we journey across this book and
its multi-valent vocabularies, we must (= a positive
imperative to read Alexander’s work), be the subject that
does-not-know and never can know-in-full. In this way we are
disabled from any longer heeding a totalitarian beseeching that
seduces us to be the proprietors of our ‘own’ self-knowledge. And
so, in this way, the sensuous delight of language (as “cartographic
plenums” p.16), the ricochet of signifiers (“holographic sonics”
p.7”), really makes ignorance blissful, places us at the
outer-limit, the interface, of the conscious and the unconscious, a
suspended state akin to listening to music, akin to levitating in
the liminal sphere of the senses as they reappropriate a rationality
that thus far has been used against us. In this way there
is something apt about Alexander dedicating this collection to John
Coltrane. As in some of Coltrane’s freest moments there is not so
much a departure from lyricism as an undermining of it, a
transformation of tone with the introduction of timbral blue-note
after blue-note: “hemispheres colliding/ as bricolage/ as osmosis/
as sonic notation.” (p.32) For Alexander this dissonance, rooted as
it is in recognisable verse forms, is introduced by vocabularies
more akin to autodidact scientific studies, studies that see
Alexander as a ‘receptor’ (Édouard Glissant) who gathers and shares
rather than a professor who ‘ring-fences’. So, drawing from
geo-chronology to astrophysics and, more pronouncedly in other
collections, a deep study of “African cellular memory” (Refractive
Africa, p.ix), Alexander sets up an estrangement that is
propelled by the more or less total absence of himself as ‘poet’ in
the poems themselves. The word ‘I’ is used twice in this collection
as if to emphasise our own de-individuation in the grand durée
that these poems place us in. As Alexander phrases it: “Implied
inner palpability as transpersonal dictation.” (p.68) It is this
de-placedness (emphasised by Alexander’s plentiful use of the
prefixes ‘pre’ and ‘post’) that has the effect of not so much
situating us in a placid transcendental realm as, and this applies
to Coltrane too, placing us in the equivocity of a materialist
vitalism! Alexander’s words and Coltrane’s notes are sonorous matter
that place us as readers and listeners in a freeness of the
signifier that outstrips us as ‘selves’, enabling “thinking to
encounter within being, more than being, something
[…] ‘non-realised’” (Samo Tomsic). And it is maybe this
non-realised, or yet-to-be-realised, that again links Alexander to a
mutating Surrealism. “We are listening
for those who have stumbled beyond civilian incorporation…” References Will Alexander:
Refractive Africa, Granta, 2021. Will Alexander:
Mirach Speaks to his Grammatical Transparents, Oyster Moon
Press, 2011. Édouard Glissant:
Poetic Intention, Nightboat, 2018. Samo Tomsic: The
Capitalist Unconscious, Verso, 2015.
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