Introduction

Since the 1970s, Los Angeles poet Will Alexander has pursued poetic language as a combustive yet precise zone of experience. In an interview with Harryette Mullen, he credits Rimbaud for setting him on his literary path. In the decades since, Alexander has remained true to the French poète maudit’s demand for a “disorientation of the senses,” even as he has taken this credo in a singular direction.

Alexander is a bricoleur who draws inspiration from wildly disparate sources. His ambitious poems, propelled by volatile wordplay and a nearly occult vision, have been grouped with California Surrealism, Afro-Futurism, and other avant-garde US aesthetics. He was also nourished early on by iconic small presses and journals, including Nathaniel Mackey’s Hambone and Clayton Eshleman’s Sulfur, where, notably, his work appeared alongside that of international modernists such as César Vallejo, Octavio Paz, and Aimé Césaire. Among Alexander’s many books are Stratospheric Canticles (Pantograph Press, 1995); Asia & Haiti (Sun & Moon Press, 1995); The Sri Lankan Loxodrome (New Directions, 2009); Refractive Africa (New Directions, 2021); and The Combustion Cycle (Roof Books, 2021).

His latest work, Divine Blue Light (City Lights Publishers, 2022), collects much shorter—even lyric—poems. Perhaps because of this new brevity, Alexander’s characteristic explosiveness is amplified. We read of “vibrational mazes,” “maelstroms / that predate themselves,” a “blaze of riddles,” and “exploded constellations.” Everything in this book moves, deforms, transforms, and metamorphosizes, as if caught up in geologic intensity. In short bursts, the poems’ speakers are even more central, as in “Mantric Blizzard as Space”:

& because
I am at nerves’ end
I can only breathe mantras
& live within

As its title indicates, Divine Blue Light is dedicated to the jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. A sense of ekphrasis hovers over the entire book, not as a mere description of another work of art but as something far more “blazing.” Ekphrasis here serves to liberate the “divine blue light”—that is, the electricity of art. In his recent critical text The Contortionist Whispers (published this year by Action Books, where I am an editor), Alexander writes, “creativity is rendered by old spectrometers and error.” When attuned to the electricity of art, the poet “becomes gemstone vapour, an enigmatic ghost, an inclement cipher.” Poetry, for Alexander, doesn’t adhere to the binary of “accessible” or “difficult” that US critics have obsessed over for decades, but is more complex, akin to a specter or vapor—unclear, sometimes invisible, but strongly felt in the poet-as-spectrometer.

This idea connects Alexander not just to Surrealism but back again to Rimbaud. For five decades, Alexander has investigated art’s occult electricity—a force that can disorient the senses—and has connected the lyrical impulse to wider planetary forces. Along the way he’s found new terrains of engagement, and new readers eager to enter his “vapours.”