Never Static

Editor’s Note: A condensed version of this interview appears in the November 2022 issue of Poetry.

Will Alexander is everything. I say that colloquially but mean it metaphysically. He’s a poet and a philosopher; he writes theory, theater, and aphorisms; he has released 10 works in the last two years, from Secrets Prior to the Sun (2016), his hybrid book on the Moriscos, to texts about anything under the sun (original sin, Surrealism, advertising time, the ancient library Dār al-Ḥikma)—though, of course, he’d say there’s not only one sun. All of this enumeration misses the point that he’s not crossing over from one thing to the other but that one thing is the other. 

His new collection, Divine Blue Light (City Lights Publishers, 2022), is not unlike the subject of its first poem, Fernando Pessoa, a disappearing self amid proliferating heteronyms. It’s also not unlike its many other subjects: Gwendolyn Brooks, or astronaut Sian Proctor, or John Coltrane, to whom the book is dedicated. Alexander’s range—which moves past the propriety of each subject to the expansiveness of every—can be approximated as Aimé Césaire’s totality of the lion, or form and emptiness, or appositional, apparitional Black being. And this being is most real and realized through the collection’s quantum mechanics and dynamics, which Alexander invokes astrophysically, evokes metaphysically: 

this being the realm by which suns emerge & spin
 
this being the manner by which gestures move suns
the manner by which hands elongate & spill around corners
 
this being quantum power 

What is so distinct about Divine Blue Light lies in the distinction between affecting and effecting, between a writing practice that via craft or form signifies signification, affects signification, and a praxis that instead effects, that produces and induces the work’s thinking, doing, and being. This being not merely what the poems represent but what they engender. This being not the reading of a poem but the experience of reading. 

My approach to the interview, and to this introduction, falls short of this being. I approach Will Alexander within the limits of critical approach, within strategies of strain and oversaturation. In the interview, Will Alexander is everything, “move[s] suns,” “spill[s] around corners.”

This conversation has been edited for length.

Reading Divine Blue Light has been the most disorienting then euphoric experience that I've had with a text. It's my favorite kind of art encounter, one in which there’s this work of tuning in to static, static, static, and then, out of nowhere, a frequency cuts across it. How do you make this kind of encounter? 

I use my rational mind as an ancillary conduit, not as a primary conduit. In that sense, I’m closer to the pre-conscious and supra-conscious that preclude or supersede the rational areas of the mind, which are there but not in a dominant manner. This access to other areas of consciousness allows incredible range. It's another dimension of reality that's already there but has been less emphasized. 

The Western mentality has been so delimited over time that people have been given this hardened education of delimit as expertise. It’s simply not there when you look at the human record. Those are the kinds of things I'm concerned with. It's not writing a sonnet or an idea about some personal family development on your grandmother’s back porch. I'm not trying to demean that, but I've never been interested in a regional or local activity of consciousness. That's what's been happening for me along the way, and as that consciousness develops and has grown, I've been able to sleep up all kinds of material that inspires me and launches me into further exploration.

I love that term—sleep up, as opposed to dream up—because that speaks to how you're not reaching for something but returning to what remains, a dimension that's already there.

That's the point: the dimension that’s already there, that has been occluded for a couple thousand years, and now the mental state, the contemporary mental state, is quite wizened and declining. In spite of all the information that we may have via known languages, known histories, consciousness has not grown. It's diminished.

You get into so much minutiae that you can't get any kind of perspective on your circumstance. It creates a sense of claustrophobia and general unease or possible panic. That's what we get every day in our Google headlines or our newspapers. It's quite telling because we are never oriented toward a wider perspective. I've been fortunate enough to be able to conscript this wider consciousness.

You’re speaking to what I find so distinct about your collection, which is that I can discern a praxis, distinct from a practice, to your work, this ontological more than perceptual investment. This conceptual turn is by no means absent in literature, but it’s more muted. Where does the conceptual dimension of your work come from? 

I think about what Philip Lamantia pointed out: you’re born as a poet. He says it’s from your maternal side, maternal insights. That's been my experience. I grew into this conception and then I learned rational aspects of what it is to be a writer, a poet, not according to rules but according to impulse. That’s the key. The way they teach poetry is often according to rules, but it’s about the impulse that creates. The energy of language, not the rules of language. For me, the energy of language supersedes the so-called rules, which, in the modern Occident, were more or less sculpted during the Industrial Revolution. The organics of a line rather than the mechanics of a line. 

I’ll say it in this poetic way: I've never been marooned in a psychological silo. I've never been marooned. As a result, I was never a good student. I did enough, but that was no indicator of what my consciousness was onto. Expertise wants to pull you into a silo and keep you there to examine minutiae and then you’re graded ABCDEFG. In Wo’se, as the Egyptians called it, or what the Greeks called Luxor, there was this educational complex about the whole human being, not the partial human being. There were teachers in geography and poetry and astronomy even at that age, and things were allowed to plant. In other words, these things allowed you to grow as a being. There was a philosophical understanding of the reality of the human being, the higher aspects of the mind. 

The refinement of an inquiry doesn’t lead to the mastery of a field but rather to this expansion and outgrowing. 

That’s what our latest astronomical findings have brought to us: a non-confinement. Questions about the origin of the Big Bang, it’s blowing through conceptions, taking people off their rockers. It’s too much. This big star Arendelle that wasn’t supposed to be there in early stages of the universe was there already. Astronomy is taking up a lot of mindsets and different directions. Poetry should follow in that suit. There are numerous suns; there’s not only one sun. It's not only one kind of consciousness, one linear consciousness. 

The whole idea is getting into the foundational element of motion, the kaleidoscopic energy of the kinetic in language. Not dot your i’s and cross your t’s, but to get into the kinetic explosion of energy. We're talking about a combination of life. It’s part of a flow of being that we don't understand. Poetry, the exploration via poetry, allows answers to come to you. Not by means of any kind of explicit this or that, but because one feels the experiential nature of language. It’s not something that one could communicate like an answer, but it does give you a kind of illumination, that the sun begins to rise inside of oneself. That’s, at this moment, the best way I can speak about it. 

Right. It’s not merely what the poem represents, but what the poem engenders. And what your poems engender is not merely their reading but the experience of reading, “the experiential nature of language.” How do you do this? 

It’s the way that it naturally morphs for me. It naturally morphs into a wider space in terms of implication. 

What necessitates this kind of engagement? In your preface, you name the “tyranny of causality,” “three-dimensional noun-based organization.”

Before I wrote, in my earlier years, I was so smitten listening to practitioners of music: Jackie McLean and John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. They were just so much more advanced than somebody like, you know, Pound or Stevens. It wasn't even close. Sonically, Coltrane and them were so far advanced beyond these strictures. Anytime I put on a Jackie McLean recording, I always knew I was in New York City. Even before I went to New York City, I could feel it. The same thing with Dolphy. 

For me, the surrounding stricture that envelops the United States or the general consciousness of the human diorama at the present is really kind of embarrassing. If a higher, other type of creature were looking at it right now, it’s like one of the Zen practitioners said, this is like looking at cartoons. The cars are cartoons and the beings are cartoonish. These times are really confusing and dark and upsetting for people on the political scale, but in terms of real insight, it's beyond all of these situations that people are going through. It's working toward something, another kind of illumination, if we are allowed to carry it out. 

The West is, like E.M. Cioran said years ago, is not at the cusp; it’s in decline. It’s been in decline for some time. This is inevitable and the headlines seem to prove it. We're going into unknown dimensions that rationality can't contend with. As a poet, I need to understand that, not go along with it, but understand it as an opportunity to get into another space of consciousness. Henry Miller says decline can be a great opportunity for the writer. It's that opportunity that allows one to range forward throughout the imagination and work with one’s gifts poetically. Of course, you put your conscious efforts in with certain forms of study and understanding your parameters. You have to know something about the instrument you're using in order to make it sing. That why I don't subscribe to rationality but to praxis, to understanding how one can play one’s instrument as well as one can. 

I’m thinking about your poem “Divine Blue Light,” which reflects this radical space of consciousness and music. You write: “being sonic blinding bodies / that rise & loop & gather themselves on the other side of themselves,” “being astral space / sired in simultaneous versions of themselves.” It recalls the kind of being that Fred Moten and Stefano Harney write in The Undercommons: “This radical being beside itself of blackness, it’s off to the side, off from the inside, out from the outside, imposition.” How does your writing actively engender this kind of being? 

I have to go back to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s work, where he talks about the primordial understanding of the being, not as a biographical understanding but as a primordial understanding of oneself. That's what I'm interested in. I’m manifesting that energy via language. When I'm in these other states and these meta-states, which I am continuously involved in, in all of my waking moments, not didactically but as a natural way of being, I'm not creating any distinctions. The energy begins to manifest its way out of that substrate lingually, in whatever subject I’m pursuing.

Therefore, it’s a simultaneous experience. It's not something I pick and choose between: closure and expansion. Always the expansion, always the understanding that being is allowed to breathe. Be it a minute or a horizon or a particular kind of form of being or animal, I'm always looking for the meta-experience of the range I'm speaking of. Therefore, there's no sense of limitation, but a sense of exploration, of actually learning from myself as I go through this material. The imagination allows one to not just fill in gaps, but to expand one’s intuition and take leaps and chances. I find this to be very problematic in many writings that are limited toward what's safe and what's factual. What about the imagination? You can't just take reality in one fell swoop, in this box or that box.

Césaire talked about the context of the lion rather than the lion. In “Poetry and Knowledge,” he wrote about the lion being the totality of lion, not in terms of itself just being a lion, but in a way that had to do with its surrounding flora and fauna, how total reality would come in to mix with its environment. That's what I'm talking about all the time, this understanding of how an existential being exists. Not in terms of four squares in a corner, but the whole idea of the roundedness of the being, the roundedness of being alive as a particular kind of being. 

I want to pose a question that Moten and Harney pose in The Undercommons. They ask, of this other being that is not reducible to being other, “Can this…be a place from which emerges neither self-consciousness nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation that proceeds somewhere on the other side of an unasked question?” I think you can speak to the unasked question and even the other side of it. 

Being outside any kind of academic strata or academic expectation is central to my praxis. I am not speaking solely of parameters of something being on or off, or something being not quite right, but between bores and angels. I don’t mean angels in a Christian metaphysical way. In the hummingbird world, there’s a bird called a sun angel. Sun angels and bores are completely different, but they come out of similar substances. They all know the sun, they all know the parameters, the solar scale. This is where the poet has the freedom to move around in all these wide arcs that are seemingly not rational to a prescribed sensibility. 

One can do that lingually, if one prepares and opens oneself, and that comes from living a certain way. I'll call it living poetically. Sometimes it's a very difficult path to follow because you feel like you fail, and there's this upset and this seeming destination. But one is pursuing one’s craft, one’s praxis for language across all kinds of sediment and detraction. One wants to reach the final, not the goal, but that final illumination of lingual goals. 

I’m thinking about people like Sam Beckett. He had all kinds of difficulties, but something was forming inside of him that led to those novels many years later, the trilogy in the late ’40s. It was beyond any kind of rational understanding. Poets develop beyond rational understanding. I know I've developed beyond a rational understanding of what I was supposed to do, what I was supposed to become. I was fortunate enough to have survived to get this understanding, this understanding within myself.

I've realized something about this interview: your work navigates the ungraspable in such rigorous and innovative ways, and in trying to attend to the rigors and innovations of your work, I fall into this pattern of epistemological approach that you break out of with every answer. 

It’s like the great Bud Powell says, the only thing I can do is play the piano. 

A phrase that recurs a lot in your poetry is “not unlike.” You end the Dean Smith poem, “not unlike the stirring of galaxies that loop via gargantuan origination.” “Not unlike” is not “like,” not the epistemological approach of “like,” nor is it “not,” which is also an epistemological gesture. I feel like you live in that space, you write from there. 

I don’t know how I escaped it. I’m not lingually, psycho-lingually, dealing with the exhausted nature of the Occidental enterprise. I'm just not into that. I'm not at the point where I need to approach it like a protest. I just live in it the way that a fish swims in water. I’m not trying to pose some kind of intellectual argument, but to be able to experience the wonders and joys of that understanding, that reality that one is lingually engaged in. 

Every time I write I feel all of these impulses, and I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say. For all my work, I don’t know exactly what I’m going to say. I’ve written a lot of plays, over a dozen, and even there I don’t know what I’m going to say, the next character surprises me all of the time. 

When I write poetry, I don't know what the next line is, what the next character is going to say. It unfolds like that across a whole range of activity.

Rather than this resistant practice in your poetry, there’s this praxis of refusal, which allows you to cut so easily across the things one would become mired in resisting or opposing. Resistance is moving without and refusal is moving with or without. 

The activity of language is something that doesn't disable me but allows greater function. I carry this across whatever I do visually, or, for instance, my plunge into aphorisms, which was really spontaneous, but I seemed to get at the heart of it and get into it to such a degree that I said, you could just do this forever. An impulse I resisted because I didn't want to become another E.M. Cioran. 

The questions I’ve prepared are asking what work you’re doing in the poem, or through a poem, but really the locus of activity is the work you’re doing before a poem. 

You’re living language, not pursuing language. You’re living it, and therefore, it has a way of growing so that maybe it springs out as a different form of a plant, rather than the way one thinks about growing a plant or a poem. Since 2021, I’ve been in the midst of putting out eight to 10 books. I didn't prescribe it. I didn't set that up as some kind of linear progression. It just seems to grow out of the circumstance. It's not a slam dunk situation, but active engagement, a lot of burning what is called the midnight oil. It’s a 24-hour-a-day cycle for me. Different things emerge out of that cycle. It could be aphorisms, could be a quasi-biographical statement, could be a poem of Pessoa, could be all ranges of things. The beauty of poetry is that it allows you to range. 

A mired question: Do you conceive of language as a problem? How do you approach it?

I approach language as riverine. It dissolves all cataracts of consciousness, the cataracts are dissolved into a kind of alchemical empowerment. Honestly, I’m not overeducated. I haven’t set up all these resistances, these frameworks, these empowerments that can only be projected into a certain kind of space. 

Octavio Paz said it interestingly in 1956 with The Bow and the Lyre, which is an incredible book. He said, it seems like everything is breaking down. All these cataracts, all these junctures are breaking down. He pointed to Lautréamont breaking all these barriers down, and Rimbaud. At the same time, some of the practitioners have re-established these barriers and they’re belatedly trapped within them, and the language can't flow through that. We need to have flown, as we merge with the greater reality that is the cosmos. I don’t mean that in a hocus pocus manner, but in an organic manner. 

My sensibility is that one has to come up living this way rather than practicing this way. Over time. Stay perpetually alert over time. My energy is not unlike when I was 19 years old. That’s one of the things Pessoa said. He said that he had the same kind of relationship to himself in an earlier time in his life. In other words, I still have that nascent energy, which has had the opportunity to mature to a degree where I can put something on the page that’s not nonsensical, not just being free just to be free, but that’s understanding how freedom can be effective. Freedom of language can be actually effective.

I’m reminded of a line in “Divine Blue Light”: “John / these are realms where the mind fails to match itself” 

That’s the first poem I ever wrote on John Coltrane. I've been influenced by him practically my whole life. Wow. He is too much. He and Eric Dolphy were way up there for me. We're all, all three of us, only boys. We had no siblings.

Did you feel pressure to do justice to Coltrane’s work? Did it take you this long to be able to write a poem on him? 

No.

OK then. 

Because John Coltrane has been through all my work. I mean, I was living this way when I was 13 years old. I was just getting into the essence of all the timelessness of what I experienced. Sonic liberty. Coltrane has a sonic liberty. This sound was all I could think about some days. 

It takes time. Like alchemy, it takes time to create the circumstance where it comes out. It’s the curiosity of the poet, that he or she develops, because there's so much absorption and understanding and misapprehension of who you are, whom they mistake you for. That goes with this territory of lingual alchemy, which is really a dangerous art because the fact is one could be cut down at any time, because there's, in general, little understanding of process in American culture. 

That’s another thing about poetry. It should be fortuitous, so that things go together rather than split apart. There's no blueprint, just ups and downs, and backs and forths, just like in life. Real life is not a linear development, but an organic one. In other words, I’m not static, never static. One continues to work at illumination. As Coltrane once said, keep on polishing the mirror. 

Hearing the way your mind moves, and how many projects you have going on, and how varied the projects are, I feel like your mind, more than just being extremely associative, more than turning from one thing to another, instead sees that one thing is the other, everything is everything. Do you ever get overwhelmed by all it is that needs to be said?

It doesn't end, although I'm taking a break right now. I'm doing all of these things at one time, but at the same time, it's like you slow things down to such a degree that it doesn't confuse you. With any of my projects, I just take time to do them. The mind can work at different levels and stages so that you don't get overwhelmed by yourself. Sometimes I don't properly appreciate it. 

Like the swift birds, these little birds that migrate long distances and find a way to rest while in flight. In jazz, they call it circular breathing. I've been able to psychologically employ that. I think I should just cool off for another week or so, a couple of weeks. Let things be. I've been haunted by this work ethic since forever. Like Nikolai Gogol says, I've always been worried about being buried in the provinces. Well, I'm not as worried about that as I once was.