I Am Thinking About Will Alexander

I am thinking about Will Alexander. I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that I am thinking about Cecilia Vicuña. I am thinking of poets and the universe. Will Alexander got me young, perhaps age 21 or so. Something shimmered in a dark cavity of my being. I was surrounded by typical canonical texts and those who professed of them, and yet somewhere not far away, George Lewis was waving his arms. Somewhere also not far away, Jack Halberstam was Judith Halberstam. I didn’t feel pulled immediately, at that moment, but there were forces that were willing to transform me, the same force that moved me like a little piece atop a Ouija board, from Chemistry to Music. Will you let me in? I asked.

*

There was a surrounding confusion through which I listened, sympathetic strings, their melodics more profound and originating from some other law. I needed it for survival. I had not known that I needed it for survival. It was a language and it was a language I did not know but I understood it immediately, then gradually, then quietly. It was verbal, it was trombone, it was dance that centered the head and the tail. Sometimes I asked how old they were. I wanted to know how long it took to inhabit that language.

When it was not verbal it was something to point two fingers at: deep in the neck. The trombone provided continuum. But language was an advantage, joy, current. I listened to my cells—did I listen to my cells. Could I?

It is hard to live up to the notion of teaching poetry, when the ways in which I had been taught poetry are so luminous, incendiary, fresh blazes, Amiri Baraka when not feeling too happy or calm—I only write poetry when I am down, he says.

*

Will Alexander as a teacher, the imaginative wild diurnal poetic prophet blowing through the desert.

*

Will Alexander is everywhere. There are suitable religions for this. The time I have spent with him is not terribly long, but he is everywhere, including some of the outermost cells. When I say that I feel free and that the cells have been unlocked and that it is in relation to my engagement with art, it has something to do with having exchanged molecules with certain people at certain moments. I am not typically in the habit of discussing the exchanging of molecules with poets. In fact this makes me feel skeptical. The fact that I feel skeptical interests me, because of the very thing that has transcended this skepticism being a real thing. As real as I am typing these words into a computer, the same one I use all the time for all kinds of spiritual and non-spiritual tasks. I do not care to discuss the spirituality of tasks.

*

But I didn’t come back here to sit back and quietly join this status quo or that status quo. There are too many, to be frank. I am small in physical stature, but my willingness to fight the quotidian carnivore is great.

The fire at this level prepares me for the larger burn. Over any number of life-years accumulated, one hopes for a greater capacity for heat. Both to generate and to withstand.

A magnetic breath. I practice some kind of kinetics. Some people are willing to teach you 20 years after the fact, my hats go flying off at the soft curling recall of such memory, still circulating my neurals.

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I start over with realia, delight, an understanding that the real study is over there. Some use their own homes, I try the palm of my hand—not to read, nor sharpen, more a warm, flat, open plain. Take some money, just enough, then go on the real hunt. Excise the tumor: the block in the stairwell, the faulty sentiment that allows the mere threat of heat to grow in the mind into something larger and more menacing.

I peer into a screen and see the partial bodies of Nam June Paik, of Jacolby Satterwhite. The writhing mass of Carolee Schneeman takes over. All this. Until Gabrielle Civil steps over and forward out of the screen, into this physical space which I will, for now, call a remote voyage of the sumptuous imagination. This is a poetics. Not the, not my, but a as in, this is it right now. For the right now. A moment of restlessness with which to apprehend the ongoing terror.

On the other side of town, a Book Club repeats itself and repeats itself.

*

The ceaselessness of Will Alexander is a line of music. He is a tonic chord of anti-hegemonic harmonics, sympathetic compressions of image into anima, edges of the animorose, it sounds itself underneath the overtures and I strip off one identity layer after another until I am untraceable, maybe just an echo, knock on that wall and listen. Will Alexander is the higher intelligence that poetry patiently listens to; Cecilia Vicuña’s voice goes lower than I had imagined. I had not listened to a single recording before seeing her in real life. Not technically true, but spiritually.

I open up Will Alexander’s book; the one in physical proximity is The Sri Lankan Loxodrome. I debate whether or not to look up the word loxodrome again. I angle myself appropriately and continue, look for my own breathing.

*

This is the moment where I sunken myself down.

Knock on my wall if you would like to be helpful. Density is random at times, but even a vastness such as Southern California can, at times, have the right kind of density. I say thank you to my timing and I say thank you to my teachers, and to the ghosts of my teachers, them too.

I refuse, however, to continue in the language they spiral around me, a web of repeated insistence, tone of comfortable inertia, it is as simple as refusing to abandon the metric system. My dates, though, are Western—a tiny gesture against the timings of Imperial Japan.

*

Allen Ginsberg died when I was a student. Some fellow students came over. Rae Armantrout came to my crappy suburban apartment with a six-pack of beer. We read Allen Ginsberg poems.

And now, two students walk into my head. I sign myself up for penultimate wretched antiblasphemous flow. Two more get their head done. I sign up for interiority literary law. I wave my arms at Butch Morris. I lose count. Let the stars erupt. Duck for tumescence when the moment is ripe. I walk out of my own class and hurry to open up the Will Alexander vein in my neck. This has everything to do with how to teach poetry —the neck, the hurry, the walking out.

How to build an institution within each mind.

That was surreal. What was. No, it was not. The price of freedom in different currencies. I walk around the room and tap each person where I think it is most needed. Whisper, then ask for recall. Hum, burn. My exposed bone for what cause.

The blank page constellates its shadows like a blanket, spreads gentle creases over every potential line of thought. Crawl in, crawl in. The white page is not the same thing as a white person. Both safety and violence in a blank white page. How do you choose to inhabit that, dear you.

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In search of an exit, I flip around. Over. When the planet is done with us, Will Alexander will have established means for other conscious beings to speak on our behalf. That language. I tell you to aim for that language. Your anti-failure, or completion if you will, or abandonment if you prefer, is not in the arrival but in that attempt. In the post-present infinite configuration of expansive sonic awareness, only some creatures will have sustained their claim to language. The rest of us will trace the black shadows, cooing and lolling.

*

I press the clock. It does not yield. In an imaginative breach, I leap back anyway, to a time predating Imperial Japan. I wish to do that in spite of myself. Earlier still, when the language was oral. Leap forward. What kind of thanks is that, for the gift of written language. Whenever I press towards the collective, there are always some who will hate it. I am one of them. What am I doing?

I wonder if surviving in a place like this is akin to a return to a particularity in language. Or can I insist on continuing to exist like this. The labor of returning. The implosion of a disappearing species is a labor articulated by not me, but Will Alexander. This is a particular instance of labor, mine is unsteady though passionate. I distribute animal sounds, hide into a written voice, detonate the bags under my eyes earned by the lateness of the moment. I female some moments, retract my nails. Blaze, spread the heat. I open my hand to you, here is a small mound of heat for you to take, just take it.