Lingual Alchemy

Editor’s Note: An extended version of this interview is available here.

Jenna Peng: There’s a line in your poem “Divine Blue Light”: “John/these are realms where the mind fails to match itself.”

Will Alexander: He’s very inspirational for me because, by the way, this is the first poem I’ve ever written on John Coltrane. I’ve been influenced by John Coltrane practically my whole life. Wow. He is too much. He and Eric Dolphy remain way up there for me. We’re all, all three of us, only boys. We had no siblings.

JP: What is so moving about John Coltrane? The dedication of this book is to him. Since “Divine Blue Light” is the first poem you’ve written on him, did you feel any pressure to do justice to the expansiveness and movement and eros of his work? Did it take you this long to be able to write a poem on him?

WA: No.

JP: OK then. [laughter]

WA: Because John Coltrane has been through all my work. I mean, I was living this way when I was thirteen years old. I was just getting into the essence of all the timelessness of what I experienced. Sonic liberty. He 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. They can mistake you for some kind of con artist or bank robber, which could be a negative psychic appellation. 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. In fact, I’m still working on things. In other words, I’m not static—never static. One never feels like one has control over everybody and everything. One continues to work at illumination. As John Coltrane once said, keep on polishing the mirror. Keep on polishing the mirror.

JP: The place you’re speaking from is so personal and idiosyncratic. It’s your consciousness that leads more than these external objects or disciplines. What kinds of literature have you been drawn to? What kinds of art outside literature?

WA: 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 of that, I’ll say it upfront; 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. Let me say this, in Wo’se, as the Egyptians called it, or what the Greeks called Luxor, 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 were allowing you to grow as a being, not to become a CEO of a company or get a good job at the Postal Service. There was a philosophical understanding of the reality of the human being, the higher aspects of the mind. This was not part of the Industrial Revolution, the way the educational system has become.

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

WA: That’s what our latest astronomical findings have brought to us: a nonconfinement. Questions about the origin of the Big Bang, it’s blowing through conceptions, taking people off their rockers. This big star Earendel that wasn’t supposed to be there in the 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, open to things. Like there are numerous suns, there’s not only one sun. It’s not only the one kind of consciousness, one linear consciousness. This common consciousness—Google headlines, and advertising at the furniture company or whatever it is—could be anything.

JP: Not only one sun, not only one consciousness makes me think of Fernando Pessoa, who you wrote the opening poem of Divine Blue Light on. What do you find so generative about his work and heteronyms?

WA: First of all, the heteronyms are lateral; they’re not linear. His imagination was able to sprawl without any kind of decrease, which was very important to me as an example. They said you could see Pessoa walking down the street and he would just disappear before your eyes. I don’t mean that in a metaphysical way, but that the way he was handling his energy was elusive, was an elusive poetic manner, which was completely unrecognized during his sojourn on Earth, during his rooming with his aunts, working as a commercial translator into English from Portuguese. He was an anonymous being during that period.

One of the things that happened during my sojourn was that I was able to actually spend time in Pessoa’s house in Lisbon. I just absorbed the situation. It was the last hours of the morning, near noon, and in this nondescript place in Lisbon, I remember just walking down the street, just staying there for several hours, just soaking up the energy. I was able, years before that, to do a small panel with Richard Zenith, who is Pessoa’s biographer, at a literary center here in LA, Beyond Baroque. The deepest encounter, of course, is my internal understanding of what he was concerning himself with lingually, how he was approaching himself lingually via the imagination. He was not an enclosed being. The language was expanding, the mind was opening it to different realms. That’s the impetus I’ve always wanted to expand on.

JP: Your mind is more than extremely associative. Do you ever get overwhelmed by all it is that needs to be said? That work can never end.

WA: 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. I worked on this project on the Moriscos, Secrets Prior to the Sun; I honed it down until I could concentrate completely on that book. Or the way in 2019, I spent a whole year typing up a volume of plays. Treason in the Northern Theatre is the name of the book. Radical book. I say that in the sense that I did this critique of Surrealism and Carl Jung, things like that. Any of my projects, I just take time to do them. At the same time it’s not occluding all the other projects. 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 I told you, I feel like I’m still nineteen, but at the same time ... You got to give yourself a break, take a little time off and relax, man.

JP: There are times when I’ll be intensively writing and reading, and then I’ll eventually work up to a point where I’m just repeating myself. My mind doesn’t go on, so I take a break until it’s able to go on again. But I feel your mind is just continuously proliferating.

WA: Like the swift birds, these little birds that migrate long distances that find a way to rest while in flight. In jazz, they call it circular breathing. I’ve been able to psychologically employ that. At this point, 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 don’t have to be, I’m not buried in the provinces as I once was.