Will Alexander on poetry, consciousness, and the energy of language.

By Jenna Peng
FROM: Poetry Foundation

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. Read Rest of Interview Here