Quotes: Will Alexander

Will Alexander, Celebration for Bob Kaufman,
San Francisco Public Library, April 11, 2016

Living art can withstand the peril of the vitriolic via the extrinsic as propaganda, of the masses condoned as they are by critical misperception.

*

I am a spirit who exposes his mandibles in order to appear and disappear. This being a kinetics that spontaneously arranges ghostly collapse to appear as simultaneous visibility. The latter being an apparition that allows the mind to ruminate upon its circuitous connecting traces.

*

I work always knowing that one must resist carking exhaustion, always resisting its a priori inclination as did Alhazen, and in later times Rimbaud. One gains from this resistance impalpable nths of stamina so as to enact prolific creativity rife with palpable transmutation.

*

I think of Desnos rife with oneiric eruption, verbally fishing for oquassa. This being the inner work of extending lightning bolts from stark extremities of sleep. What follows are vocables that mimic proto-fires that condense in the shape of burgeoning aural seed. What then emerges are slivers from uncanny aural scarps that magnify and extend into strangeness.

*

I speak Gullah and cater to stored rats. As for me, there always exists abominable increase, dazed lepers, arachnids crawling through hair. As for hunting migrating forms from the inferno, I scour its satanic region, I take into account forms of unleashed fever, creating from my presence a brackish type of moth, soaring, yet all the while cadenced by telepathic inherence.

-- five selections from Will Alexander's Across the Vapour Gulf, New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #22, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2017. Copyright © 2017. All rights reserved.