Vertiginousin a pitch dark sailing houseas alienated spinning figmentI ambulate as galling paper roadas phantoms blazing in & out of consciousnessas othernessas alienated otherpeering down on myselffrom a coeval skyfacing a scale that enters ashesas a chronicle of non-sequiturs being rays from Saturnian winds because there exists nothing except nothing I can squandernothing that curious bookcases brewso that fire appears from urnsas if it were a territorial omenas electrocuted scaraliveas magical utteranceas roughage self-specified in opening form onto random scholarly dustthusasking myself the one-line equation of how astonishment boils
In a Pitch Dark Sailing House
Will Alexander
Feature Date
- June 7, 2023
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“In a Pitch Dark Sailing House” from Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane)
by Will Alexander.
Copyright © 2022 by Will Alexander.
Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books. www.citylights.com
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Born in 1948 in Los Angeles, Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, playwright, philosopher, visual artist, and musician. He has published over two dozen books in a variety of genres and has earned many honors and awards including a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry, a California Arts Council Fellowship, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, a Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, and the 2016 Jackson Poetry Prize. He has also exhibited his artwork in group and solo shows. His work is known for its visionary, oracular surrealism and the influence of Negritude. Among his publications are Refractive Africa (New Directions, 2021/Granta, 2022), which was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, The Combustion Cycle (Roof, 2021), Across the Vapor Gulf (New Directions, 2017), and The Sri Lankan Loxodrome (New Directions, 2009). His book Compression & Purity (2011) was volume five in the City Lights Spotlight Poetry Series. He is currently the poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque in Venice, California. He has lived his entire life in Los Angeles.
“Since the 1980s, the Los Angeles-based Alexander has mixed politics with mesmeric, oracular lines.”
—The New York Times
“Adopting a surrealist approach to making sense of the universe, Alexander plumbs language for its limits, often with dazzling results….Pondering the mysteries of existence and artistic influence, this engrossing work turns the quest for self-knowledge into a choral act.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“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.”
—Jenna Peng, The Poetry Foundation
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