Description
This volume brings together academic and poetic essays which focus on Will Alexander’s complete oeuvre. The collection explores Alexander’s long career in African American avant-garde poetry, and sheds light on other genres of Alexander’s work in addition to poetry, including: essays, plays, aphorisms, novels, dialogues and drawings. Each contribution contextualizes Alexander’s work in the many traditions and literatures his work draws from, including African American poetics, ecopoetics, post-colonial and anti-colonial poetics, bio and geo-histories, and global practices of consciousness raising and spiritual transformation, among other topics. The volume also includes a new interview with Alexander, as well as one of his long unpublished poems. Alexander’s writings are multi-generic and traverse many fields and states of consciousness. This edited collection thus provides a deep and sustained engagement with Alexander’s work, surveying how it has transformed the landscape of poetics, the avant-garde, and the individual reader.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction.- 2. A Glossary of Glossolalia: The Syntactic Conservation of Energy in Alexander’s Prose.- 2. Will in the Wilderness: Language and Ecology in Will Alexander’s ‘The Stratospheric Canticles’.- 3. Diffractive Index: Will Alexander’s Iridescent Method.- 4. Will Alexander’s Surreal Song: Improvisation and the Politics of Epic.- 5. ‘Not subject to being object’: Questioning Calculation in Will Alexander’s ‘The Congo’.- 6. Faunal Communities.- 7. The Poetics of Plenitude.- 8. ‘There Are No Nouns to Ensnare Me:’ Decolonization of Identity in Will Alexander’s Poetics.- 9. Divine Blue Light.- 10. Momentary Weather Systems and Cosmological Climates.- 11. Alexander’s Archives.- 12. Poet’s Roundtable.-13. Conclusion: Interview between Will Alexander and Joshua Schuster. 14. Alexander, ‘The Sand Genie’.
