An Interview | Will Alexander in Conversation with Terrence Arjoon

The first time I saw Will Alexander read was at Hauser & Wirth in 2018. He read after Cecilia Vicuña, from what must have been​​ The Sri Lankan Loxodrome​​ (New Directions, 2009). I remember him stopping mid-poem to recommend that we research​​ medieval​​ Baghdadi​​ sewage systems,​​ highlighting​​ a key achievement of the Islamic Golden Age​​ (concurrent with Europe’s Dark Ages),​​ and​​ mourning​​ the destruction of a beautiful city. That is what, to me, Will Alexander does: trains sustained attention on the smallest cosmic detail, a detail that in the process of being seen expands to encompass the entirety of the universe. ​​ He does this in​​ Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat​​ (Essay Press, 2016), his book of selected prose in which he eulogizes friends and teachers; and in​​ Across the Vapour Gulf ​​​​ (New Directions, 2017), his pamphlet of aphorisms. He’s been doing this for thirty-plus years, bearing witness to the universes.

I read Alexander’s latest book,​​ Refractive Africa​​ (New Directions, 2021) on a windswept New York beach near the end of summer.​​ The city had brought in sand crawlers to reshape the dunes that protect the sandpipers and beach grass. I think of a stanza from​​ Refractive Africa:

& our collective demise

seldom acknowledged or made manifest in the chronicles

never marked via​​ general mourning

as if our remembrance via grief had never been extended itself or appeared

 ​​ ​​ ​​​​  to be human

This is from the book’s central section,​​ “The Congo,”​​ in which Alexander takes the role of sangoma, a healer,​​ “who foretells the state of birth &​​ rebirth.”​​ He mourns for the beautiful country ruined by resource extraction and​​ colonialism, but also looks inside it, and into the future; he considers an Africa that exists beyond the bounds of time, space, or biological decay.

The following interview was conducted over email from September through November of 2021. We discussed Alexander’s heroes, late-surrealist style, and the future.

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Terrence Arjoon: You open your new book with a poem dedicated to Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola. To me, he captures​​ many of the stylistic tics of recorded African folktales, like the elongated sentence structure and the temporal and linguistic playfulness, but updates it with mid-twentieth century Nigerian political strife and 60s metatextuality. Is he in some way reclaiming the folktale from ethnographers like Leo Frobenius?

Will Alexander:​​ Tutuola to my understanding is not kneaded by, say, the inbred scholarship that was germane to the likes of Césaire and the Island elite who entered a European educational training ground. For Tutuola the contrary was the case, as he never officially ascended above the plane of primary schooling. Yet a penetrant lingual was magically bred via nonlinear scale and the organic understanding of the seemingly smaller state being resonant within its larger component. This nonlinear property regales the tide of his tales lesser or larger always without regularity as motion. For Tutuola, its motion is alive as an organic psychic fractal that naturally rises from indigenous rooting. It was never his wont to rise from superimposed scholarly​​ praxis but to have it naturally rise in what could be termed an anarchic dazzling.​​ 

So what his African critics railed about on and on as deficits, we naturally see in hindsight as empowering a space symbolic of marginal regalia having no power to shape or move the world. These critics are psychologically short-circuited by what I understand to be superimposed marginalia. This being none other than a brazen verbal assessment of Tutuola’s imaginary yield, in​​ essence appraising his essence not unlike stand-in-segregationists from the American South. They in essence arrayed themselves in the colonizer's rhetoric.​​ 

Yet as I tend to paraphrase the fragment within my poem on Tutuola,​​ “Babesola Johnson & his ilk”​​ remain nothing but soiled messengers of distraction. As Kierkegaard so famously put it​​ “the crowd is untruth.” ​​ So the crowd that advanced Babesola's thinking can no longer foster true power or opinion. Thus the late Tutuola in his penetrant use of language continues to enact within his language protracted power that remains unstinted.

TA:​​ Unstinted power is definitely how I would describe Tutuola’s language. His sentences are free from any form of control or logic, and you see that best when he is writing​​ trickster characters. I was particularly taken with the titular character of​​ The Palm-Wine Drinkard. What is the role of the trickster in your poetics? And do you find yourself conceiving of poetic devices as juju or gris-gris?

WA: Science and magic seem at present commingling on a simultaneous plane. There exists this simultaneity of accuracy and healing. For me poetry remains endemic with primordial power being a natural force, spiraling with adventure.​​ 

As reality presently struggles at siring a rationally scripted balance of itself, the Occidental notion of itself is starting to deal with untold forces far beyond the realm that can be contained within a version of itself that can be contained within a political or racial category. This is not rampant speculation or wild dizzying wattage purposely projected, but a state of affairs where the principle of convenience fails to oscillate, or render succor to the populace at large. Ours being a strictly commercialized civilization has​​ little defense against such formulation.​​ 

A Yoruba psychology such as Tutuola’s understands detours or what I understand to be non-commensurate examples that never accrue as positional linearity. Because it has narrated its own exclusive perspective it has no flexibility as regards the measure that prevails as deep time. All the while its predilection for exposure to deep time has rendered it unarguably useless. Not simply contained dementia within psycho-analytic praxis but as expanded psycho-physical disruption.

TA: When you say poetry is endemic with primordial power, spiraling with adventure, I naturally return to your paintings and drawings, one of which adorns the cover of​​ Refractive Africa. As a reader of your work, it seems like painting is as much of an important spiritual practice to you as writing is. I think of two of your favorite painters and their relationship to enhanced mental states: Roberto Matta’s​​ “psychological morphologies”​​ and Arshile Gorky’s​​ “dreams are the bristles on the paintbrush.”​​ Do you enter into a trance-like state when painting? How intertwined are your writing and painting practices?

WA: The language emitted by painters such as Gorky, Matta, and one can include the earlier example of Miró​​ when he calls for the assassination of painting, is to reach beyond the bound prosaic locales of consciousness bound by implied fixation that nouns tend to imply in the everyday mind but opening onto whole fields of possibility that one finds when viewing astronomical fields or internal physiology.​​ 

Perhaps a hieroglyphics of the unlimited. A vocabulary more prone to the inner body or astronomical cartography. This remains the flexibility of vocabulary infused by a sense that remains unlimited. We are living in an era when even the big bang​​ is being questioned. So when I psychically enter one of Matta’s large imaginary fields I exist beyond fields, beyond the mind always summoned by corporate contraction. It has only been a century since Hubble leaped into Andromeda and the galaxies beyond.​​ 

For me, the poetic realm is recognized as the equivalent of simple quotidian exchange equivalent to stock reports. Thus the inner being remains stifled and fails to engage evolutive possibility. When one engages some of Miró's thoughts as he embarked upon his early revolutionary canvases his thought was never engaged via self-agreed compliance with established standards. Like Gorky a sense of motion not just for the sake of motion but as internal alchemy, a deeper sense of what it means to be alive. Not as a formula but the struggle to rise beyond equations that produce inner surcease.

TA: In your 2004 interview with Marcella Durand you discussed your correspondence with Philip Lamantia, and that you couldn’t get in contact with Aimé​​ Césaire while organizing a conference. Did you get to meet Césaire before he passed away in 2011?

WA: Near the end of Césaire’s life I organized a Surrealist Conference at Beyond Baroque Foundation in Venice, California, drawing from poetic currents nationwide. I​​ thought it organic to include Césaire’s blessing but at the same time I understood that he must have been beset by so many requests that my letter must have gone unheeded. The local French consulate forwarded the letter along.​​ 

For me I was simply gathering the ambiance of great energy, not unlike visiting the studio of the late Eric Dolphy some years back, or organically engaging in dialog with Dannie Richmond or Jackie McLean. Just to exchange energy with great spirits.

I have always tried to suss out those who have used their living language via what I consider to be an ecstatic aboriginal language. Not merely a language rife with sophistication mired in prior sources but striking out from one's original bedrock, never taking into account what it means​​ to remain instilled by rational correctness. Of course, the imagination can never be graded by preset standards; this in general is why we have a motionless civilization at seemingly the most crucial juncture in its history. This is not the moment for entertainers and prize-winners, but poets who see the gulfs and junctures that collectively beset us. At this point, popularity is nothing more than a sodden cross to bear. For me language has remained an exploration via what I consider to be living nano-realms.

TA: And I see that in Tutuola and the near-surrealist Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, this transmutational relation to language, words are makers. Do you feel an affinity to the work of Wilson Harris? I see in his fractured Caribbean​​ dreamtime a reflection of​​ the Aimé​​ Césaire quote​​ “Surrealism brought out the African in me.”

WA: Indigenous consciousness has remained aggressively repressed by the Occident for the greater part of two thousand years. I understand that poetry can be part of psycho-cellular transmutation. This remains its imperceptible shifting via lingual consciousness. This remains an Indigenous field of consciousness that Wilson Harris entered upon his publication of​​ Palace of the Peacock​​ in 1960 and Aimé​​ Césaire’s​​ Return to My Native Land​​ in 1939, not the exact dates when their consciousness expanded because the latter cannot be quantitatively replicated. Consciousness remains an invisible entry point that cannot be given as a quantitative or measurable entry point but an impalpable state that poetry alchemically convenes in.​​ 

My experience has been that language convolutes as consciousness increases, say, from a one-celled organism to a human being or a star. Césaire’s experience of topically rich plant life in Martinique was not like reaching​​ fruition in central London or Paris. Not a darkened geriatrics of European familiarity but say, a striking out not unlike Hubble beyond orthodox boundary points.​​ 

I am not concerned with the text as hierarchical comparison but knowledge as a stream that has irrigated all psychic fields and has not been privy to exclusive engenderment. As Césaire and Harris emerged from a living context, so too knowledge as we have come to know has emerged from a living collective context.