Noticings

Will Alexander's The Stratospheric Canticles (Pantograph, 1995) is simultaneously defense and enactment of a poetics of apocalypse. The poet as "fumarole" might be said to define Alexander's sense of poetic vocation in this collection of shorter poems ending with the forty-page title poem. Not just this last poem but several others in the book outline an "aesthetic," though such a word might seem to Alexander the relic of European discourses, inadequately descriptive of a project better understood as cosmology for "an era of post-eternity." Nevertheless, one can point to distinctive properties of the poetry here, as Alexander himself does in a poem called "Apprenticeship" - hypotaxis, "paratactic co-ordination." With the various, manifold accomplishments of a poetics of disjunction in full view lately, and now much imitated Alexander's "technique" is itself of great interest for its location outside of both "avant-garde" and "mainstream" orthodoxies. Of course the one aspect of Alexander's work that has received the most comment - his prodigious vocabulary, his "logolatry" (as the title of a Mark Scroggins review in the American Book Review's special number on "postmodern" African-American poetry had it), is evident in this as in other Alexander works.

But Alexander's idioms, it seems to me, his allusions to everything from Sufi mysticism to "microbial botany" are not meant to map a vast terrain of erudition. Nor is this a language in the service of plenitude and difference, not exactly anyway, despite the pressing ecological concerns of this poetry. Rather, the various idioms, vocabularies, and images of Alexander's poetry are eminently transmutable, one into the other. The energy of this poetry is not wholly or even importantly an effect of its pyrotechnic particulars - I'm not sure that we are meant to check a dictionary to see how "precise" Alexander is, as Eliot Weinberger suggests in the book's blurb. I'm struck instead by the agglutination of parts in Alexander's poems, and more problematically by the way in which an expressivist force distills all the poem's matter to the ONE MATTER to the cosmos which is also the self - pressurized, turbulent, eruptive. Make no mistake about it: this is a poetry that would "will" its way through and beyond historical contingency:

it can be said that one is unified by pressure