Will Alexander’s Poetics

Readings Across the Radiant Glossaries

Joshua Schuster

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9783031900013
• eBook ISBN:
  9783031900020
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

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 The volume also includes a new interview with Alexander, as well as one of his long unpublished poems.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

• Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
• Will Alexander’s Poetics
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Will Alexander’s Poetics—A Transmutational Orchestra
• A Glossary of Glossolalia: The Syntactic Conservation of Energy in Alexander’s Prose
• Wilderness Words: Exploring Ecopoetics with Will Alexander’s “The Stratospheric Canticles”
• Diffractive Index: Will Alexander’sCosmopolitics
• “Organic Disorder”: Will Alexander, Surrealism, and the Renewal of Epic
• Will Alexander’s Spectral Hieroglyphics: Surrealist Intimacy with Elected Precursors
• “Not subject to being object”: Questioning Calculation in Will Alexander’s “The Congo”
• “To Expose the Prior Mathematics of Monsters”: Will Alexander’s Poetics and the Re-counting of Mathematical History
• Faunal Communities
• The Plenitude Poem
• “There Are No Nouns to Ensnare Me”: Decolonization of Identity in Will Alexander’s Poetics
• Astrobiopoetics: Will Alexander, Stellar Scale, and the Other Anthropos
• Out of Sync, Out of Sound: Three of Six Improvisations on Will Alexander’s Divine Blue Light
• Only the Weather Matters Anymore
• Generative Archives: Working with Will Alexander
• A Surrealist at the Kitchen Table
• Will Alexander’s Wild Syncretism
• Will Alexander, the Inexhaustible, and the Unfeasible
• Trumpeting
• “Blaze as Unknowable Drift”: A Note on Will Alexander
• Will Alexander’s Cosmic Indigeneity to the Whole of the Earth
• Will Alexander and Joshua Schuster—Interview—Conducted in Los Angeles, August 16–17, 2023
• My Poetics: Conscripted Notings as Mathematical Séance
• The Sand Genie
• Will Alexander Bibliography
• Index1