Across the Vapour Gulf

by Will Alexander

flight across precipitous intransigence. --from Across the Vapour Gulf . In Will Alexander’s work, “Every poem reads like a subversive, alchemical wonder. It is tempting to label Alexander a surrealist or experimentalist, but he is truly a singular voice” (Jackson Poetry Prize citation). Composed and collected by slow accretion over the span of thirty years, Across the Vapour Gulf opens with a note by the “When I first laid eyes on the writing of Cioran I was smitten by the form. The aphorism seemed cleansed of detritus―in Cioran's hands, it seemed to spontaneously ignite. Poetry, history, philosophy, the essay, medicinally combined, appearing on the other side of itself as insight. Reading Cioran opened an unexpected neural pathway, opening the way for the composition of the compilation at hand. Each entry was instantaneous. They welled up and appeared with such astonishing alacrity, that they seemed to compose themselves practically fully formed.”

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

Published August 15, 2017

About the author

Born in 1948, Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, visual artist and pianist. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. He was also the subject of a colloquium published in the prestigious African American cultural journal, Callaloo in 1999. Author of nine previous books, Alexander has taught at various colleges including University of California, San Diego, New College (San Francisco, CA), Hofstra University, and Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, in addition to being associated with the nonprofit organization Theatre of Hearts/Youth First, serving at-risk youth. He is a lifelong resident of Los Angeles.

Reviews

[David Grundy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will Alexander’s recent publications have tended to cross multiple generic plateaus while maintain the integrity of his characteristic, and apparently trans-genre language-mode: as well as poems, a book of plays, a novel, a book of essays, they include this, a book of aphorisms, inspired by the philosopher E.M. Cioran and composed over a period of 30 years. Operating through what the preface calls ‘accretion’ rather than argument, the inverse or reverse of the essay or the novel of narrative, these read slowly, patient in their prose lines, yet nonetheless like mini-explosions, lava cooling to species-destroying flood or world-covering encrustation of ice. We might think of these pieces in terms of efflorescence: crystallising to deposit trace on gray surface slab, incisions on the increasingly flimsy façade of eco-genocidal human ‘progress’, flashing inwards or to a cosmic imaginary: when citizenship within a thanatopic ‘democracy’ is denied, the other side of social death, imagine instead that one is the citizen of twenty billion galaxies and thrust time-scale to the actual imagining of eternity, past any conception of a staid and staying Godhead.

So the texts call themselves aphorisms—provocations, statements that are questions, questions that are answers, observations of the invisible. In philosophy, the aphorism pushes past systematisation and into original sense of essay as assay, attempt, test, experiment, trial (an exemplar here of aphorism as method would be Simone Weil); or impure purification of materials to what Alexander might call originary contagion, alchemical source. And contagion, leakage, travel, etc, with which these texts are so concerned, has to do with the refusal of constraints that are generic and also racialized, biographical (see the piece ‘On Anti-Biography’ in a 1995 issue of Andrei Codrescu’s journal ‘Exquisite Corpse’). As Will Alexander cannot help but write into being, these aphorisms are also poems: though the term ‘prose poems’ seems insufficient here, and it would be interesting to compare them to the essays in Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat, where too Alexander’s characteristic surrealist language-forms structure the onward momentum, stasis or encircling return of the pieces. This occurs through the combination of syntax and word-choice, in which action (traversal) so often passes by means of, by way of, through multiple states, adjectives suspending towards a noun which promises resolution but delivers instead the richest of ambiguities: out of any number of examples, “corroded by psychic statistical mercury” is a favourite here. Analogy on analogy – “To study the tumult of galaxies is akin to having experience akin to the smell of leaking salt”.

The texts are political insofar as they reflect on colonialism, eco- and geno-cide, consumerism, and so on; they are also firmly committed to the principle of often solitary poetic investigation at a slant to ideological conscription, reduction. Though over fifty pages in length, this feels like a slim book—but one whose slimness belies its compacted quality of thought, at once vaporous and dense, engulfing and leaping, extending thought. Vital work.

[Serena · Rating 5 out of 5]

I won’t claim I understood this book, but I did love it.

“What is this perfection of which I speak? I want to cal it perpendicular rotation, or perhaps the power of cleansing transparency, flying above misty reams of soil. Dialectically, it possesses the root vibration simultaneous with a colloquy of nerves, not unlike arachnoidal webs connected to Earth. And these webs channel pure light that seems to hover as immobility. The body then seems to exist as this arachnoidal connective, as a seminal light source in being.”

[_ · Rating 5 out of 5]

The caverns are written with quantum and primordial magma.

[void °❀⋆.ೃ࿔* · Rating 5 out of 5]

not hierarchy nor rhizomes but some mysterious third thing

[MADZ · Rating 1 out of 5]

The world’s most inaccessible book of poetry. Who is this for? There is such a small percentage of people who have the privilege of being educated in the decoding of language that this work required that it makes me wonder why the author would choose to limit the audience so. Does he not want his work read? Because if so his wish is granted.