Compression and Purity

by Will Alexander

The fifth volume of our Spotlight poetry series, Compression & Purity is a new collection of poetry by Los Angeles–based African American surrealist Will Alexander. Known for densely textured visionary epics influenced by poets like Aimé Césaire and César Vallejo, Alexander here returns to shorter forms to address his ecological, cosmological, and historical concerns. Highlights include a monologue from the perspective of "The Blood Penguin," a song by the "New Water on Mars," and Alexander's autobiographical lyric essay, "My Interior Vita," describing the evolution of his artistic consciousness through jazz and surrealism. Compression & Purity confirms Alexander's reputation among surrealism's foremost contemporary practitioners.

Genres: Poetry

100 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2011

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

[Jeffrey Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

Welcome to the hallucitorium run by Will Alexander. He’s a unique wordsmith, kin to the Surrealists’ Breton and Cesaire, and in America the San Franciscans’ Philip Lamantia, Bob Kaufman, and Ronnie Burke. Alexander is a Californian as well (though from South Central L.A.).

Transmitting trance-matic blasts of auricular combustion, Alexander’s lexicon is a “glossary of vertigo.” His seventh book of intense techno-lyricism is expressed in fissionary monologies teeming with “engrained astonishment.”

Cosmological, astrological, philosophical, geological, mathematical, and hypnogogical in scope, he finds concordance in chaotic discord. “Creativity being an ongoing praxis, is a continuous trance, in which one deals with the unification of worlds.” And who better to unify the language of different disciplines than a poet?

Like a force of nature, a procession of seamless symbols, the lines roll out as variant strata compress into a crystalline composite. Endlessly surprising juxtapositions commingle, requiring the reader to continuously refocus and synthesize novel renditions.

Such an onslaught of sensations, descrambled and re-presented, is sublime. In “Water on New Mars,” the author speaks from an alien perspective. “Being water / I am the voltage of rocks.”

Alexander seizes pieces and particles emanating from a semiotic cyclotron. Unparalleled images of beauty erupt in the mash-up of worlds: “like diamonds falling from a fabulum of ciphers / like rivers of moons flowing over slate.”

Surrounded by sigils, this poet is mad potent.

[Night City Moves · Rating 2 out of 5]

My 2/5 star rating is simply MY EXPERIENCE with this book. you have to consider these 3 things:

1. i don't read poetry much,

2. I'm temperamental,

3. i was in a rush to finish it in order to get closer to finishing my reading challenge this year.

This rating is no real reflection on the authors talents or the quality of his poetry. i could see this book working for other people, but i have to provide my own honest experience with this book, MY PERSONAL RATING.

It was really hard for me to get into the book and i didn't have any visceral reaction although a few lines were quotable and engaging.

[Kathy Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

We had lunch! (Blaine you and I in Echo Park) I see the history and culture and of all of life present, past and future through your most amazing talents of imagination tossed on paper. It's a shame that schools left out so much brilliance that you bring back. My IQ shot up. You dare us to not believe and then get better. I did. Thanks for being so much fun to read.

[Peter Prokopiev]

Cooool!!! Alexander is a real artist, he is a crazy geometric orchid in the otherwise dull landscape of contemporary poetry.
That being said, I didn’t expect his poems to be completely written in his futuristic jargon, I feel like he gets lost in it. One needs more than one flavour to have a nice meal.

[Veronica Dell'Aera · Rating 2 out of 5]

not my cup of poetry

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection seems well framed so that some of the gallactic energy of Alexander is easier to access. I liked the occasional extremely short poem for how it set off the longer pieces. Alexander's sense of humor comes through within/through/despite his obsessive vocabulary. I was especially interested in some of Alexander's experiments with persona, the poem as spoken by a more or less identifiable speaker; this is often established by bracketing the entire poem in quotation marks. Alexander's anti-autobiographical statement and his "interior vita" are fascinating documents that appear a little more than half way through the book. They establish a kind of poetics that opens the work. Placed as they are, later in the book, they ensure that the reader grapples first with the poetry itself and comes upon Alexander's commentary as a useful but not determinative adjunct to the more primary process of making poetry.

[City Lights Booksellers & Publishers · Rating 5 out of 5]

"This new & rich gathering of Will Alexander's works – always in progress – marks him again as the true successor among us to the likes of Surreal & deeply explorative figures like Breton & Césaire. No other poet writing in America today does it the way that Alexander does – a range of words & images that startle & create new pathways for language & the mind-in-freedom (“alchemical, mesmeric, totalic,” as he names them in these pages). Compression & Purity, so aptly titled, is the work of a true American & world master – & a joy to have & read."
—Jerome Rothenberg

[Andrew]

I try periodically to like this kind of surrealist, open-meaning language-poetry, and I just can't. So then I try hating it, and I can't quite manage that either. About the worst you could say about this work is that it's meaningless, but that's also the best you could say about it. I find this book interesting as a raw presentation of English words thrown together in a semantic blender, but it's not the kind of thing I'd want to drink very often.

[Jaie Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

blimey! will be coming back to this poet