Moon Beams #16 - Will Alexander
I first met Will Alexander at a pro-Palestinian reading event at Beyond Baroque a few months ago, where we quickly found plenty of overlap in our values, concerns, and passions.
With his record of publications, accomplishments, experiences, and talents speaking for themselves, to spend any time with Will is to be inspired by the energy and dedication to art, in a variety of mediums, that he practices, preaches, and shared about with me on episode #16 of “Moon Beams.”
In lieu of a full video per usual, I’m posting the word-association session and final section about his upcoming publication, Aunonomic Reasoning by Black Sun Lit, (one of 8 already out or soon-to-be-released this year) to accompany transcribed answers he shared with me, since the rest of the recording did not make for the best audio quality.
On Reasoning, Will described its core being “based on the calipers of the automatic nervous system as it happens. I calibrate this in terms of automatic writing, and the way the nervous system can work without scripting, so all of this is working as we speak.
“Writing should be like a natural organism. That’s what I’m interested in, that’s what my whole practice has been about: being able to flow at every second at every part of the day, not as a hardcore rigidity, but as a natural practice that opens, that lingually opens one’s gate to the higher mind.”
How would you describe the current state of poetry?
Psychologically brokered by the endemic state of the cognitive plane…. better put: the highly-materialistic plane.
What is exciting you most about poetry at the moment?
Psychic exploration.
If you could change something about how modern culture views poetry, what would it be?
Taking it as, like they do in Iran, filtered into alchemy, the alchemical content of poetry, and people rising into the alchemical level, linguistically.
If you could steal particular skills from a few choices poets, what would they be?
There are several, I can go from Dino Campana, Feredico Garcia Llorca, Bob Kaufman.... the inner urge and the existential discipline via one’s urge.
Word association:
Sandals
Locomotion.
Post-modern
The depth of one’s present alacrity.
Traffic
Lingual congestion.
City
Opportunity and a form of escape.
Block
Ironic by flow.
Flag
Terrestrial suggestion.
Border
Endemic stultification.
Voting
Voting not for oneself, but voting for one’s inner opening, voting for inner-plasticity, voting as inner-plasticity.
Trees
Vegetation as health, vegetation as anomaly, anomalous on the current state of correctness. Like the late Booker Little once said, to enlarge sonic dissonance by inner imagination, take a large sound, not to conjunct it, enlarge sound via the imagination.
Hope
It’s a flow to the future, a flow to not a utopia, a flow to a possible utopian future, a non-materialiastic future, an imaginal plane, a flow to the imaginal plane, a flow is one’s imaginal plane, a flow via one’s imaginal plane, poetry should ignite one along the way. We don’t want to be experts at all stages of our lives, we want to be able to open ourselves to growing and attracting growth, all the time, attracting life.
