Will Alexander, the Inexhaustible, and the Unfeasible
摘要
Will Alexander’s The Contortionist Whispers and his most recent, The Coming Mental Range, are individually, together, and all at once a bildungsroman; a poetico-philosophical treatise and its aestheticosophical mode d’emploi; a summa of intensifying concision and extensifying concentration; and, as well, an existential, ontological, and cosmological theory of all being and becoming—“as if my wings were a great clairvoyant equation.” The Contortionist Whispers concludes: “it is writing … no longer imprisoned by structure contained by feasibility.” Frank O’Hara, in his great poem, “Ode: Salute to French Negro Poets,” called upon Aimé Césaire and kindred “spirits of other lands” to “make fecund [his] existence.” Will Alexander’s writing, whether phrase or sentence, paragraph or chapter, book or oeuvre, never feels altogether feasible. So overwhelming is the inexhaustibility of his writerly and ideational intelligence and inventions and their motivic, contrapuntal, choreographic, and accumulating trajectories and rhythms that seemingly leap into the air with no set place for a return landing—“balance can never imprison my language”—and, yet, always manage the unrelenting acrobatic pinnacle that finds poetic and, yes, equational resolution and, thereby, invention and discovery in the most unexpected, utopic, and yes! unfeasible of ways.