Short description:

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 The volume also includes a new interview with Alexander, as well as one of his long unpublished poems.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

Joshua Schuster is Professor of English and Director of the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University, Canada. His research and teaching interests cover poetics, theory, and environmental ideas. Most recently, Schuster has published books on understanding extinction (What Is Extinction? A Natural and Cultural History of Last Animals, 2023) and existential risk (Calamity Theory: Three Critiques of Existential Risk, co-written with Derek Woods, 2021). He teaches courses on environmental literature, contemporary philosophy, poetry, and American literature.

Long description:

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 The volume also includes a new interview with Alexander, as well as one of his long unpublished poems.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

1. Introduction.- 2. A Glossary of Glossolalia: The Syntactic Conservation of Energy in Alexander’s Prose.- 2. Will in the Wilderness: Language and Ecology in Will Alexander’s ‘The Stratospheric Canticles’.- 3. Diffractive Index: Will Alexander’s Iridescent Method.- 4. Will Alexander’s Surreal Song: Improvisation and the Politics of Epic.- 5. ‘Not subject to being object’: Questioning Calculation in Will Alexander’s ‘The Congo’.- 6. Faunal Communities.- 7. The Poetics of Plenitude.- 8. ‘There Are No Nouns to Ensnare Me:’ Decolonization of Identity in Will Alexander’s Poetics.- 9. Divine Blue Light.- 10. Momentary Weather Systems and Cosmological Climates.- 11. Alexander’s Archives.- 12. Poet’s Roundtable.-13. Conclusion: Interview between Will Alexander and Joshua Schuster. 14. Alexander, ‘The Sand Genie’.