Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane) by Will Alexander (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane) by Will Alexander
• Allan Graubard (bio)

divine blue light (for john coltrane)
Will Alexander
City Lights Books
https://citylights.com/general-poetry/divine-blue-light-pocket-poets-63/
108 pages; Print, $16.95

Will Alexander is well known for his poetry, criticism, and plays. If brevity of any kind can encompass his literary oeuvre—which is questionable—then "explorer" comes to mind, particularly of liminal states charged by convulsive metaphor, visionary scope, propulsive rhythms, and a lexicon that ranges from micro to macro. His interest in quantum phenomena parallels his fascination with biota, insects, fish, birds, mammals, humans, and the historical and cosmic breadth we are part of. That he is the recipient of several prestigious awards that recognize this compass, the last in 2022 as finalist for the Pulitzer, has not altered his path—although it has enlarged his audience. Evidence a cold December evening in Manhattan when he packed the room for a launch reading of Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane) way downtown at Aeon Books.

Alexander wrote Divine Blue Light's forty-five poems over several years from 2017 on, with the final selection done mid-pandemic. As he has put it, during the pandemic, perhaps prompted by the isolation we all endured, a "wave of poetry" inspired him to write ceaselessly, making of the poetic, in this and other books, a vivacious "living force"—for him and for us.

Divine Blue Light opens rather quietly, however, with a brief preface that identifies an antagonist: reason's "tyranny of causality" and the cultural and sociopolitical logics that back it up. The poems possess an elusive quality in response. On the surface, not all, but some, can read as unconcerned with the coordinates we identify with, including the dimensions that flesh out sensorial reality. Alexander is more at home in an imaginal zone where the language that forms his poems evolves from or provokes "a blazeless blazing."

That phrase, with its Zen-like overtones, rings fairly true. In one sense, it refines a traditional view of inspiration. Receptivity to phenomena is as important as or more important than heightened sensation, passion, and intention. [End Page 110] In another sense, the phrase bridges each of those avidities for poetic ends with variable results: gravitas infused with weightlessness, passion clarified by intellection, solemnity cut with humor. Equally so, Alexander is rarely blindsided by these couplings or the dance he gives them. Of course, whether or not readers keep up, or can, is up to them. Alexander is not one to pace his works for those who read them. The "other" is not the reader, and yet, when with him, the reader enters an elsewhere precisely in this world and its implicit depths.

The titles to his poems tip to the values just noted, both leading and deriving from them. Here are a few: "In a Pitch Dark Sailing House," "Anterior Cartography," "The Raven as Incantatory Nuclei," "Borderless Hypotactic," and "On Philosophical Audition."

As an explorer's art, where beings, clarities, and opacities interpenetrate, sometimes dramatically, especially when colonialism enters the field, Alexander also is practical. Explorers must be. He uses what's at hand, what's planned, what's been forming in his thought: a gestation strung with near impalpable moments as they infiltrate language—beauty, too, with its changing faces and ever metamorphic. Nor does he shy away from argument. In this respect, his enrichments are inclusive and recursive, with different arcs, taxonomies, cartographies, characters, and other motifs. Of these I will briefly discuss three longer poems that work as pivots in the book, with two ending critical thoughts.

"Condoned to Disappearance," which opens the book, is dedicated to Portuguese poet and writer Fernando Pessoa. The title depicts a realm in which Pessoa wrote through several masks, Pessoa's heteronyms, which enabled him to vanish as author. Its initial lines set the stage:

As sigilcamouflaged by curious smoke & surceasethere remains your visage enigmatic & crystalremaining hiddenwithin occulted lingual ravines

Then Alexander sketches Pessoa's biography and identifies a similarity between them, predicated on an act of migration, which Pessoa experienced actually (born in Portugal, educated in South...