Transcript: Poems on Air, Episode 61 - Will Alexander

The following transcript is provided for accessibility only. Layout, formatting, and typography of poems may differ from the original text. We recommend referring to the original, published works when possible to experience the poems as intended by their authors.

[Music intro]

LYNNE THOMPSON: Hello! My name is Lynne Thompson, Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles and I’m so happy to welcome listeners to this installment of Poems on Air, a podcast supported by the Los Angeles Public Library. Every week, I’ll present the work of poets I admire, poets who you should know, and poets who have made a substantial and inimitable contribution to the art and craft of poetry.

LYNNE THOMPSON: Will Alexander is a lifetime Los Angeles resident and treasure—full stop. The recipient of a California Arts Council Fellowship, a PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and the Jackson Poetry Prize, among many others, Alexander’s most recent work Refractive Africa—a collection described as “[s]urreal and searing poems, anchored by cultural and literary figures of the African continent, that couple breathtaking musicality with carefully considered global history”—was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

LYNNE THOMPSON:Today’s poem is an excerpt from "Eruption from the Compound of Living" by Will Alexander.

Eruption from the Compound of Living Living (an excerpt) for Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo


Beneath a luminous compound equator
inscribed on Madagascar
Jean-Joseph
you erupted from disquiet alive as post-zodiacal
   phantom
knowing from birth that your blood was none
   other than oneiric ferment 

as the “Black glassmaker”
you possessed invisible lingual beauty
having  somehow  risen  above   mange-eaten
   wrath
& exposed its perjury by the mere fact of living

colonial wrath through refraction
singed your shadow through negation
lit a fire of riot in your system
tempestuously self-veiled from itself
via beatific blizzard
via inspiration as spiraling apogee

as trans-partisan inferno
striding through bedlam
via your living moment as insubstantial ash
as momentary doctrine

your roaming strewn with caliginous weaving
providing useless gradients & doctrines
through which you strolled as cryptic leopard
   destined to dwell under the psychic cannibals
   of France

there was alway this split inside you
this garrulous shading
this plague of contorted values
provoking in you peculiar lingual spells seminal
   with strychnine
certainly not a visibly wrecked mule
or a formless amalgam of rage
instead
intoxicated verbal power

LYNNE THOMPSON: The Los Angeles Poet Laureate was created as a joint program between the City’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles Public Library and this podcast is available wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

[Music outro]

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    • DISCLAIMER: This is NOT a certified or verbatim transcript, but rather represents only the context of the class or meeting, subject to the inherent limitations of real-time captioning. The primary focus of real-time captioning is general communication access and as such this document is not suitable, acceptable, nor is it intended for use in any type of legal proceeding. Transcript provided by the author.

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