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[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]
- Back to Poems on Air: Episode 61
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