"A Collective Force of Burning Ink": Will Alexander's Asia & Haiti

Abstract

A homegrown if not organic intellectual, Will Alexander is an writer from South Central Los Angeles, whose poetry is global, even cosmic, in scope, encyclopedic in its display of esoteric knowledge and arcane vocabularies, visionary in its apocalyptic intensity. The author of numerous works of poetry, fiction, drama, and essays, of which a fraction has been published, Alexander has been largely ignored by black as well as mainstream readers, scholars, and critics, despite regular appearances of his poetry and prose in Sulfur and Hambone, literary journals friendly to avant-garde poetics, edited respectively by Clayton Eshleman and Nathaniel Mackey. Beyond convenient labels such as African-American surrealist or North America's Aime Cesaire, Alexander is difficult to categorize aesthetically as well as ideologically. However, the political landscapes of Asia & Haiti, published by Douglas Messerli's Sun & Moon Press, could bring Alexander to the attention of a wider audience, including more black readers. Born into the early cohort of the post-war baby boom generation, Alexander is a child of the Cold War era, which in part defined the aspiring revolutions and liberation struggles of so-called Third World nations, that in turn inspired the Civil Rights movement and black nationalist struggles in the United States. Alexander's father, a World War II veteran who was born in New Orleans, married a Texan and left the South for California following a military tour that took him, among other places, on a brief visit to the Caribbean. There, the elder Alexander was impressed to see black people in positions of power, and his story of that experience left a distinct impression