Our American nightmare. OT (or not), but p’haps of interest to some here (or not), this announcement from SF State’s Poetry Center Director Steve Dickison has been making the rounds:

Will Alexander benefit in SF

As many of you know, poet Will Alexander is quite ill with cancer and is undergoing chemotherapy. He’s spent his life largely off the poetry grid, taking on odd jobs, and has no financial support or, needless to say, health insurance. Please join poets in SF on Dec 1 at 7:30 for a Bay Area benefit reading. Donations will be bundled and sent directly to Will.

Readers include:

Nate Mackey
Juliana Spahr
Taylor Brady
Lyn Hejinian
Andrew Joron
Tisa Bryant
Adam Cornford
D.S. Marriott
and more!

hosted by David Buuck and Small Press Traffic

$10-up donations
Saturday December 1, 2008
7:30 PM in Timken Lecture Hall,
at the California College of the Arts,
1111 8th Street, San Francisco

If you cannot make it, but would like to contribute, please contact David Buuck for details at:

or, you can also send donations directly to Will:

Will Alexander
400 South Lafayette Park Place, #307
Los Angeles, CA 90057

More here or here.

I first encountered Will’s extra-ordinary work in Nate Mackey’s Hambone #3 back in 1983. I’m most familiar/enamoured with the two long poems, published together in 1995 by Sun & Moon Press, Asia & Haiti ("& each impeccably engendered crime / was spawned with the soul of devious obsolesence").

Here you can hear him reading two poems, “The Pope at Avignon” ("because nothing in this world can conceal me / I test the limits of my evil / prone as I am to bloody off-spring by debacle"), & “Concerning Forms Which Hold Heidgegger in Judgement.”

There was another benefit held for Will earlier this month in NYC, which can be heard at PennSound, where there’s more audio of Will reading his work. Sunrise in Armageddon is his latest.

From a Clayton Eshleman intro in American Poetry Review:

Born in 1948, Will Alexander has lived all his life in Los Angeles. While he attended UCLA (and has a B.A. in English and Creative Writing), he is artistically self-educated and until fairly recently wrote and painted in almost total isolation. I met him in 1981 at a political discussion about the American military involvement in El Salvador, and soon after discovered the strange uniqueness of his writing. His appearance in Sulfur #2 (1981) may have been his first national literary publication.

Until the mid-1990s, Alexander lived off low-paying jobs in Los Angeles (for example: the ticketing department of the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team). In recent years, he has done writer-in-residence stints at UCSD, the New College in San Francisco, and Hofstra University. His first book, Vertical Rainbow Climber (Jazz Press, Los Angeles), appeared in 1987, but it has never been distributed.
. . .

In conversation with [Harryette] Mullen, Alexander addressed his sense of poetry:

I find words every day that I’ve never used before. I might use words that I create, words that didn’t exist in language. . . . I feel foreign language rhythms while writing in English. Writing a foreign language within your own language creates another language . . . I’m what you could call a maroon (in the West Indies, a fugitive slave), I’m a psychic maroon. . . . The poet has to be infused with the plasma, the river of poetry, so that the river sweeps through, and takes everything in its path. . . . Surrealism is perfectly conjunctive with my understanding of an African world view. It deals with the visible and the invisible. For me, the invisible is something that not only takes place in a subconscious realm, but also in a supraconscious realm as well as a conscious realm. It’s back to that river again. You’re dealing with a triple mind instead of a single mind, which is part of the scape of the mind, but definitely not the end of the mind. . . . I have no problem with my identity. You can get to a certain level of consciousness, which is available to all races. In every race you want to work at the higher level. . . . I carry a central fascination with the scorching connective between meaning and sound, as if I were that first genetic connection, magically naming stones from primeval eras. . . .”

Please help if you’re so inclined & able.