Here's a brief video of Will Alexander reading his work at New York City's Hauser and Wirth Gallery on February 12th of this year.
After a few minutes of introductory comments linking slavery and oppression with futuristic and retroactive technologies, Alexander reads "In the Ghostly Eclipse Zones" from his 1998 Pavement Saw Press collection Above the Human Nerve Domain, which ties to these foundational ideas. After that poem, he tells the audience, "These, for me, are spells. Poems for me are spells. It's this magic instance and a wave of energy energy. [...] To me life is a wave of poetry. At certain points things pop up. They pop up at interesting moments. In fact it's so spontaneous that something could come to me now as I'm standing here and I'd have to scribble something." His second and final selection, which goes unnamed, is inspired by César Vallejo and starts with an epigraph by the poet, "Brooding on life. Brooding slowly on the strength of the torrent," and continues these themes.
In March of this year, we highlighted Aural Monsoon's album Live in the Haight — the jazz duo features Alexander on piano and Mark Pino on drums — which is another manifestation of the spontaneous poetic energy Alexander describes above. You'll find that and many more wonderful examples of his work on his PennSound author page, which is home to a variety of talks, readings, and interviews spanning the past twenty-five years.
