Divine Blue Light (For John Coltrane): Pocket Poets Series No. 63

By Will Alexander

• In May 2022, Will Alexander's previous book, Refractive Africa (2021, published in the U.S. by New Directions and in the U.K. by Granta), was named a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
• Will Alexander, although hugely admired as one of the great avant-garde Black poets for many years with over a dozen books under his belt, is finally starting to gain national and international admiration from major outlets. Refractive Africa , was also reviewed in both the New York Times and The Guardian. 
• Divine Blue Light will be published as volume 63 in the Pocket Poets series, with Will Alexander joining the ranks of Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Frank O'Hara, Anne Waldman and, most recently, Tongo Eisen-Martin, among other great American poets. 
• This book joins a list of recent City Lights titles by innovative contemporary Black poets including Tongo Eisen-Martin, Pamela Sneed, D.S. Marriott, Uche Nduka and great poets from the past like Bob Kaufman and Stephen Jonas.
• Alexander's surrealist-inspired poetry is a direct descendent of the work of Philip Lamantia and Bob Kaufman, two signature American poets from the Pocket Poets Series.
• Alexander is a lifetime resident of Los Angeles and is the current poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque, a venerated poetry institution in the area. 
• A poem appearing in this book was chosen and brought into orbital space by Dr. Sian Proctor on Space X's all-civilian mission, Inspiration4, in 2021.

• Language: English
• Publisher: City Lights Publishers
• Release date: Nov 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9780872868717

Book preview

PREFACE

These poems remain parallel to nanograms teeming as dazzling wattage. Compared to reality as three-dimensional noun-based organization, these poems are less concerned with the palpable plane; instead the work remains sans the tyranny of causality kinetic via invisible current. This being current that remains un-stilled sans three-dimensional appropriation. Within my current terminology I understand this state of mind to be one of blazeless blazing not according to prior lingual aristocracy that has attempted to impose a lingual theocracy of super-imposed rationality.

—Will Alexander

Condoned to Disappearance

for Fernando Pessoa

As sigil

camouflaged by curious smoke & surcease

there remains your visage enigmatic & crystal

remaining hidden

within occulted lingual ravines

at one level

it is known that your appellation

is Fernando Pessoa

born 13 June 1888

of course there exists

the perfunctory tables of your chronicle

loss of your natural father at 5

your mother’s re-marriage & new placement in Durbin

then university stay

fueled by magnetic indifference then life in rented rooms

then businesses letters translated from Portuguese to English & French

then criticism written in 1912 creative prose in 1913

& the following year poetry

the heteronyms

their powers

their conspicuous agendas including Alberto Cairo Ricardo Reis Alvaro de