Bird and Shaman

The Combustion Cycle (Roof Books, 2021), by Will Alexander, gathers three long poems written over two decades: “Concerning the Henbane Bird,” “On Solar Physiology,” and “The Ganges.” At more than 600 pages, the book calls attention to one of the great originals of contemporary US poetry, and at the same time it’s a record of something else—something that has less to do with contemporary US poetry and more to do with another model of time and tradition. It feels like a record of a shamanic engagement with nature, with geological time, and, perhaps most radically, with what the political theorist Jane Bennett has called “vibrant matter,” the movement of supposedly “non-living” materials, such as metals and rocks. Alexander seems to be both the most American of poets—part of several US traditions—and almost not even writing in American English, a poet foreign to his own language.

Alexander was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the son of a US military officer and traveled widely as a child, including a formative stint in the Caribbean, which, as Harryette Mullen argues in an essay about Alexander in Callaloo, proved an important international experience of seeing Black people in positions of authority. Back in the United States, he graduated from UCLA in 1972. But it wasn’t until the early 1980s that his work began to appear in print, first in Clayton Eshleman’s Sulfur, a journal that blended US avant-gardism with an international canon of poets such as Pablo Neruda, Aimé Césaire, Antonin Artaud, and Alejandra Pizarnik, and later in Nathaniel Mackey’s Hambone. Alexander went on to publish several books with small presses, including Vertical Rainbow Climber (1987) with Jazz Press, Arcane Lavender Morals (1994) with Leave Books, and Stratospheric Canticles (1995) with Pantograph Press. In 1995, he published Asia & Haiti with the signal avant-garde press Sun & Moon, which brought him a wider readership and more serious critical attention. This has been followed by 25 years of productive writing and publishing with a variety of presses, including New Directions and Chax Press.

Along the way, a number of astute critics have grappled with Alexander’s work and tried to incorporate him into various literary traditions—or claim him as almost sui generis. In 1993, the essayist Eliot Weinberger wrote about Alexander in Sulfur, positioning him as an outsider in the international tradition of Artaud and Césaire. In a 1999 article in Callaloo, the poet and critic Aldon Nielsen instead positioned Alexander in an African American lineage that goes back to Amiri Baraka and Sun Ra. Over the past 20 years, the poets Andrew Joron and Garrett Caples have persuasively situated Alexander’s aesthetic in a “neo-surrealist” California tradition that puts him in conversation with both Philip Lamantia and the Language Poets. Caples has pointed out that though a surrealist in many ways, Alexander works more with the materiality of the signifier than with the image-proliferation so fundamental to much of surrealism.

In an interview with Mullen, Alexander argues that surrealism and the Black tradition are far from incompatible:

That’s the reality of what people call “the surreal,” to be able to fly without pedestrian manacles. It’s the imagination taking off. There are levels where the mind can go—it’s like Egyptian science, that deals not only with the visible world, but the invisible world as well. When you’re dealing with the surreal, when it organically vibrates—this is what Césaire said about surrealism—it’s perfectly conjunctive with my understanding of an African world view.

Mullen makes a similar point in her essay about Alexander, in which she highlights the essential internationalism of Alexander’s aesthetic, from the spelling of individual words to larger issues of influence:

His preference for the British rather than American spelling of words such as “colour,” “vapours,” and “manoeuvred” begs the question of whether Alexander is even writing in American English, much less what is called Black English. Alexander’s most cherished influences wrote poetry in languages other than English. Clearly his interests, as a reader and as a writer, are global. His literary influences connect him to an international avant-garde, just as his experience as an African American connects him to a Black diaspora, and to the political struggles of Third World peoples.

Mullen reads both the surrealism that Joron and Caples invoke, and Aldon Nielsen’s Black tradition, as international movements. She brings this transnational argument into the very language of Alexander’s poetry. As to whether his British spellings suggest that he may not even be writing in “American English” or “Black English,” Mullen asks Alexander about this in the aforementioned interview, and he says: “I find words every day that I’ve never seen used before. I might use words that I create, words that didn’t exist in the language.” Further clarifying, he adds: “It’s not that I know these other languages, like Spanish or Italian, but I can feel their rhythms, although I’m writing in English. Writing a foreign language within your own language creates another language.” His use of montage makes his poems feel as though they are written in a foreign language, one that Alexander doesn’t even speak.

I am interested in this idea of a language that is already a translation, so to speak, a poetry written with a foreign language within the apparent language. It brings to mind Paul Celan and Aase Berg, poets who also seem to be writing “in translation” in the “original,” a language, in other words, foreign to itself. If, as I argue in my book Transgressive Circulation: Essays on Translation (2018), the marginalization of translation in contemporary US poetry is the result of discomfort with the mediation and strangeness that results from translation, then these poets write out of that space of strangeness. You can see that, for example, in Celan’s extreme neologisms (nolongerhumanday, shardtones), or in the way Berg splices scientific terms with bodily terms (grainboundaryskin). In almost every stanza of The Combustion Cycle, Alexander gathers, bends, and deforms scientific terms—or terms from other discourses—for his own purposes. As in Berg’s Dark Matter (2000), Alexander’s language comes off as sci-fi or speculative:

I’ve heard erupting antennae
their tall blank stalks
merging in a state of harmonics
erupting transfuse glimpses
through meridian orange-red
being the human Sun in movement
beyond its dark agonal needs
hurtling to a post-material matrix
in order to fish in an unknown current
as multi-dimensional grasp forming into being

While the poems have none of the narrative features of science fiction, they do have the genre’s texture and mood: here the insectoid antennae joins with more technical, abstract words such as harmonics, transfuse, and matrix in an orange-red atmosphere. Of course, as Nielsen would point out, Sun Ra, with his cosmic persona and futuristic costumes, is a fundamentally speculative enterprise as well. And as Joron notes in his history of “Neo-Surrealism,” surrealism and science fiction often overlap.

The title The Combustion Cycle exemplifies this scientific or speculative texture. But more than that, it explicitly announces the book’s method and its form, its cycles of “combustion.” Alexander repeats this motif of combustion throughout the book, using terms such as ignition, germinations, writhing, blistering, insurrectionary, incessant vibratory data, and emission. This is a poetry that constantly goes through combustions of various sorts: dynamic, volatile processes that generate a poetry of transitional, liminal states. The poems can be seen as the traces or results of these processes. At the beginning of the volume, Alexander offers instructions, or perhaps an explanation, for the reader:

THIS CYCLE INSTIGATES AN INTERPENETRATION OF LINGUISTIC POWER CREATING IN ITS WAKE A SUPRA-RECOGNITION EVOLVING WITHIN THE OCCULTED PANORAMA OF THE COSMOS, CROSS- WEAVING, THE ANIMAL, THE HUMAN, AND THE PHYSCHIC ELEMENTS, POETICALLY ENGENDERING
 
GNOSTIC RECOGNITION.

The result of these combustions, cross-weavings, and “ignitions” (as he puts it elsewhere) is a “gnostic recognition.” And here I read “recognition” as “re-cognition”: the result of the poetic act is to think through the world again. There is not an end point, only cycles.

Lest this emphasis on volatility make the book seem hasty and violent, the epitome of the lyric, know that nothing is further from the truth. Although the book is written out of combustions of linguistic and psychic material, Alexander’s writing is not lyric, not heated, but steady. There is no sense that the I of his poems is in the throes of a lyric crisis (nothing like Shelley’s “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”). There is even a strong sense that Alexander’s I may not be human. At times, the I refers to itself as a bird, but it also often feels like something else:

I exist as incessant cylindrical magenta
inside my black vertiginous eye
never ceasing to vibrate
so that I am diaphanous
transpicuous less given to accessible opalescence
or distortion by skiagraphy
as I hover inside the Andes
as the fuel of an interior lightning subspecies

Rather than being a human or an animal, the I is more like a space for “combustion,” the space where the poem can take place. And the poem takes place by forcing language into and through the I, and in turn making that I “hover.” Even “inside the Andes,” the I is a figure of constant movement and vibration, never pinned down. The book is both the combustion and the record of the combustion. This is why it is full of mists, seepages, hovering, toxins, obscurity, gloaming—in other words, instabilities and volatile, in-between states.

With all of these I’s holding together such a long poem, we might think of Alexander as Whitmanesque, and that would not be incorrect. But while Whitman’s I is lyrical and expressive, Alexander’s seems posthuman. His book has none of the fitfulness of Whitman. It moves gradually, taking note not just of human affairs (even if that affair might be communing with nature), but also, and especially, of the concerns of the natural world. Alexander’s I seems to record the world in a posthuman way, focused on matter as much as human actions:

being of Andean climatology
I know the precarious kindling of space
I know its dense subjective bleakness
far beyond the ozone systems
far beyond its sense for capacity of heat

The book and its cycles do not have a narrative or an arc so much as weathers—systems and patterns that move through the book, seemingly independent of human activities. (At times, for example, imperialistic wars are registered but without context or background; it is as if they were just another physical process or combustion.) Alexander pays attention to the sense that even the world’s least “alive” things—metals, rocks, and so forth—are, in Bennett’s words, “vibrant matter.” As she writes:

Why advocate the vitality of matter? Because my hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalized matter feeds human hu-bris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies.

By assuming this inhuman I, Alexander can write a “Song of Myself” that really does attend not just to “leaves” but also to rocks, geologic phenomena, and weather patterns.

Perhaps the best way to make sense of this combusting I is via a tradition that both Alexander and Mullen offer: shamanism. In her essay, Mullen writes: “The poems themselves represent an interesting syncretism of spiritual practice, cultural ritual, and political critique.” Eshleman also calls Alexander a “shaman,” a moniker Alexander embraces both in the framework of his poem and in the actual text. One of the book’s epigraphs is from Mircea Eliade, a scholar of shamanism: “any fragment of the cosmos can give rise to a hierophany, in accordance with the dialectics of the sacred.” In the book, Alexander compares his poetic state to an “intense shamanic coma.” He asserts himself as “I / the shaman / with his wings imploded / floating.” He calls himself “pure shaman in a changed molecular climate,” and declares, “I am bird & shaman.”

Readers can consider Alexander’s reference to Eliade as a guide, and think of the poem as a manifestation of the sacred (hierophany), but I like to think of his work in the context of another contemporary poet who has invoked shamanism: the contemporary Korean poet Kim Hyesoon. In her critical work (translated by Don Mee Choi and published by Tinfish Press in 2012 as Princess Abandoned), Kim notes that, as in Alexander’s book, the shaman has to be ill; that’s a prerequisite to becoming a shaman (Eliade writes about this as well). Out of this initiatory illness comes an ability to “hear ghosts.” With this in mind, it’s hard not to notice the close connection between the shamanic I and death:

I was a code
a death glimpse of riddles
the bird whose value was old diamond as plague
whose deluge as drift as asymptotic posture
according to omen
I was dead for 3 savage days
I was forced to confess my foundation
my violation as existing
& my graph
the simple noise I exuded from poisoned fragmentary ponds
& my defiance near death during enigmatic hail

But perhaps more than the death—or near death—that brings the poet into a shamanic experience, it is exactly the everything-ness of the poem, from geological formations to twittering birds, that, in a sense, is the death he “hears”: the anthropocenic sublime of knowing that humans are destroying the world, simultaneously as he attends to the dynamic, physical, and geological processes that may survive the end of humans. Perhaps most importantly, by attending to this “vibrant matter,” Alexander has written a profoundly ecological text.

I should end with a warning: The Combustion Cycle is a long book that’s not lyrical and that demands something of the reader. No, it’s not a “difficult” masterpiece à la Pound’s Cantos that demands readers catch every allusion (although Alexander does include a bibliography). This book demands that readers engage with it despite the lack of any arc or a grand edificatory design. This is a book whose “difficulty” lies in a simple proposition: can you read it for one, or two, or three hours? The result may not be the model of “getting it” that many readers expect. It’s not hard to access the text, but the difficulty is in bringing oneself to the text and letting it access you. Readers who do sit with the book for an hour will get something much different than what many recent poetry books offer: you will not “get it”—the transactional aesthetic experience—but it will alter your mind. This is a book written out of a trance and to induce a trance. This is a book that may change your brain chemistry. Or make you combust.