Word: poems
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...poetry begins to do what it’s supposed to do. While good poems almost always yield to analysis, no author writes a poem for it to be analyzed. Ironically, a poem written for analysis would most likely be a bad poem, not conducive to any meaningful analysis...
...poetry reading is that the poet’s voice diffuses the anxiety of not being able to “figure out” the poems, and allows for the poems to begin their emotional work. Sometimes a poem strikes you, but often it will not. It really depends on your emotional state when the poem encounters you. I believe that poetry readings are especially important in contemporary poetry precisely because, in returning to their oral roots, they remove the intellectual anxiety attached to the art form, and allow it to be enjoyed the way music is enjoyed...
...Repetition as de-existence / as condoned & re-spun vapour / which continues to post-exist / as mirages across an ark / as lucid underwater scent.” Thus begins “The Bedouin Ark,” the opening poem in Will Alexander’s new collection of poetic monologues. It is not a propitious start: the combined effect of “de-existence” and “post-exist” in this context is one of self-conscious jargonizing. “Ark” is one of five shorter poems that serve...
This is, of course, ostensibly a poem, not a sociological treatise. At several places in the poem, however, Alexander’s narrator allows politics—Sri Lanka’s historical tragedies—to enter and tarnish his otherwise halcyon vision of the Indian Ocean. Thus, while the sailor is “a wanderer in a zone of fluctuating kelvins,” he has “been reported as expired at Jaffna,” the largest city in Sri Lanka’s predominantly Tamil north-east and the epicenter of its civil...
...text plods on, the poem collapses under the weight of its interminable references. The writing is always dense, but seldom beautiful. The polysyllabic scientific terms, forgotten place names, and global cultural figures with which Alexander litters his opus ensure that the poetry is characterized by mechanical coldness, not joy or pathos. At one point, the narrator describes himself as “stunningly wrought powerless by my sudden lexical commingling.” It is a moment of wonderfully unintentional irony...