Now available as a second edition with a new preface from the author, Will Alexander’s Towards The Primeval Lightning Field (O Books, 1998) is a work of “vertical philosophy” revealing the strata of cultures and language, like geological layers seen all at once. These essays comprise Alexander’s “search for origins outside the warrens of the visible,” revealing a singular imagination that moves with the force of a manifesto and the impossible dexterity of the unknown. Alexander’s virtuoso arpeggios of linguistic realms explore language and perceiving, and resonate far beyond the constrictions of the rational world.
Will Alexander works in multiple genres. In addition to being a poet, he is also a novelist, essayist, aphorist, playwright, philosopher, visual artist, and pianist. His influences range from poetic practitioners, such as Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud, and Philip Lamantia, to the encompassing paradigm of Sri Aurobindo’s Integral Yoga, and the Egyptian worldview as understood by Cheikh Anta Diop and R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz. The latter is central to Alexander’s expanding inner range, which has allowed him access to levels of mind beyond the three-dimensional as boundary. He thereby explores the full dimensionality of each word. For him, each word has access to not only the median level of three-dimensional experience, but also partakes of experience on both the supra and subconscious planes. His praxis of language is not unlike the Mayan numerical world, where each letter of the alphabet spontaneously engages in non-limit. Thus, all fields of experience are open for exploration: art, physics, botany, history, astronomy, architecture, and poetics. Alexander is the author of over 20 books, including Asia and Haiti (Sun & Moon Press, 2000), The Sri Lankan Loxodrome (New Directions Publishing, 2009), Mirach Speaks To His Grammatical Transparents (Oyster Moon Press, 2011), Towards The Primeval Lightning Field (Litmus Press, 2nd edition, 2014), Refractive Africa New Directions Publishing, 2021), a finalist for The Pulitzer Prize, Divine Blue Light (City Lights Books, 2022), and The Coming Mental Range (Litmus Press, 2023). He lives in The City of Angels.