REFRACTIVE AFRICA - WILL ALEXANDER

I don’t read and review enough poetry so forgive me if this is stupider than usual. I’m not sure how I heard of L.A. poet Will Alexander, I know I was trying to get my hands on a book of his called, “Asia & Haiti” but so far I’ve been unable to download or buy a physical copy. This book popped up though and after seeing that it had a poem dedicated to Amos Tutuola and another to Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, I knew I had to cop. Turns out that this book is only three poems long, the two aforementioned poems about these great African writers and a third, and the longest, about the Congo. I don’t think I’ve been sent to a dictionary this much from something I’ve read in a while. Alexander drops some wonderful poetic phrases like “vitreous owls” and “aleatoric electrification.” He also chooses very concrete and “real-world” issues to tackle in his poems. I feel that poetry is often, at its worse, navel-gaze-y and self-centered. Focused on individual diffuse feelings and unattached to material reality. Alexander picks very concrete subjects and creates poems that often seem to verge into essays; not in style, the whole time he remains in the highest, most erudite poetic register, but rather in insight and clarity. This is poetry as critical review. I’m pretty familiar with Tutuola, I’ve read maybe four or five of his books and really like his stuff so it was easy for me to follow and appreciate what Alexander has to say about his work. Tutuola is criminally underappreciated and this is the first thing I’ve come across that treats him like the major writer and genius he is. I love his insight about how Tutuola writes about worlds and characters who have never come into contact with modern or colonial bureaucracy, that’s such a good way to put the particular world that he conjures. Sadly, despite Rabearivelo being Malagasy, I haven’t read any of his work (primarily because he wrote mostly in French) so I can’t as much speak to the insights that Alexander brings up there but I will say the poem was luminous and beautiful. The Congo one in the middle was perhaps my favorite. I’m pretty familiar with Congolese history in the 20th century (not as much as I should be but more than most people, I could identify most of the political figures he mentioned without the aid of the notes in the back of the book). Alexander really nails the particularly hellish reality of the Congo’s history and the ways it has remained a sort of laboratory of colonial and Capitalistic evil. The place on Earth where the mask really comes off and the true manifestation of European then American desires is visible. “Alive in a morgue that creates planetary finance” as he puts it, or, to quote another line, “between the living & the living dead / profits accrue” While dark and depressing, the effect didn’t feel preachy or lecture-y to me. I found it serpentine and complicated and linguistically impressive. But, again, I don’t read enough poetry. That being said, I hope to read more of Alexander’s.