[The following is an excerpt from a long poem, “The Ganges,” which runs around a hundred pages & is itself a third of a giant book entitled The Combustion Cycle. The book contains two other poems, “Concerning The Henbane Bird,” & “On Solar Physiology,” the former in the voice of a hummingbird, the Andean Hillstar, & the latter spoken in the voice of an Angolan shaman. As for “The Ganges,” Alexander tells us, “it pours from the voice of an untouchable.” Of Alexander himself I’ve written elsewhere: “Will Alexander, more than any of our other American contemporaries, is the inheritor of an ecstatic surrealism derived from European sources, colored by factual & scientific particulars, & drawing with great intelligence & passion from an international avant-garde & from the negritude writings of Aimé Césaire & others, for whom he acts as a true successor.” His use here of historical & appropriated materials is also worth noting. (J.R.)]
[Part One of the Quartermain essay can be found here on Poems and Poetics. His complete view of Eye of Witness will appear early in 2015 in the twentieth issue of Lou Rowan’s Golden Handcuff’s Review, a major repository of poetry & poetics moving from one century & millennium to another.]
[Following his remarkable translations of the great Persian poet Hafez, Squires has embarked on an assemblage of translations from Old Irish, “the oldest vernacular poetry in Europe.” Its relation to what John Bloomberg-Rissman & I have been assembling as outside & subterranean poetry should also be noted. (J.R.)]
[A NOTE FROM PIERRE JORIS POSTED ORIGINALLY ON HIS NOMADICS BLOG 6/11/2014.] “In Paris now, on the day of the opening of the Marché de la Poésie, a great yearly 4 day event. One major pleasure will be to meet up with old friend Eric Sarner.
[What follows is the first part of Peter Quartermain’s response to Eye of Witness, an in-depth view that leads me into & beyond areas of my work that needed & still need (for me at least) viewing & amplification from the outside. Quartermain’s essay is scheduled to appear early in 2015 in Louis Rowan’s Golden Handcuff’s Review (GHR 20), so this is an opportunity to put it into circulation closer to the publication late last year of Eye of Witness & to turn a
Poems and poetics