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Chris Bell
Alexander, Will (1948– )
The poet, dramatist, essayist, and visual artist Will
Alexander was born in Los Angeles, California,
on July 27, 1948, to devout Christian parents Will
Alexander, Sr., an employee of the Department of
Water and Power, and Birdie Alexander. Although
he was raised in the heart of South Central Los
Angeles, at 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard,
Alexander’s parents moved before that location
became the site of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Not
allowed to wander far from his mother’s watch
while his father was at work, Alexander spent a
good deal of time playing safely alone for hours;
perhaps this became the root of his steadfast, in-
dependent, and self-paced development as a fine
artist. A graduate of Los Angeles’s Washington
High School, Alexander studied sociology at Har-
bor College and earned a B.A. in English and cre-
ative writing from University of California at Los
Angeles, in 1972.
The Alexanders prevented Will, their only son,
from reading anything but the Bible during his
childhood. A slow learner, Alexander did not fully
grasp reading until he was eight and a half; al-
though he later discovered that this experience was
typical of many black males, by age 11 he doubted
his own intellectual ability. However, in his early
teens, Alexander, who had grown tired of his par-
ents’ restriction, was repulsed by what he consid-
ered the superficiality of the churchgoers he knew.
Left with a spiritual void, Alexander, like Arthur
Rimbaud, whose work influenced him, concluded
that he was being suffocated by his Christian be-
liefs. During his teenage years, Alexander became
an avid reader of leftist political writings, played
sports, and collected jazz albums. At 13, he first
heard what he called the “planetary power” of Eric
Dolphy, McCoy Tyner, John Coltrane, and Jackie
McLean. At 16, his jazz collection, which grew to
nearly 3,000 records over time, consisted of two
albums—Cannonball Adderly’s Nippon Soul and
Coltrane’s Olé.
Insatiably curious, Alexander educated him-
self by reading. His informal teachers were the
painter Chaïm Soutine and surrealist writers An-
tonin Artaud, André Breton, BOB KAUFMAN, Philip
Lamantia, and Octavio Paz. Listening to them,
Alexander built his own energy circle, found his
own voice, and wrote his first poem at 18. By the
time he entered the University of California, he
was writing daily. However, by the time he earned
his degree, he had ceased writing, unable to con-
sider himself a true writer. He chose instead to
study independently art, music, and literature
that, he was convinced, would provide him with
the self-respectable level of artistic development
he desired.
By 1987, when he published Vertical Rainbow
Climber, his first collection of poems and draw-
ings, Alexander had developed his own perspective
on language, which, he concluded, must be simul-
taneously grounded and take flight, a combination
that he could only achieve by working with palpa-
ble subject matter. He found support for this phi-
losophy in the African concept of animism, which,
grounded in the Nubian epistemology, teaches that
everything is alive. Alexander came to see language
as an agent of change that advances and heightens
individual and collective consciousness for spiri-
tual realignment to life.
Alexander has published, a collection of short
fiction, Arcane Lavender Morals (1994); a play, Con-
duction in the Catacombs (1997); a collection of es-
says, Towards the Primeval Lightning Field (1999);
and five collections of poetry: Vertical Rainbow
Climber (1987), The Stratospheric Canticles (1995),
Asia and Haiti (1995), and Above the Human Nerve
Domain (1999).
Early on, critics described Alexander as the
writer of “seeming nightmare idiom”; however, his
publication in such literary journals as CALLALOO,
Exquisite Corpse, Hambone, and Sulfur garnered
a wider general readership and brought broader
critical attention. In time, he would be called a sur-
realist, black postmodernist, neosurrealist, innova-10 Alexander, Will