 Welcome, everyone. Thank you again for joining us today at the Billie Jean King Main Library with the Long Beach Public Library. Got people still entering the room. I'm going to start in just a second. Okay. All right. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Angela Scott and I am the library assistant here at the Billie Jean King Main Library's Miller Special Collections Room. On behalf of our senior librarian of collection services, Jade Wheeler, our special collections librarian, Jeff Whalen, and all the staff here at the Long Beach Public Library. I'd like to welcome you to the first online event of the Miller Room Spoken Words, Spoken Art Series, Celebrating Poetry, and the Spoken Word. Today, we're pleased to bring you a special poetry and conversation event with surrealist poet Will Alexander, moderated by Woodbury University professor Mike Songston, aka Mike the Poet. This is one of a series of programs that will be featured periodically in the Miller Room throughout the year, in addition to a variety of lecture series on local history, architecture and historic preservation, arts and culture, as well as our poetry and fiction writing workshops, Miller Room Book Club and short story reading group, art programming, Miller musical performance programs, and much more. So please keep an eye on our LBPL calendar and website for upcoming events, and we hope you'll join us again for more of these special programs as they become available. Now while we have you all here, we'd also like to mention some upcoming Miller Room programming for May. On Saturday, May 15 from 2.30 to 4.00 p.m., please join us for our next Miller Room Book Club meeting. In honor of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, we'll be reading The Refugees, a collection of short stories published in 2017 by Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2016, and we'll be exploring poignant stories of immigration, family, love and identity in the experiences of Vietnamese refugees to America. The Miller Room Book Club reads a rotating selection of fiction and non-fiction books, as well as short stories that generally focus on the Miller Room's study topics and special collections, relating to the arts and performing arts, Asian culture and heritage, local and California history, libraries and archives, and much more. This book club is currently meeting online via Zoom and pre-registration, RSVPs are necessary. So for more information or to join the Miller Room Book Club's emailing list, visit our LBPL website at www.lbpl.org, and sign up via the program's event bright link on our homepage or event calendar. Or you can message me here on the live chat or call the live, the main library for further details. In addition, we are also pleased to launch our new Arts and Culture lecture series this May in honor of Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month. So please join us on Saturday, May 22 from 3 to 4 p.m. for this inaugural online program entitled Many Islands, Many Stories, Exploring Oceania or Arts, Tradition and Heritage with the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum, presented by the museum's director and curator Fran Luhan. Join us for an engaging afternoon as we explore the diverse cultures, histories and artistic legacies of our Pacific Islander community here in Long Beach and further afield. So again, please visit our website and event calendar to sign up for the Zoom program. Our advanced signups are available now online and stay tuned for other Miller Room programs that we'll be rolling out in the next few months. Finally, the Long Beach Public Library kicked off a new 50 book challenge back in January. We're only four months into the calendar year. So if you've made a resolution to read more books in 2021, this is a great way to do it. So check out our website to learn more and have fun reading, earning prizes and checking goals off your list. Now getting back to our program for today. It is our pleasure to once again welcome and introduce our featured guest this afternoon, Will Alexander and Mike Songson. Will Alexander is a poet, essayist, novelist, playwright, aphorist, philosopher, visual artist and pianist. His latest work published in 2021, The Combustion Cycle, is part of a rich tapestry of writing that is now approaching 40 titles in these same genres. The Combustion Cycle explores shamanism from different regions of the globe, including the Andes, Angola, and the Asiatic Wellspring that is India. And as our special guest, we're looking forward to hearing more about his work today. Mr. Alexander was born in Los Angeles and earned a BA in English and creative writing from the University of California at Los Angeles and has taught at many colleges and universities, including the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the University of California, and Hofstra University, among others. He's been awarded an American Book Award and has also been honored with a Widing Fellowship for Poetry, a California Arts Council Fellowship, and the 2016 Jackson Poetry Prize. He's currently Poet in Residence at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California, and he still resides in Los Angeles, where he has remained a lifelong resident. Now, Mike Thompson was born at St. Mary's Hospital right here in Long Beach, and is a third generation LA native who has lived his entire life in Los Angeles County. He grew up riding his bike around El Dorado Park in down the San Gabriel River through East Long Beach. Following his graduation from UCLA in 1997, he's published over 500 essays and poems, and his poetry celebrates Southern California history and geography. Mike has an interdisciplinary Master of Arts in English and History, and he's taught at Cal State LA, Southwest College, and is currently a professor at Woodbury University in the San Fernando Valley. In addition to writing poetry and performing across the Southland, he enjoys sharing his gifts and talents as a poet, scholar, and mentor with hundreds of young writers across Southern California. A number of pieces in his book, Letters to My City, also celebrate Long Beach sites like Cambodia Town, Bixby Knolls, North Long Beach, and Retro Row. His essays have been recognized by the LA Press Club, and he's published widely with KCET, the Academy of American Poets, Poets and Writers Magazine, and dozens of other publications. In today's program, Mike will be guest moderating our poetry and conversation together. And as we delve into the world of avant-garde surrealist poetry, among other things, Mr. Alexander will also be presenting readings from his newest book, The Combustion Cycle, as well as other poems from his vast repertoire of work. At the end of the program, if there's time, we'll also have a Q&A session that will be moderated by Mike through the chat. If you have any questions, please type them into the chat bar, and you'll see a chat button at the bottom of your screen, and you can type and submit your questions there. And your questions will be answered as time permits. The program will officially end at 4pm, and if you need to leave, you're welcome to do so. But otherwise, please stay and continue asking questions via the chat until about 4.15. We'll also be sending out an email in the future with a link to the archived video recording of this program, so you can watch it later at your leisure. Finally, if you're having difficulty with your audio or video during the program, please let us know in the chat so we can try to assist you remotely. So thank you again for joining us today, everyone. And without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, the Miller Room is very pleased to present our very special guest, Will Alexander. Well, Will, it's great to see you. Same here, and same to you back. You know, I just wanted to start our conversation off with a quote of yours, one of my favorite quotes of yours from Compression and Purity, your book from City Lights. Okay. And I love it when you say, my feeling is that language is capable of creating shifts in the human neuro field, capable of transmuting behaviors and judgments. Humans conduct themselves through language and when the latter transmutes the human transmutes. I love how you talk about these shifts and breakthroughs that language creates. And right off the bat, I just wanted to kind of kick off our conversation with the way we always talk about language making breakthroughs and then how your work is really about about those breakthroughs. Yeah. Language, as you said, quite rightly, it comes like it's the irrigation that springs up from what I call almost nothingness. And it's a magical, it's a magical eruption from which, you know, well spring in what you do is what you do is like participate in that eruption, immerse yourself in that eruption and it's natural. It's like something you can create from a textbook or some kind of a theory. It's something that you feel that you experience and you have no other way of addressing that feeling except to script it to write it down. Not a kind of a dictation, so to speak, a natural surrealism and indigenous surrealism, not an ideological surrealism. Yeah, we were talking earlier about the mentality of the indigenous world and fort and fortility. And so today, we're going to hear a whole cycle of poems from you. And where, which, where shall we begin? Well, I'm going to start with the piece was it was. How can I, it was written some years before the combustion cycle, but it anticipated the combustion cycle. Yeah, the combustion cycle was sired, I guess, maybe in this poem from above the human derv domain. The book I wrote about 1999. It was published in 1999. And this is entitled the iridescent enigma and it's the voice of a hummingbird that's speaking. And the Andean, it's called the Andean hill starts second largest hummingbird on earth. And this is the palm and we'll start from here. By the way, the hummingbird is speaking. So as an indigenous person, I feel language, not just no language or attempt to know language. But this is the bird, the hill star speaking. In this smokeless Harrier desolation, I have, I have surmounted inscrutable irada under two electric polar moons shifting between the colors of slate blue and magenta. I, the Andean hill star, hovering in these Martian x-ray waste, iridescent enigma by some triple wings beating against the soul of cartographical sarcees with this innervated this derish distinction with its migrating sun loss. The triple atmosphere corroded by tense elliptical static by the drainage from barbarous glacial nerves. So that the surge of countless contingents of phobos make the human staggering genetic less and less a factor where ciphers are beheaded. Humankind now tending to gaze from a portico of gangrene from model as nervous collective. So I am alone, having absorbed isolation, having absorbed the general coloration of imbalance isolated by planet. I am Augustus Lomacellus from Morphonus Magnifica and an alien enigma. Alone, I have left the earth and its species incapable of rescue of dazzling vapor which transmutes, which allows the watery chemicals to rise and take on the wisdom of vertical misnomer of the acid which would blend with the aerial oxide of waters. With prepotent force of natural helium speech which implodes, which transcends present character constricted as it is by anorexia and debris. Its retention corrosively split into oblong grain which ceases like a bleak Siberian witch and tragic forms of respiration. Its sodium kindled by fractions which torment, which hounds the aspiration as to apogee as to consuming volation. So I as hummingbird as expanded broach points in the blood seeking elongation and task, which conflagrates inertia. Again, task so that illuminates snake through the cells, no longer palpable as visual Varges. That's silken, sanquinary spectrums to be bled and negatively fed to have learned upheavals. I who now live above the liminal burst which exists between that which flies and that which stays sully. No, I am not marooned on ophthalmic plateaus cartographically contained as though Peru with the only distance, the only material diamond to be breath to be absorbed as exclusive monomial clarity. So the bareness the solemn gamma ray gradations, the probing snows on Olympus Mons with its scattered rays with its geometric diamonds congealed in the orbit of black and sphinxian diameter. Which gives me claim to magical fluxation and missed so that my five former bodies example gives to my aura. A fabled and disciplined marker. And a glance which traces odor, according to hieroglyphic substance capable of pletitudes and aggressions capable of neurological disaffirmatives. Here I am woven by gravitational mobility, get a free and cold space, known throughout the yellow Saturnian and vagueness, or the are across the Iranian methane formations, or in the work configuration. Where a basic elevation is open where pre turpentine trilling of the living in the living dead, both broadened and destroyed. So that the atmosphere are an earthly debility of garrisons becomes canceled habitat for being. Yes, we're dense and offensive procurement so that the Holocaust tribes, the central extermination of salt is no longer that which will flower in a post racial chemist being the aboriginal darkness which pre exists time. Again, the invisible fever which opens in the being random helium morale, a picture negrito of a sender inside a sender which post exists the inverse, called by gross existence, pre directional eaten. So that one can never explain the pure charisma of my zodiac instant bell of my zodiac under the Christian law of simple post mortem carnage. Never blame cast by twist and tickets the invaded and then annulled by natural solar crystallization between very, very shifts in different and intimities of creation. Here I am. Graspless, the committee eclipse incantation, which overcomes the vile by he who migrates from nectar, who unmingles barley by he who detracts weight. Man. That is that piece kind of connected to the my interior Vita from compression and purity to Yeah, everything is connected, but not in a not in a lateral linear way, but it surprises me because it always comes up fresh doesn't come up like I'm going to connect this part to that part but they just magically appear. And after after I've written them I do notice there's some kind of resonance there but I don't naturally scripted like that. I love this line you said in the my interior Vita. I was born under Leo under its signpost of he. Yeah, yeah, I was born. 727 and 1105 nights that triple sevens. 777. Working self, but you know to me it is free our business says at a certain level of consciousness, one can overcome the zodiac. So that's the principle I'm working on, not that I'm trapped in the zodiac but I'm trying to overcome the zodiac through the experience of living. Expansion of time and space right. Exactly and language is the greatest way to do it. And then work with it as a is just like people work in terms of building homes or you know working inside us I'm working in ether working in this language of ether and that's gets you in trouble sometimes in a materialistic culture but it's okay. The combustion cycle is wow you know it's nearly 600 pages. There's a lot of mathematical formulas in here. It was just a crude you know over time you know I just started that actually working on that book in the Pasadena library is the way to escape at that time the issues I was going through and not not as an escape but it's experience of other levels other than the city in circumstance that everybody seems to be confronted with in one way or another but not to disavow them but to transmute them through through language and through poetry is what I do all the time with work. I'm always working to transmute life. There's so many different levels of reality in your pieces like there's that you know there is like beyond just historical cultural personal but like, you know time and space there's geographic references but then there's references to galaxies and chemicals and just so many different elements mingle and merge with within it within your work. And we've been we've been taught to segregate all these levels of knowledge and put them into a little container. And you know even the so called the security agencies talk about certain states of mind they want to do to get out of the out of the linear but at the same time they want to impact those levels and put them back into the linear which makes makes it confusing and really doesn't work. What do they call it it's something about taking they call it to have a certain term about that and the security agencies about the placing the cognitive back into the linear, but it really doesn't work. It seems not to be working and you don't have a touch like a like a shaman would have a touch about knowing what plant goes with this and it goes with that and how the temperature of the human mind is working on in an individual at a certain moment, you know so he could heal that person or inject that person with insight. And you're right about a they're always trying to separate the subject in the object right when it's really all one thing. And it's a form of attempted dominance, which has been working for some time in thousands of years but it's not a, it's not a permanent kind of solution. They are always looking for solutions not experience of the activity of living. All the time that living is, we're subsequent to living. It's already been taken care of without us. You're like a poetic hacker, you're hacking the matrix to poetry. Well, yeah, I've got to do something with it, you know, that's what we'll be here for really is not to send up signals to a to a computer screen. Let's, let's, let's hear another one what's another what's another poem should be here. Okay, this is one I'm fairly comfortable reading it's called a nexus of phantoms from my new directions book of 2009 from the Sri Lankan loxodrome. And I read this quite this poem quite regularly it's called a nexus of phantoms. In a lower key cave motions of the exist of disintegrated swans in a translocated lake, brimming with harvested poisons sealed by corruptive post mortems. Such swans staggered by microbial reasoning, their aggressive nest, anatomical with anomaly with gifts of strenuous and conidine meanings with a thirst which hurdles conspiratorial invasives, alive with the coronal oceanics, open like a cloud of trail of windings. Analogous with the ox, the pelicans, the mordances, perhaps with the petrol's and the gannets under the power of darted mocking orations. The swans, looking back on solemn blood perusal, like a form of death breaking roses on the shore. It is the example of phonograms of lost and compacted lenses turning within a charismatic fall line, or an Iseneth, or what an avian would announce in Greenland as a catapatic wind. The swans, like a haze of magnetism or implied gondola locations where the scent of each lower key is consumed and brought to dazzling eclipse refurgence. In another foci, in another depth, their form self-challenged in the cloak of suns, their power be revealed with seven moons burning reduced to two intense incendiary magnets. And these incendiary magnets, like a nexus of phantoms, scattered across the geometric optometry. You know, the poems I write are of a whole. It's not like this poem is over here, not that writing, but it's just this one mass, like the cosmos itself. Within that mass, you know, you have particular instance of that mass and going this way and going that way. But as a whole, the energy that comes into my energy of writing is from that same source. It's not a bifurcated, the grain is not bifurcated. It has all the nutrients. I try to have all the nutrients in it, not by my consciousness, but by the fact of the way that I feel about the language. Because when I'm writing every phoneme counts, every word counts, every syllable, every word, it's all part of, it's suffused with energy. I try to suffuse everything with energy, not subjects, but the energy in the language. So the subjects go in combat. The energy is always there. You've got that a geometric optometry. Yeah, the geometric optometry is something you feel. It's not something you know. Henry Miller once made a statement that sometimes he wrote stuff and stuff down and he didn't figure out for some time. So it is magical and the voice comes into you. You just work with it and you have to build that voice up as nutrients. The life of a poet is one of nutrients. All experiences, whether you fail or succeed with the particular experience, really doesn't matter. It means that you get a certain kind of energy from that experience that can be channeled into language. So in other words, you're not owning the language. It owns you. It speaks to you, really, and you're speaking to it. I was rereading Compression and Purity yesterday and I wrote this really short across the poem that spells Will Alexander using some of your phrases and what your book told me. And I wanted to share this poem, Will, as a segue into your next piece. So this is a cross that spells Will Alexander. Will Alexander is singing in magnetic hoofbeat, intergalactically painting a panorama of the cosmos, longitudes of latitude, liquidate ribosomes, locate the periodic table in his poems, Andromeda allocates Alexander and Dolfy's keys, Los Angeles Lafayette Park geometry generates rhapsody, culminating compression and purity, Xanadu accelerates the cycle of combustion all along the watchtower, word, sound, power, nocturnal notation, weaves, wills, Sri Lankan, Luxadrome, doubling the kinesthetic indigo, mineral alignment, energy vectors in his studious velocity, regions and rays resonate tributaries of imagination. Thank you. Thank you. Well, we're going to do something. It's just called the deluge in formation. If one believes oneself as stasis, there exists no seepage, no neuro density or scar. One then saturates as ash, as pointless cannibals, lethargy is dislodged in from a podium or a treatise. One comes to know demobility as a craft, as an arc which sodders itself to specifics. Yet to know one's not sequestered to do mundane advancement as doorway or basic habit as speculation. I'm speaking of chastisement or cross referential superimposition. Within this condition, I'm more like a crow from crucial underwater fires. A crucial underwater crow, neither Chinese nor Shinto, but of the black dimensionality as hidden underwater mass, which persists by daring, which seems at the surface a purposeless kinetic or a pointless mandrel's infection. Saying such, I consider myself a reddish Shinto crow, then just a strongly a black anathema crow. Then just as quickly a sun-fed crow from snow-washed volcanoes. So I look to myself as wetter, as in climate-carrying manga, as flight through great electrical haze. I, being blur, who shapes the imperian, who invokes withdrawal, who instills in his forces stunning psychic transference. Man. We're already getting some good questions and some thoughts from folks. And Pina has said that is a relation between language and the senses. Could there be dormant senses that language cannot access because it has not tapped into knowledge that can improve from them? Would your interest in shamanism consider this kind of possible gap? Yeah, I think that's a great insight that she has there. Because, yeah, I think we're still evolving as beings. According to the advertising agencies, we've been put into blankets of what we like if we were 15 years old, if we were in nursery school. But these things just tend to vanish when one gets insights into reality or other levels of reality. Maybe that the American civilization and the Western civilization is a adolescent structure when we really look at the whole situation. But this is something I try to explore in my next book. It's coming out on Darrell Higman. It's a book about the original Renaissance of the West, which was in Granada between 700 and the rise of the Spaniards after 1493. But anyway, I don't want to get into that right now. But we're talking about an efflorescence of the mind where it's able to build and leap all its former limits. I'm interested in exploring beyond my limits. Well, that was interesting what you said about Granada in Spain because they had one of the world's first truly multi-religious cultures, right? Well, the key word is toleration. The toleration because the fact that the energy from the, you know, the tolerations from the energies was included to Christians. It didn't bifurcate from that, but it didn't exclude the Greeks, but it built on the Greeks. And they just didn't stay static with the Greeks because they created their own understanding of insight. The typical says with the Greeks, the Greeks, the Greeks. But what about the Egyptians in this period of the Muslim kingdoms? Do you have any book recommendations on that history? Because I wanted to read about that time period in Spain, like he said from about 700 to about 1493. I've always been interested in reading more about that time period. That's an amazing period. I know that there's a lot of stuff. There's a book, and I can't remember the author's name now, but it's an incredible book called Islamic Technology. It has incredible information in it, and it's quite amazing. Wow. And there's an essay by a gentleman named Jose Pimienta Bey talks about the seeding of the Western universities. Oxford, Salamanca, all of the above. And Oxford, Coimbra, all of those things were post this experience. In fact, this is what got me into writing about this. I know there's many more beings that may be able to have more information about the areas, but I'll say it like this. The Sun system was first seeded during that time period. Abu Said Zinjari, 1031. I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, but he seeded the Sun system of Copernicus, but we never hear his name. We hear about Copernicus, Copernicus, Copernicus, Hegel, this, but there's problems with that. In other words, we see that period as a blank period and nothing happened until the European Renaissance came. But European Renaissance was only basically, is a painting era, is an era of painting, because the Bono Moussa brothers and the mechanics, you know, the situation with, you know, the middle illnesses that were already understood to exist and be diagnosed in the 10th century. Wow. Wow. Insurance. I mean, people didn't have to have insurance to go to the by-mart since I don't know if I'm pronouncing it right. These are hospitals in that you did need payment to enter the hospital. Let's get treated. I mean, the cataract surgery, things like that are already there. But no, the European dates are always subsequent to that. Everything is subsequent to that. And this is why I think it's been isolated and blanked out because of the fact that we want to see the European ideas as the summit or the original kind of insight into different forms of knowledge. That's hence the Renaissance. But the Renaissance was always happening. You know, and it was happening before, you know, it happened during the Egyptian period. Wow. And we need to know how the Egyptians and the Chinese and the Islamic cultures connected in China. There was this connection between Islam and China, which was in terms of observation, astronomical observation. A lot of things going on there, rich, rich period. But my book is called on Dar el-Higma, which is coming out from Africa World Press. And, oh, man, I'm getting far afield here. But, you know, it's coming up. This is an indigenous reading. You already got my interest up. Man. Paul Cunningham had a question. He said, hi, Will, how did the repeating image of the alabaster shark materialize in the combustion cycle? The alabaster shark came up as, as Arabino calls it, an adesh. It's something that comes from inside of you. And it felt right at that moment to write it down. Now I wasn't thinking about some kind of historical references, but as a shamanistic pigment that rose in my imagination. Man, we've already, we've gotten a couple other questions. This is from Lebrecht Baker in Long Beach. Mr. Alexander, can you please expand upon or talk further about what you said, you're not owning the language, but instead the language owns you? Well, this is an idea that, you know, that this has been here forever. And when Andre Baton talks about language, he puts, he has a whole list of pre-genitors. How do you say that? I would say that progenitors that were doing this, I mean, amongst them and Jonathan Swift and Shakespeare. But also you have informational context that were not ideological, but included people like Garcia Larca. And somebody is anti-official surrealism as Mr. Vallejo. Yes, explosive stuff, man, explosive stuff. So, you know, I'm not ideological, but I understand where you get these natural elements from. It's like the dust that falls on the earth from outer space. You can't segregate. Man. So you can't segregate your reality. But this doctrine and that doctrine, this and that, but you have to explore the energy which people, and you have to do it accurately like a shaman does with plants or people like in the African American people that us, me, that came here from Africa who were able to tap into certain kinds of medicines. We weren't allowed to go to doctors and so that medicines from nature, I shouldn't say, I should say. So these are things that you have to have from an internal base, not just some kind of external kind of prescription that you've been given because we weren't even supposed to learn how to read. So how do we survive and continuing to survive off this energy? I mean, it's a natural kind of a thing. So language for me is my way of tapping into this energy. It's not something I'm just trying to intellectually solve or puzzle. So in other words, we want to just do these things. And what I could do is solve puzzles by natural engagement. So here's here's and I do these these puzzles and I try to solve them poetically. And this is a small palm from a compression impurity called coping Prana. It is the way I breathe through chronic terrifying firms through a black and gracious stomach. And it's this uranium rejoinder, this impact pointing backwards. And when witness causes observers to planet to blur and forget and to flee. They can't see my approach, my wayward dorsal looming, my lettering and black drizzle. It's my approach by weaving my sigil as curved embankment. Therefore, I can never name myself or plot myself according to the sparks or the splinters from the workbench. Days, ruthless salivation with my awkward insular romans. I'm like a few darkened eagles riveted against the moon. Then I'm brought to a table by deafness feasting with herons, which spins me by embranglement by encircular abatement. I'm always seeking to have me neutered beneath my derma, so as to talk to myself, so as to cancel my structural scrutiny. They speak of me as a lawless as a swiggable as a typhoon and see well as tomorrow's as to fixed and accelerated combination. They fix me as deserted bereft as fragment from a starving lion's compendium. I'm as deserted as pointless positron without image as hieroglyph, as sundial, as martyr, being leakage from a barbarous index province. Yeah, man. So we're trying to, we're barbarous in a certain way. I'm intellectually barbarous because I've never been able to script a neat, linear compendium for myself ever. I learned things from different directions, circular, backward, going backwards, pointing going to the forward. It's not completely nonlinear. So because it's nonlinear, I was never able to subscribe to any real articulate combinations within the old educational structure. That's why I was glad to get rid of it. But you know, my mind doesn't work that way point by point by point by point. It tends to contain you. When you were at UCLA as an English major, what did you think of the poetry in the Poetry in the Academy? You know, when I was doing that, I was reading this book on Artel by Naomi Green. I think I can't think of the name of it right now, but it was a beautiful book which I unfortunately don't have at this time. But I was being fed. I was understanding the basic tenets of surrealism during that period, just on my own. And it seemed a conflict with what they were doing at that time. And hence my wires were crossed most of the time. And you would tell me that Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane entered the picture at that time too, right? Oh, well, they were there already. But for me, but I learned about them when I was like 13 years old, something like that. I heard a piece by, I heard Ole. It was one of the first premieres of Ole in the radio here. And they set great radio here with that. And I heard that. I couldn't believe it. I was just running around the room, listening to that stuff from Dolphy on the flute. Yeah, I mean, McCoy did this incredible solo on there. But, you know, I was sinking all that stuff into my system, putting that into my nerves. I didn't know where I was going with it, but I just felt it. It was like a healing situation. So during boredom in school, I would write down the names of Roy Haynes, John Coltrane, Carl Tyner. And I ended up meeting everybody except Coltrane. But during my odyssey, you know, I've had a chance to contact these people, not as celebrities, but as energy fields. You had a long conversation with McCoy Tyner, right? Yeah, we were talking one night, one Monday evening at the old, it was, it was called the Adams West at one time. It was on Crenshaw and Adams. And McCoy gave a concert that he was playing over at the lighthouse and most of the beach, but he volunteered to do a free concert that night. On a broken out piano and he made it sound great. And we had just a good conversation about John T. McClain's 8 Club. A lot of people don't know John T. McClain's 8 Club with, you know, Hank Mobley, Trane, Muck. There's a great record with Muck at the 8 Club. Wow. It's on West Washington here in LA. But McCoy didn't talk too much, but he, we were talking about John T. McClain's running the numbers and the whole situation. People like, you know, the Ava Gardner, all these movie stars would come over and get to hang out. But, you know, it was a hell of a, I never went on for it. I'll be honest, I was too young to go, but I always regret not being there, you know, in that atmosphere, interesting atmosphere. West Washington was quite a street at the time, too, huh? Oh, yeah. West John, West Washington, all of that, Adams, too, right? Yeah, there's a lot of, a lot of energy over there, you know, like where it's on Florence and, what's Florence and Western? There was a club on the corner, right there on the corner, on the east side of Western. And I can't remember the name of the club, but you walk by and Dexter Gordon would be playing there, stuff like that. Amazing stuff. And, you know, it's Coltrane always liked to play in LA. And, you know, he and the first, I never went to the Renaissance club, but that's what they got there. He and Dolphie got their first anti-jazz reviews from a concert they did here in LA. Really? So it's just interesting stuff, man, interesting, interesting city. But we don't hear about the official, from the official point of view about what's been going on here. I'd heard of Felacuti lived in LA in the early 70s. Felacuti lived here. People was like Felacuti, Cedar Walton, of course, the Great Billy Higgins. You know, it's a whole mix of things here. Dolphie, of course, you know, this is his whole mix of things, man. And that was those were your formative years, right, when you were coming up? Yeah, you know, that's what you do. What Apollo does is live. He or she doesn't construct a methodology for development. That's why everybody has different strengths, different kinds of pools and tensions. That's why all the work is original work is always different. Different people have different ways of getting at this energy. Like the way that you grow certain kind of a plant is not the same way you grow another kind of a plant. It has to be understood that way, you know, but see the educational system wants to put everybody in a box where they all grow the same for the same reasons. This is why an unemployment page only has a certain limitation of what you what a human being can do. And this is something I don't I never subscribe to. I can't because it's just like I said, like, but power this place is I can only play the piano. I can only do this this one way out of my originality. We had two more questions. Brecht Baker asked, how did you get into writing poetry? What was your first aha moment? And then Angela Scott, our librarian said, Will, how do your interest and experience as a pianist and musician influential poetry? Well, first of all, I play honestly, I'll tell you, I play by feel, not by registration of notes like one plays conventionally. But I've had very fortunate experiences with, you know, playing with Bobby Bradford and spontaneous playing. And I play with other people and it tends to work because I hear it's the hearing for me and the agility of the fingers. And I've been able to just take a nudge from. He was discovered the piano player was discovered by Arnett Coleman, by the way. I can't think of his name. He played for ESP Records. What is Davidson? Lowell Davidson. Lowell Davidson has given me inspiration, the piano player. But he was originally a chemistry major, I think at Harvard, but he played the piano. Only recorded one or two records. People like the Great Hauston from Philadelphia, you know, people like that inspired me, you know. Mingus's piano playing, by the way, had a great experience where I did see Philly Joe Jones play the piano and the drums. Just one time. But just hearing these people gives you inspiration. Just gives you inspiration. This is something that people don't understand that they want to look at people get autographs from them just to get things from them. But to absorb what they're doing, absorb what they're doing is important to me. It's more important than absorbing everything you can, the way you can absorb it, not the way someone else absorbs it. And you and Kamal grew up together too, huh? Oh, yeah. Great Kamal. We share this natural resonance that we don't see each other that much, but we vibrate together. It's like a natural situation, you know. In fact, I'm hoping to see him shortly. I hope he's on his broadcast, but you know, all energies to you, man. But this is this is great, you know, to have this vibratory current to talk to you and to experience some of these these histories. But you know, what I'm going to do now is maybe read a smaller piece and it's called a vibration from the. What is it vibration from the coast of India? You know, they're going through some rough times over there with the COVID as as is all of the human race. But this is called vibration from the coast of India from the new direct from the city lights volume. One feels it's harried anodyne vouchers. It's populace of rats. It's vexing by bubonics. The fact that the body is eaten as vapor as base invisibility to be discarded to be rinsed with carcing polonium and lime. So there are basics intrinsically freed of themselves of their dark extrinsic imperial patterns as if the Holocaust body had never existed. They were teaching that fruition as claw a model or fragment. That's the fate in its ultimate D existence. There remains a galactic brewing formation never weighed by the cells about measures invented by an honoris grasping or sorghum or principle. So to me to vibrate the whole the whole universe as it comes to you, not the way that you scripted, but the way it comes to you. Like India comes to me in a certain way or Albania, which I wrote one day without knowing much about Albania. I began to read an article on Albania. And for some reason the poem began to appear about the dictator in Verhoja, who was an old Stalinist dictator that stayed for many years in 1945 to many, many years. But, you know, I got into this. This I migrated to Albania and Albania by the way was off limits in the old communist kingdom. It was a it was non non-Soviet based. It was it was Chinese based. It's very strict and people had to they transformed mosque into stables things like that. People ate grasses like they do in the Korean peninsula. So it was kind of like a critique of that that that ideological spectrum. I didn't just take it in as whole soul and body that they did this and they're that and they have some ideological purity, but I just saw the humanity of the situation. And it's like that humanity is the whole of reality, I should say, is part of the poet's experience. It doesn't have to just be be physical about something outside of your front porch, but it can be part of your your psychoneurological spectrum. So I'm not idealized for that sense. David Lau from Lana Turner magazine just wrote. I wrote an essay one time where I tried to compare Will's style to doffy cold train out in jazz free jazz is very broad intellectual music in touch with many different places, times, knowledge is those musicians drew from a lot of different sources themselves. List of objects or adjectives pushing sense sound out a stranger. That's right. No. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hello Dave. You know, it's it's it's an eclectic mix, eclectic mix man, you know, and you got to know where your feelings are, but you got to know how you fit into that situation accurately. It's like you're kind of like a, I said poet is kind of like a mathematician. I was going to use a quote from Northrup Fry. If I can stand get up and go get it. Sounds great. Well sounds great. Okay. Oh, I was just going to read it just just struck me. Oh yeah, here it is. He says the poet is the poet, like the pure mathematician depends not on descriptive truth, but on conformity to his hypothetical postulates. So that's what mathematics is. It's not an abstract situation, but it's a balance. It's understanding of balance. And that's what language does. You have to understand the balance and the sounds and how the colorations mix. It's like creating a certain kind of a invisible kind of formula all the time. So everything for me is like the essence is hearing how you hear. Not how you just know, but how you hear how you feel about that hearing. People need to get their ears up, huh? Put your ears on as they say, you know, put your ears on. In fact, I was on a small TV program years ago with put your ears on with the poet Bill Moore some years ago. Put your ears on. You know, and this is what I do all the time, not just putting them on, but letting them stay on after you involve them. This is the one thing we don't want to cut things down and truncate things. This culture is so designed to take away oxygen from life. We love chopping down trees and sculpting and sculpting that. And it's allowing a reality to the wisdom itself. Extraction, huh? Extraction and transactions. Extraction and transaction and profit. That's all you hear about. It's transactional trade. So what I do is whatever I hear, I start to write it down. In fact, I just finished something 48 hours ago because I heard it. And that's what the reading, your particular reading comes into focus because it allows you to draw from things when you begin to hear what you feel and begin to write it down. And then the general knowledges that have impacted you begin to rise. And that lets me, you have to read everything on that subject at all times. You could just do that and just put down a regular notebook or dossier on this and that. But it would be just completely linear and deformed because it wouldn't have the feeling in it. That's what creates the poetry. It's the same language, but it's transmuted language. So this is what, it's like your total exercises of being. And so the combustion cycle was a complete exercise for me. It was not a literary activity, but a transmutation of the elements that I was carrying in myself. It's not like I was thinking about myself as an author, but as an experience. The names on the book, but, you know, it was something that was coming through me. Not something that I was planning and plotting and putting into place where I could, you know, figure out my next, my next reading or my next presentation. None of that, never, none of that occurs for me, never. But here's a small poem. It's just three lines. And I put as much energy into a poem that's three lines is one that goes 600 pages. The cosmos is fragment. A bell in a grotto, a sun with its flame riveted inside a selva. So I'm not interested in just the size of something, but the quality of something, you know, we're too hung up on sizes of books and how much you can't much quantity, you know, but how, how is the art that creates scopes this information? How do you put these things into concert? There's a lot of people that were writing stuff with during Mozart's period. But as the jealous musician, what was the same? Salieri was talking about this in a motor was magical. And so in other words, the magic is out outside of the concentration of the intellect is such the cognitive mind, you know, and so he was railing against that. Salieri is reeling against this non-calculative, this improvisation that the Mozart was able to wonder through and accelerate during his life. But, you know, for me, it's too much information has been created from the European utilitarian point of view. Too much, you were inundated with this all the time. And if you don't do it like that, you're not considered to be intelligent. It's like you go into a store with your cell phone and they give you all these these these shorthand informations. And if you don't pick them up right away, they don't think you're very smart. That's what happens in school. And it's it's it's it's debilitating because if you look at the old Egyptian idea of the educational system and Luxor, which is by the way, a Greek term, Luxor, but you were not graded. You were given degrees. You went by degrees of insight and how you got into the inside of the cosmos, maybe through geography or astronomy or or language was was another way of entering into your predilection for knowledge, not to be just used as a exterior tool to to put up something or match something with something else. And it's for them for the moment, but how you would irrigate your your interior principle. And so that's what I'm interested in is the irrigating my interior principle, not not through the consciousness of the exterior body. But I wanted to see a little combustion. Yeah, let's do it like that. I'll do that way, man. I have two quotes on here. One from. Yeah, thank you for doing that. As Amacar Amacar Cabral says, over 99% of the indigenous population are untouched by the culture of the colonial power. And then there's one from great name Agbar. He says, despite the impressive technological advancement of modern Western man relative to his own history, he ranks far behind the African people of Kimmet, Egypt, both technologically and spiritually. Part of the reason for this mental devolution is the limited conception of human potential that one finds in Western science. That's what it was. The security agencies have this term called cognitive anomaly where they can only go so far. But everything is based on superposition. But what we want to do now is to be able to go into the economy to this beyond the anomaly into this other descriptive levels. And let me start reading if this is this is the voice of an Angolan shaman, which is, which is related to the African old African sangoma sangoma heels. He doesn't, he doesn't overstate this his technical abilities. And there are technical ability abilities in this in this region of the earth, but they're never they're never championed or lionized, according to the West. He says, I of the electrocuted hamlets of the transfigured remnant of inclement nostrils subsumed by swirling electron soils. I work by means of solar isolation by means of combustive subsonic by means of cryptic soma and bird. Trying to yield by figments, a world beyond eras, a world with inner magnetic hydroxyl commingling with outer suns with the electrical motion of distance to alterity. And it is because of this distance that I've been claimed by the ambiguous by dynamic hesitations being both kinetic and counter kinetic bio catharsis which arises through sub fervor and vacuum. Me, I've hovered within uncountable disorder. Yet I've flown like a bird from stunning guan transposed transposers by blood type channeling through strange charisma and error. I've never been able to reason from induction. I hold my mind point by point, according to mechanics, accrued from traumatic incendiary counting. My difference understanding by the equator as absence of mass outside the realm of the coolity as abstraction as if absorbing by means of supper physical infusion. Because I sometimes waver in my gate, I am accused of being flawed by being a curious sub celestial avian, unable to fly or descend according to tenants, which focus themselves through universal reason. Because I'm not of the conscious body. I'm focused by osmotic planes by riddling a knowledge by levels known in certain parts of the world as a sapien issue by mingling and private. I've come to know certain aspects of being through trans rooted fields, the roots and waves of vertical to imploded species of deer. And the political subsets. And the random holograms are speaking is where the sun or narrowly swims where the galaxy intrinsically lights and suggests. This being shaman's hieroglyphics, your narrow glass in the genes, sometimes stumbling in a shaken vitrious house, purring through a porthole of integers, as if the numbers were formed by an unbalanced tweet or an interior chart burning with a folio of diamonds. The rhetoric of the sun, associational goals, empowering my soma as a chain charged uranium warren, not warn predictable as ideology or mist, but as resonance as a relay of bells over vast projections beyond limit. And this limit being nothing other than the consciousness of limit of thinking of oneself within the prediction of that limit. Therefore, phantoms, they being limit as being and projected limit as being. Therefore, I exist as numerology as circle as a combined for sons being a great astrology of rivers. And these sons and rivers by breathing by no makes scattering and burning, create by magnification, momentum, suspension, fractals, a positional soils, summoning codes beyond cellular inculcation. Because I've only been judged by limit by a Coleman fragmentation, I remain obscure pillaged by extensive determination, but untoward utility practice is imprisoning code. No longer of the overtone of the galaxy is living obscurity. I'm thinking of the common obscurity of eras, a figment, the monological stream of the Kermian partaking of the fire before the earth was settled. Ironically, this becomes a curious fragmentary solace, a mode of discipline and energy. Being a singer in a hostile ozone field, I've come to terms with Bulgaria's isolation with tumult within various salts within the horizon. Because I am without definitive without the victims which sculpt the categorical. I seem de-energized, contracted, suspended as possibility, as enigma, as stray, as that which transmits an abstract catharsis. So as molecule as some by conscious numbering, I'm placed in this or that projection as a priori plaintive as precarious ideology. I no longer bicker with my own bereftness, crafting myself by judgmental fouling, by a self-riding plot found by sacrilegious determination. True, my biology function, I've been given the craft of breathing, and at times I monitor waves in my system. Not in the sense of counting or declamation, but as precipitates, precipitates, precipitates, as fans, as solar lake in its sigil. These being waves which flow from the summer, like a hatching of Novi or butane operatics. I'm not the order of hives or buffeted within erotic changeling hectares, which then dissolve through forces which dwell in central illusion. Because I am immersed in the upper and the counting of the upper and lower Egypt, I know the expansion of the Sumerian sun. Being active in entry through Mayan stellar portals, which means I'm connected to the human solar center. And this solar center which articulates, which animates the Soma to the powers which dwell in the galactic central furnace, which issue a resonant psychic fuels as coarsicating stamina, and each species being part of the stamina, for instance, the ants burning, revealing themselves in depths of psychic alps, being citric metamorphics engage in rhetoric beyond the potential of human flare or quantum. All the levels we conveyed and drowned and reignited within a havoc of instance, within three billion suns, acting as reverse rotation. This being the algebra of primeval protozoans within the flank of fiery brecciopods within the forms of otoliferous stellar algae. I speak through inverted hagiography or the varying utility of particles inscribing laments as a scorching motility. There's a sand which crosses junctious sired in the ethers as continuous heliopause. Certainly this is minus politics of the ozone, which rises subverted dust and virgins, inversions resolved as blank electrical waste as events which hover as omnivorous horizons. Now, as bird and proto bird, again as blank conducting principle, I come to my language as interior diorama, triplicate, massless, swimming as a form through seasonless upper darkness. This being the ether at the pole, touching on the nearest vertical light, being cobalt in the conscious mind, being the symbol of eagles diving through subsurface enopsias. This being the inner level, the fields within fields. These being the curious cycles of ethers and suns and kings and blue tornadoes as bodies, being transpicuous fuels combined through magical inhalation of the sun. This is the way the sun breeze. This is the way that the seminal unfolds. Thus the body, being fractal in rotation, remains alive by ophthalmology, by audition, by skist, which rotate as carbon. Therefore, I am called by some of Gary de Dos Santos, the seeming avian, carried at the interdimensional as crossroads, where the cells seem blinded, where the thoughts seem dazed by ceasing to assemble. I could easily speak of the birds of Mozambique, or of the winds that burn in the eastern Sahara, by skin seemingly brewed by Angola in Brazil, by schisms which generate angles and currents, by fjords of the moon which collide and magically structure the invisible. I'll stop at that point, but. Thank you, Will. Yeah, yeah. Goes on and on, but just to give a part, little part of a part of a part, because everything that you do is connected to something else. It's always circulating. This is one of the things that this culture doesn't understand that they got everything parted up to this parted up to that. You should get rid of this, you get rid of that, and you'll stop something. But it doesn't ever stop anything. Life does not stop. They just found a sun that was, I think it was 110 times. How can I say? The planet was 110 times further away from the sun than is Earth, and was still part of the system, you know, part of the solar system. So there is some bizarre information of complexes going on in this universe that have not been accounted for, and we don't know how they got there. We can speculate, but we really don't know how they got there. And we have to do that with ourselves, even though we have names and we have dates and this and that. But we don't really know. We kind of rely on what people sometimes tell us about what we are. And that gets us entangled even further. Will, you always help me see a little bit further, see further down the line and see that you make the invisible visible. And thank you for expanding the lens and just opening it up. Thank you so much. It's not a personal thing, but we want to spread it out so we can share with one another. One person can, yeah, that's what we want to do is share. We're all interconnected, right? It's all interrelated. It really is. And it's not like some kind of namby-pamby situation, but it's really true. You see this thing going on in nature all the time. And it's stuff that's being discovered right now. It's unbelievable. I do give the informational complex of science is just fantastic because what's being discovered now, like under the ice caps and the extra, I think it's over 4,000 exoplanets we're working with now. Terrence Butcher says, good to see Will again after all these years. Good to see you. I'm glad you came. And thank you for being here to listen. I'm trying to share with this medium is so crazy. I mean, to me, I mean, to be able to just talk like this and share with so many people, but I'm grateful. I'm grateful for having this, this, this, you know, opportunity. But, you know, we just want to just spontaneously connect because we want to know that it's kind of like the old thing of putting a palm in a bottle and then letting it right across the waves. Well, thank you so much for this amazing conversation today. It's been truly, I don't have the words you do. It's been amazing. Thank you. And thank you for your time and for your generous support of poetry and our long public library community and the poet community at large that's visiting us today. I mean, we have people from potentially all over the world that looks like we've got people visiting from Italy who want to who want to see this program once it once it goes on to our YouTube page. And I just want to remind everybody that if you have people who would like to see this, or if you want to see it again, it will be posted on our LBPL YouTube page within the next week or so as soon as we can get it edited and posted. So I will be sending out an email to everyone with your, you know, the emails that you signed up with the Eventbrite. If you haven't had a chance to sign up, if you didn't sign up with Eventbrite and you got the link from somebody else, like I said in the chat, please submit your email address here. So in the chat so I can make sure to get it to you. The Brecht Baker wants to know, do you have any other talk scheduled that we can share with everyone here? Oh, actually I'm doing one tomorrow. I'll send it out. And it's a lot of stuff going on right now, but I'll send it to you and maybe you can. Yeah, I can send it to the Brecht and I can send it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it'd be great. Okay. Okay, wonderful. I'd also like to thank just a little quick thank you to our library administration and staff, friends of the library, our Long Beach Public Library Foundation and so many other local contacts including Mike Songson. Thank you for helping to set this up for us today and Mr. Alexander, thank you so much for agreeing to do this. It's been truly incredible and I knew nothing about surrealist poetry before I started listening to your program and reading about you in advance of this. So it's truly been an eye-opening experience not only for me but for many people and it will continue to educate and enrich the lives of people all across our community and further a field who are able to tune in online and see this later. So we just really want to thank you, our sincerest thanks and appreciation to everyone who was able to attend today. Have a wonderful evening, everyone. Stay safe and healthy and we look forward to seeing you again soon at our upcoming Miller Room Programming. Thank you so much again. And then Mike, did you have anything you wanted to say or Mr. Alexander? I want to tell everyone to get the combustion cycle and compression and purity and singing and magnetic hoof beat. The new book coming soon will be... Reflective Africa. Africa, correct? That's New Directions. And when is that going to be published? Well, that's going to be coming out in November and we also have a companion publication from the new Granta Imprints in England and that will be coming out at the beginning of 2022. Oh wow, wonderful. Yeah. So prolific. It's amazing. Thank you again. Thank you, Will. Thank you, Angela. Thank you, everybody for joining us. This has been truly an amazing experience and we're just... Thank you for everybody's interest in, you know, I'm going to sign off now, but thank you for everything. Thank you. Take care, everyone. Thanks again. We'll see you soon. Thank you, Will. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye. Bye.