Will Alexander

Will Alexander, notebook titled “On Solar Physiology,” undated. The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.

fromThe Zone Above Hunger

From the 1760s onward a working class has evolved from the industrial epoch. A class, worked to its teeth in order to maintain a modicum of raiment and shelter. And it is this latter condition into which I was born, always near the margins, at times, only an eyelash from penury. 

But as an artist, a poet, one does not have to curtail one's power in order to evoke the suffering which comes from material deficiency. Inner radiance cannot be curtailed by the stones one has to sup with one's bread. One can look at Rimbaud or Blake, at Cesaire or Bob Kaufman, to see that the mind cannot be contained within the provinces of hunger. And this is not to say that the reality of poverty has no life in letters, or that the imagination is elitist. By no means. But what I speak of is the imaginal power to leap beyond the brutally imposed confines to combat the bureaucracies with an elemental seismics, with a new and alien thinking.