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Reviews
In this oblique exploration of natural
history, Charles Alexander brings us the world as an intimate
gesture, a speaking through water. He manages to make autobiography
universal and the great outdoors deeply private, and all through
his love of language. That’s, finally, where his attention
lies–in the crystallized sentences and vibrant phrases that
flit like bright birds through his rich mental landscape.
—Cole Swensen
Charles Alexander gives us certain slants, various
slants, oblique angles into this world, poems written with considerable
grace, integrity, and a tentativeness that becomes an ethical
gold standard, its own sounded out wisdom, a hold on things as
the book artist writes, “phenomenon of binding without /
the least bit of stitching.” So, tell the truth but tell
it slant; this book, truthful, and telling.
—Hank Lazer
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from section 7 of arc of light/
dark matter
7
speaking of mesostics, most of which are prepositional, stunning
a wave, from a crowd of people on the loading dock being noisy,
a fractured sense of linearity, interconnectivity on the tongue,
then someone came up to me, glasses until there is no need for
drinking, framed by inconsistency, upon a shore where wave suns
the rock of present tense before trickling away, too fast for
me, according to accordions, wind as a function of musicality,
toys which duplicate the operations of a desert military tactician,
storms to distribute sand, having run off the road in a remote
part of Africa, vehicle where none was desired, to be certain
there are beaches there, close to where the bombs fell, convincing
the coeditor, say it was four hundred and thirty two of this kind
and three hundred and twelve of the other, what would that mean
in a context of indeterminate poetics, who determines the density
of the bombing patterns, floating into the deepest part of the
fragmentary nature of things, what one never would have considered
next, not that the terror could ever be thought to be so close
or planned in a corporate office, formica on top, a cooling brought
on by a sequence of popsicles, not to not to, charlatans though
they be, utilizing a new instrument to monitor the apathy of voters
before administering the drug, where foals rush in, freed from
any sense of context, an inevitable failure, previous to ethics,
alarming how considerate the managers of war can be when they
are relaxing at home, an inviolate sense of fluoridation, if the
word on the corner can be believed, a sexual overflow, not the
last light on the street between the places where they live separately,
not coordinated by a sign, of fish, pieces to make alive together
Review
In designing a circle of stones
about a pool for a zen garden, one would take a single rock and
move it ever so slightly out of alignment, knowing that the mind's
eye would then have to respond, participating in the creation
of circularity itself, a far more powerful, vivid effect. Gertrude
Stein employed this same gestalt principle of the absent subject
in her portraits and in Tender Buttons, enabling language and
meaning to suddenly blossom like the unfolding of a rose. Now
Charles Alexander pushes the envelope of what is possible in writing
even further, to the ends of the universe. And beyond. What begins
in the eye as a paragraph becomes in the ear a line, 53 of them
in fact, one line poems rich with news, life, war, sex, parenting,
the texts at hand, the spicing of mulled thought, humor, bright
southwestern colors, and an ear to die for. The comma, that pointer,
the least understood of all our elements of punctuation, shapes,
modulates, paces "a phrasal rhythm denying the sentence,"
leading the reader onward, inward, "winged-static, designed
to repsond abundantly, falling forward into technology writing
a program or batch of phrases to imagine a universe where bent
light is generosity and peace with no desired for stasis..."
This is the most sensuous, intelligent, rewarding writing I've
read in ages. -Ron Silliman
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Reviews:
"This book collects six works, different
from each other in many respects, but all moving with a strong
investigative force. Thinking is the experience of everyday living,
and Charles Alexander's work is a poetry of thinking. But it is
experience, not difficulty, that wonderfully complicates these
poems and brings them very close. I hope many people will read
Hopeful Buildings and take great pleasure both in its detail and
in the larger construct that the details, perceived, provide.
I do."
--Lyn Hejinian
"Intensive systems here make possible extensive
readings, across textual times and places. This work hears a complex
literacy of literalizing words. By means of a fencing of statements,
sense is found rather than determined. The real is as thought."
--Robert Creeley
"Twenty One Tales," the last section
of Charles Alexander's Hopeful Buildings, performs an articulating
excursion into a crystalline world of linguistic intensities variously
marshaled against the proclivity of grammar to foreclose sense.
No measure less precipitous is permitted entry to these stately
galleries of elided stanzas."
--Charles Bernstein
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Charles Alexander's
previous books of poetry include Hopeful Buildings (Tucson:
Chax Press, 1990), Arc of Light / Dark Matter (New York:
Segue Books, 1992), and Near or Random Acts (San Diego:
Singing Horse Press, 2004). He lives in Tucson, Arizona, where
he directs Chax Press, publisher of letter press and trade editions
of poetry, in a studio shared with his wife, the painter Cynthia
Miller. A former director of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts,
he has taught at Naropa University, the University of Arizona
Poetry Center, and Pima Community College. He is the current winner
of the Arizona Arts Award.
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