ABSTRACT
W ill Alexander, a Los Angeles poet of African-American de-scent, has been prolific (if sometimes partially hidden) since the publication of his first book, Vertical Rainbow Climber (1987). His published work (which often includes his own drawings) straddles multiple genre classifications and often seems invested in calling into question the very category of poetry. Most important, because of his fondness for archaic usage, for neologism, and for a sentence (and poetic phrase) style that accumulates rather than sorts-what Harryette Mullen has called a "hyperhypotactic sentence" -Alexander constantly risks dismissal as being merely willfully obscure. "I'm consumed with trying to find my own language," Alexander has stated, but if the reader is willing to come to terms with both the urgency and the character of that quest, the poet has foregrounded the possibility of a productive (multi)valence, and the quest is thus unlikely to be rejected as narcissism. That impressive escape is, perhaps, a result of his willingness to talk of (if nothing else) biological and aesthetic genealogies and their interesting convergence.
