Al Young, Justin Desmangles, and Will Alexander
with musical guest Harley White
Mon. Feb. 17, 2014 at 7:30 PM
1719 25th Street
Host: Justin Desmangles
Widely translated, Al Young’s many books include poetry, fiction, essays, anthologies, and musical memoirs. From 2005 through 2008 he served California’s poet laureate. Other honors include NEA, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Fellowships, The Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence and, most recently, the 2011 Thomas Wolfe Award. On the first Friday of each month in 2012 he presented an original poem at KQED Radio’s The California Report Magazine. As its Visiting Scholar, Young currently teaches imaginative writing and creativity at California College of the Arts, San Francisco. Offline Love, a new poem collection, sits almost press-ready. Detailed information about this versatile Berkeley-based author and his work may be found at www.AlYoung.org.
One West Coast
for Gordon Lapides
Green is the color of everything
that isn’t brown, the tones ranging
like mountains, the colors changing.
You look up toward the hills & fog—
the familiarity of it after so many years
a resident tourist.
A young man walks
toward you in vague streetcrossing denims
& pronounced boots. From the pallor of
his gait, the orange splotch twin gobs of sunset
in his shades, from the way he vibrates
his surrounding air, you can tell, you can tell
he’s friendly, circulating,
he’s a Californian: comes to visit,
stays for years, marries, moves a wife in,
kids, wears out TV sets, get stranded on
loneliness,
afternoon pharmaceutica,
so that the sky’s got moon in it by
3 o’clock, is blooo, is blown—
The girls: theyre all
winners reared by grandmothers & CBS.
Luckier ones get in a few dances with
mom, a few hours, before dad goes back
in the slam, before “G’bye I’m off
to be a singer!” & another runaway
Miss American future drifts
over the mountain &
into the clouds.
Still
there’s a beautifulness about California.
It’s based on the way each eyeblink toward
the palms & into the orange grove leads backstage
into the onionfields.
Unreachable, winter happens inside you.
Your unshaded eyes dilate at the spectacle.
You take trips to contain the mystery.
— Al Young
Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, and visual artist. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. Over the years he has worked several jobs (including the LA Lakers box office), taught at various institutions, and has been associated with the nonprofit organization Theatre of Hearts/Youth First, working with underserved, at-risk youth. Alexander’s poetry and his visual art have been greatly influenced by his readings of Bob Kaufman, Octavio Paz, and Francophone Negritude writers such as Aimé Cesaire and Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo. Alexander describes their themes of cosmic isolation from society and interior discovery as an “alchemical metamorphosis.” Much of Alexander’s work is characterized by this powerful mix of metaphor and sophisticated language.
Compound Hibernation
Those who glance about me
who cease to see inside the Sun
who cease to imagine its destabilized pre-quanta
cannot know me
cannot know my ethos as pumice
as mingled apparition or flare
my perception through the prior sun that I ingest
like a blackened pre-existence
or collected hawks through assignation
the Sun
with its dualisms
with its pre-biotic photons which waver
perhaps
9 suns before the Sun existed
before the oceans seemed formed
there were molecular drafts
akashic precursors
floating proto-ammonia
I think of carbon
& wisps
& floodings
of feral combat shelter
where blank geometry accrues
before separable biology was born
before the contradictory ballast of de-existent protozoa
being scorching photon by abstentia
like a pre-atomic sigil
destabilized as blizzard
a pre-cognitive rotation
a strange galvanics of the cosmos
& because of this galvanics
one reeks of invisible tremor
walking around in league with daunting helium affliction
thus
the mirrors in my skin like haunted salamander fluid
like cells bereft with cooling centigrade rotation
therefore
I know the abyss as volatile lunar transposition
as sub-liminal mantis as climbing
as splintering
therefore I am not
an oily or blasphemous yogin
collapsing in default by sudden anger or water
yet I am compound
struggling with scattered mental a-rhythmia
with partial psychic aphasia
intensive
illusive
aloof by interior compounding
— Will Alexander
Justin Desmangles, a native of Sacramento, hosted the weekly radio broadcast, New Day Jazz, at KDVS, 90.3 FM, in Davis. Dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of Afro-American history and culture, the program featured jazz, poetry, political commentary and interviews. An independent producer of literary programs at the Koret Auditorium, San Francisco State University, and Yoshi’s, Desmangles is the creator of Does the Secret Mind Whisper?, an annual celebration of poet Bob Kaufman. Desmangles’ poetry and journalism have appeared in Amerarcana, Shuffle Boil, Konch, Drumvoices, and Black Renaissance Noire. In 2007, Desmangles was elected to the board of directors of the Before Columbus Foundation, where he is now Chairman, and is an administrator of the American Book Awards.
