The Dialogics of Will Alexander & Heller Levinson, Part 1

Heller Levinson’s book, Un--, forthcoming from Black Widow Press this Spring, will feature further trackings of the Dialogics. For pre-orders and more information, please visit Black Widow Press.

Dialogics:  The Dialogics are ongoing conversations between Will Alexander & Heller Levinson.  They began in 2001 in Los Angeles over beer & burgers at “The Saloon” on Pico Boulevard.  Below is a sampling of recent exchanges.

H = Heller Levinson.  What is the Essential difference between the Athlete & the Artist? Is there a difference?

W = Will Alexander.  Many many similarities. Having done both I would say the artist rows further into eternity. 

H:  Is Infinity more than that which precedes & concludes us?

W: It would have to be in excess of matter itself, given that matter prevails as a subsequent realia. By absorbing it's originatory condition it betrays it's own resistance to this condition thereby invoking a curious maturation via osmosis. 

H:  Could we not simply say that Infinity is the Non-Containable.

H:  The problem I’m having with the phenomenologists, i.e., Husserl, Levinas, Sartre, & Co., is their identification of transcendence, exteriority, otherliness, specifically & exclusively with the alter-ego, with personhood.  This annihilation of the natural world – the tadpole, the lizard, the tree, leaf, rock, earth – is both troubling & incomprehensible.  Incomprehensible in that how can ‘thinking’ persons possibly overlook such vitalistic abundance.  Is this what separates the poets from the philosophers (another schism), from a Whitman, say, who could talk of “ . . . touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh (Italics mine) to renew me.”  The time has come for poet & philosopher to merge, to anoint the earth newly.

W: As curious as the following may seem, Existentialism remains a modified remainder of 18th/19th century argumentation as a kind of insular quantity. The latter argument invoked a divide that the early racialists and classifiers nurtured and seeded. Names such as Cuvier, Blumenbach, Samuel Morten,  and Arthur de Gobineau most forcefully come to mind. The latter casting their collective lot via the fostering of division. In this context American Indians, subjugated Africans, Asians of all stripes remained at the level of tadpoles and lynxes. Never to be equated with the human ideal reserved for the vaunted Greek ideal. 

When Sartre, and Husserl, and Levinas, invoke human scale as their most significant point of concentration, it rumages, around within a delimited purview via a constricted socio-political humanism it's glossary naturally fails at rendering the other. This glossary attempts to define  singularity as a type of human experience as the central integer within the flux of cosmic number.  Add to this, it seems to assume its subject to be the condition of European consciousness as it emerged from 2 devastating Global conflicts, from the social devastation chronicled by Dickens during the rise of the Anthropcene. Of course we can never forget the shadow cast by the 80 million slaughtered Indians in the Americas, and the 100,000,000 maimed souls due to the trans-Atlantic circumstance that was the African holocaust.

Indeed, Existentialism rendered by the larger has failed to invest itself in the authenticity of the other. Indeed, it came to fruition during a span when Europeans seemed to wander without purpose across a pointless inscape littered with post-Hitlerian pyschic debacle.

*Editor's note: To read a second installment of Dialogics, please click here.

Will Alexander- Poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, philosopher, visual artist, pianist, who has authored over 30 books and chapbooks. He has read at venues stretching from Rotterdam to Los Angeles and is currently poet-in-residence at Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in Venice California. In addition to this he is a Whiting Fellow, a California Arts Council Fellow, a Pen Oakland winner, an American Book Award winner, as well being both a recipient of the Jackson Prize for poetry in 2016, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Beyond Baroque Poetry Center in 2018. He resides in Los Angeles.

Heller Levinson, the originator of Hinge Theory, lives in New York where he studies animal behavior.  His book, Un--, is planned for Spring publication (Black Widow Press, 2019).

Hydrogen by Dave Shortt

promiscuous autonomous bonds with forever,
food & water following from the sun forming
from the one protium abundance, deuterium
was more sociable but
still their ages made them incomparable (incompatible) , she
wanted a baby who would never breathe
petroleum fumes, odorlessly would it
mobilize into moderate fusions, while
mega-bombs repressed in dark matter
slumbered, as spectacular oxidizing explosions
assimilate into heat & light's civil function,
a pleroma of solar wind comes in as waves
of disenfranchised ones with their property
of unpredictability, never to be known
will continue the deep isolation of the mass
awakening within the molecules
as neutral or charged co-existence of the lighter
with the heavier, extended & further committed,
in splendor materially,
the surpassing plurality 'alive with innate colors'
brought under its gregarious paternity
& polygamous character compounded with the ease of starlight
fomented with compassion induced
from the underground meeting between water & the fayalite, coming
from there to here & back again
the chemical chimaera of laboratory earth
occulted in its home
nurturing & morphing the legitimate residency
of the 3 forms of self-determination
born in breaking symmetries in the prime of time the time of prime,
protium deuterium tritium
in free states of radioactivity, stable non-neutrality, & endurability
'traceable to the Big Bang,' they
invisibly fuel concentrations of such peace
as are controlled by the sunrise
& are awed into corn's carbon pathways being harvested,
trinity of underground & galactic plasmas
isotopic in omnipresence,
one of the fraternal twins venturing into Kekule's benzene dream,
as the levity of bilateral talks escapes earth's gravity
& leaves the atmosphere, to be replaced
along reducing routes of biochemistry medicated or wild,
emitting equivalent appearances of potential dialogue
in the grip of consent from the auroras
predictably sharing until tomorrow & tomorrow & tomorrow
a change magnetized right here
into a usually incredible greenish feeling
of one period occurring overhead at a horizon
of Love streaming naive,
lightyears before & behind baryonic curtains trying to introduce
quantized norms abuzz with gassy kinetics
specifying an ant or a fertilized field
variable in strength in an organic history
held together over a drink of
whatever tastes good, transitioning
into acids cola'd or digesting the earth
in annihilation of each moment's configuration
adjectived or not,
ascetically detached from any anion-cation duality
of its position,
servant of a neutrality motivating
an equation the other side of which is numbered
unaccountable Consciousness, where embedded matrices
justify the muteness of the lightest baby of the atoms
in analysis of the desire unable to desire
& of the familiarized-with electron unable to analyze,
the alleged simplest common denominator of 'relationship,'
no way to break its geometrically-pretended longing
to provide every necessity available in the spectrum
of the spectrum
for the spectrum's every energy level innocent in need,
probably never to return to the wastes beyond when
it started traveling into the definitions of 'solitude' & 'deprivation'
actually proving itself as a kind of trustworthy shamanic daredevil,
the faithful friend lost track of,
now a multitudinous follower now the one followed,
now a primitive endowed creator lacking nothing
& everything

Dave Shortt is a longtime writer (from the USA) whose work has appeared over the years in numerous print & electronic literary-type venues, including The Ekphrastic Review. More of his poems can be found in Uut Poetry, Molly Bloom, Poetry Salzburg Review & Blackbox Manifold

Snow to Sleet then Night by Joshua Marie Wilkinson

so half our life is vague and stormy make-believe. –Glenway Wescott

Which would make the other half

what?

Fear of death, the snaky punishment of trying

to mask our desires?

That aversion named pleasure?

So much for lasting all night, inviting in

the spirit of the other.

What’s unkillable in us is perhaps

what’s distasteful in any neighbor.

Shortness of breath. The inability to reflect

mid conversation. Restless dis-

ease. Anxious attachments. Poor drink.

When I stop to look around it’s just a wet breeze.

Snow diminishing to sleet

to whatever slurry’s left of anything.

I want to stand up when I’m sitting. Sleep

when I’m running. Fall when I’m flat

on the ground. Through the rug to where?

Not death, of course.

Some other vacancy. Some other set of

impossibilities.

Joshua Marie Wilkinson wrote a book called Meadow Slasher (Black Ocean 2017). He lives in Seattle.

Cavalier by Shawn Anto

Shawn Anto is from Bakersfield, California. He’s originally from Kerala, India. He currently studies at Cal State Bakersfield looking to receive his B.A. in English & Theatre. He was last seen on stage in Dreamers: Aqui y Alla. He's currently working on his senior project where he will be directing scenes from the plays: “Gogh” by Mateo Lara, Disgraced by Ayad Akhtar & Porcelain by Chay Yew. His writing has been featured or are forthcoming in Orpheus, The Paragon Press, Susan/The Journal, AnElephantNever, Internet Void, Ink & Voices, Mojave Heart Review, and elsewhere.

Three Pieces by Irene Koronas

elias

opus 110 in a flat touch, kitsch’s ride

on ingres paper. praise putter rat

dispose in c minor sobriety

one bid narcosis. savor savior. need

cango forefinger. indoor

string allegretto. still sit still.

panoply balcon. good friday figs

passe defini aorist 

concern 2

crack glim’s feeb gull

diamet poses her ternal key

tune stimmuna’s instruert

the ut bitten room lies

crucifixion huddle absorbs

deskill to virtu smooth. stroll

kill. clique alters purp to ever

upwar. sweat fur. pow pow

aside the jitter drag div

trinsic in diagramatics

tri apex

sq gib

ft seg

yd insull

tsp idi

concern 3

imitation matt amuses a rip

open form is plash content.

gotten short. forgot burn

pissen coo. delibly or fix lame.

vermillion tep not quest wakes

defi blood let’s ally taste. ease org

verberation. about 21 spank

cobalt. the sphere lays one

two stratagems. dark

erebus has plenty of merika.

trum attribute, postilion.

hell the mediocre reem oath

hampers pulsations, each sharp c

nonstation and lay

The works “elias,” “concern 2” and “concern 3,” included in Silver Pinion, are from my manuscript holyrit, Volume IV of my Grammaton Series, a series which can be characterized as postlanguage, hyper-minimalist écriture, melding the aporias of a posthuman poesis with an orthodox spiritus. The results of this meld are the invention of a high minimalism manifested through units of measurement: the grammaton. As with a digital bricolage, no grammaton cleaves to a single narrative account but rather to an infinite array of variables, memed and burrowed from matrices comprised of gematria, the fibonacci code, hagiography and iconography, as well as syphoned from a trajectory of experimental literature and poetics from Dadaism to Uncreative Writing. My Grammaton Series is fashioned from a panerotism reconciling the disequilibrium encoded within the hyperlinks of a retromanic pleroma and a feminine clinamen. I relegate identity and gender to funerary antiques in a reliquary. Dexterity, agility, finesse and hilarity resurrect the zombies of confessionalism, so as to unleash stanzaic androids and gynoids, secreting glossolalia from postdata holy writ, creating a grand, new poesis for the 21st century.

Irene Koronas is the author of numerous collections of xperimental writing. Her individual collections include declivities (BlazeVOX, 2018), Volume III in her Grammaton Series, ninth iota (The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2018), Volume II in her Grammaton Series, Codify (Éditions du Cygne, 2017), Volume I in her Grammaton Series), Turtle Grass (Muddy River Books, 2014) and Emily Dickinson (Propaganda Press, 2010). She’s a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art & Design and is the Publisher and Managing Editor of X-Peri.