caffeine__helps's review
5.0
A fascinating collection of poetry and essays, some which were collected previously in publications by Apport Editions, Entropy, EVIDENCE, and Los Angeles Review of Books.
In his essay "The Contemporary Mind: A Pointless Rural Fragment", Will Alexander introduces the idea that millennia of human oppression, colonization, and religious and political dogma has resulted in a "suppressed evolutionary tension" in the minds of all people in our current global capitalist society that limits our individual and collective progress. Alexander argues that the influence of colonization and dogma renders the human brain as a "partially functioning fragment", and artistic endeavor, specifically poetic thought, is the only means to transcend the constraints of society and these new predetermined mental functions.
An intuitive intellectual himself, Alexander also discusses “outsider” ethic and intrepid methods of Adolf Wolfli and Henry Darger in “Wolfli/Darger: Contorted Equations”. Following the logic in “The Contemporary Mind: A Rural Fragment”, “Phosphenic Threadings” furthers Alexander’s idea that poetic thought surpasses our conventional thought and even our comprehension.
This is only a small taste of a mind-bending collection which shows that Alexander is the poet of philosophers and historians as well as surrealists and phenomenologists.
In his essay "The Contemporary Mind: A Pointless Rural Fragment", Will Alexander introduces the idea that millennia of human oppression, colonization, and religious and political dogma has resulted in a "suppressed evolutionary tension" in the minds of all people in our current global capitalist society that limits our individual and collective progress. Alexander argues that the influence of colonization and dogma renders the human brain as a "partially functioning fragment", and artistic endeavor, specifically poetic thought, is the only means to transcend the constraints of society and these new predetermined mental functions.
An intuitive intellectual himself, Alexander also discusses “outsider” ethic and intrepid methods of Adolf Wolfli and Henry Darger in “Wolfli/Darger: Contorted Equations”. Following the logic in “The Contemporary Mind: A Rural Fragment”, “Phosphenic Threadings” furthers Alexander’s idea that poetic thought surpasses our conventional thought and even our comprehension.
This is only a small taste of a mind-bending collection which shows that Alexander is the poet of philosophers and historians as well as surrealists and phenomenologists.
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