"FROM CELLULAR ANIMATION TO SOPHIE (IN PARIS)"- THE WORK OF WILL ALEXANDER & SOTERE TORREGIAN
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best of days and nights to you all,
the janitor
On the Art of Will Alexander
Explosive, cellular and with infolding synaptic whorl is the art of Will Alexander, it pulses
in time with a not-yet invented chronologic
What the viewer catches is just a sliver in the evolution Will sets in motion, or which sets
Will into motion. I don’t see the skeleton in his work because there isn’t one. Gossamer
bone if anything. Whole worlds come to roost in his drawings. They bring to us flinted
glimmer and nest-worthy cosmologies
Kites and gyres abound. Lures glint to bring in radiation from other eyes. The spiny and
swaying chandeliers of intergalactic static percolating at the furthest edges of one’s
ability to perceive the entirety, simultaneously gaseous and fibrous, filled with the salts
of otherworlds
I’ve been in the presence of Will’s drawings and the telepathic fuzz that is emitted from
each one silently ignites in me a language I never knew I could comprehend. Will’s work
avoids dominant art grammars with ease, evokes the play of the egg and an unabashed
enthusiasm for visual lemuriforms, that alien glossolalia that spills out from under his
hand into a swirl that commands abandon
–Brian Lucas
(thanks to Duration Press)
On Cellular Animation
Synonymous
with a carriage as moonlit ignition
as wasp or vapour
that electrifies the cosmos
with true interior functioning
being balance as true magnetic psycho-biology as draft
Circumstantial Tremor
As continent made covenant
with its own dissembling as wrath has made its skies starve
its momentarily crumble
being disadvantage of itself
its circumstantial tremor
sans equational habitat
As darkened veering
stumbling upon my own error
at my nerves end
I can only breathe mantras
& dwell as internal burning within
Every space of every hour not as transmuted blizzard into space or empty air but as ice
as mathematical symbol
not as living quotient
but as dazed nutrient gone awry
Fragment: Blaze as Unknowable Drift
Blaze as unknowable drift
as mathematical drift that blazes with ciphers I’ve listened to moons eclectically rise
to conundrums blaze & ascend
not as molecules
or distributed torrents
but as vibrational mazes
as curious oneiric cartography
Inner Palpability
Implied inner palpability as transpersonal dictation all works composed as a musical ark
as if rowing in an isthmus of lightning
the threat through rising vapour currents hissing with dissolution
this being none other than internal cartography
ghostly cipher as interiority by number
again ghostly flares & ciphers as if the arc from lunar suns had risen
therefore suns appearing above suns
ignited via the blue fragmentation that is grace
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The Art of Sotere' Torregian
Preface, or My Last Will and Testament?
There are many voices as I write. I find myself a stranger amongst them. In a recent Star Trek rerun Captain Jean Luc Picard of the Starship Enterprise finds himself transported in
time back to the year 1941. I found myself recognizing those streets—the cityscape, the automobiles, the women's clothes, the bustle of the city when I was born in my first natal birth.
My second birth, which occurred at age 17, was by way of French Surrealism. Long before then poems had issued from me but they could find no real habitation, yet they did so when I
was embraced, or should say was enveloped, by SURREALISM and by the words of the Manifestos of André Breton and his fellow friends and poets, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, as well as Max Jacob's Le Cornet à dés, Guillaume Apollinaire's inaugural surrealist drama Les Mamelles de Tirésias, and eventually the Négri- tude Movement of Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, which summoned my ancestors' métis Africanité in my blood.
That became intermingled with my Mediterranean origins, there- after displaced by immigration to Newark, New Jersey, as my grandparents emigrated to America from the island of Sicily. As I grew up I have likened it to what I imagine it is like growing up in the xenophobic atmosphere of Chinatown in San Francisco, with its own customs, feasts and foreign speech, and with no real sense of the outside world of White America. I then felt as I do now as ever an immigrant, displaced, without a homeland.
I came to despise my surroundings—the Anglo world whereupon I had involuntarily been deposited and displaced. In school I had been forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and to sing the discordant notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the words for which I could never understand and which I mispronounced, unbeknownst to those kids, singing away, around me. As a student I was a daydreamer, who transported himself, as in Keats' poem “Sleep and Poetry,” to another world outside the windows of the schoolroom, which I eventually discovered to be SURREALITY.
There, beyond any ethnicity, or internecine of countries, of “God, King, and Country” mouthed by political bigots, I, having graduated from prison (school), at the age of 19, to the utter disappointment of my relatives (but with the empathy of my mother), dared to declare myself a poet as my “profession,” emerging out of obscurity to give my public debut, the first reading of my poems, in 1963—the pivotal year (age 22)—at the Café Le Metro coffeehouse, New York City, amidst the warmth and friendship of such poet pals as Ted Berrigan, Joe Ceravolo, Ted Joans and John Ashbery into the intervening years of the late Sixties.
Thence, a flurry of books and unpublished manuscripts followed, which to my amazement, I authored by my own hand. How could that be, I asked? But it is. I still ask it to this day.
Still, I consider myself, as Paul Valéry declared of himself “un amateur de poesie.”This is to be understood not as in the English meanings as an amateur but in the French as a lover of poetry.
Hence, many voices have merged or emerged in these, what I like to call, automatiques, with the earliest to the latest gathered here. Perhaps, as days go by, they may constitute my Last Will and Testament to my audience of readers.
And I will travel as a stranger amongt these many voices of mine, which are gathered here under a name of one almost unbeknownst to me—SOTÈRE TORREGIAN, who remains on the planet without visa.
I am I, now 500 years old.
My future bride will find me mummified in this book.
S.T.
FOR SOPHIE (IN PARIS) AT THE APPROACH OF FALL
Mais chante sur mon absence tes yeux de brise alizés, et l'Absente soit présence (“But let your eyes of trade-
wind breeze sing upon my absence, and may the Absent Woman return”) —L.S. Senghor, Élégie des alizés
My fingers in idleness make the sound of drumming a horse's hooves in a gallop
then halting (perhaps rearing itself
at an inn its phantom horse's head
become a road-sign)
all re-enacted on the hard cover of a book
just picked up this morning as I loll waiting to rise from my bed
Far away I hear the TV announcer's prattle
In a moment I note the hands of
the clock have already moved into another hemisphere
Here I long for the fragrance of your hair
perhaps with its scent of spikenard with which maidens were anointed before entering the labyrinth of the Minotaur
12th September,2005
FOR THE PAINTER TARUN BEDI, ROME, ITALY
A child has dropped a gold star on the path
As I steal out the door
to post some last minute letters
at dusk
my neighbors won't notice my shoes coming apart
The Tigris and Euphrates still flow on (tinged with blood)
O homindae! Auguri! Ardi!
My shadow now makes its hajj
to Freud's consultation room in Vienna its walls covered with oriental carpets a stream one must wade surrounds the patient's couch
“A plume of words” (Anne Waldman)
O meadows and thickets of an embrace remembered disappeared at the bus-shelter Upon my return
I wander from one end of my room to the other
in the coquille* of a beggar rather than a shepherd
The child's gold star glimmers still on the wet pavement trodden by passersby
*coquille, Fr., shell
October, 2009
VANNA'S IRIDESCENT YELLOW DRESS
for Vanna White
Vanna's iridescent yellow dress
this evening
its yellow ochre invades my silence
I greet it in but a moment's viewing as a man returning
from journeying the Gobi as a solitary
And as a solitary
I remain holding my pen in hand
as if it were a sorcerer's wand
and with a wave her dress
evermore iridescent
leaves its colour to pervade my world as she herself appears and disappears
In the same manner as Monet
held his brush at Giverny
to capture and transpose the lily pads there in the pond onto a canvas
And as sleep comes to herald its entry the room is lit with gamboge and ochre
As I lie here pondering what it was Archimedes was drawing in the sand
in his last moments before all went dark
Here my sultanate is established myself become its chambered nautilus
As I speak as interloper
I see the effluvia of my voice is of a xanthic hue
The water I pour from the decanter streams the yellow ochre of her dress
The colour of the room
has changed to an iridescent yellow
And you
who have come upon this testimony observe the air about you now transposed to the same yellow of a vibrant flower
4th April, 2013
DANS DE ROUTE SANS BUT
for Nanos Valaoritis
On my bed is the sail of Odysseus I smell
the brine of the Aegean as I wake I admit I am
very bad at playing checkers or games in general
It's always been that way I don't expect it to change I have difficulty in recalling the names of the planets and/or their respective symbols, e.g., the♄ for Saturn
An opportunity to listen in the Silence...
Of islands I think of Zakynthos and of the isle
of Gorée off Senegal where slaves were imprisoned awaiting their journey of “the Atlantic Passage” to the New World
A single blonde hair on my arm—the rest of my hairs bespeak my métissage* something she could never quite
comprehend
—As to the word “home” that evokes my dépaysment its nearest equivalent perhaps being music (which Corelli would recognize as opposed to the denizens of my own era)
Amongst other things which I “surprise” myself with it is the continuity
of “Love...that waits in the shadow of every word”
April, 2013
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