I was thinking of d alexander the other day & decided to see what of the man’s poetry I could track down. Through Abebooks.com, I managed to pick up three volumes, all published in quick succession in the mid-1960s:

 

• Not a Word, published by Oyez Books in 1966
• Mules Balk, published by Robert Kelly’s press, Matter, in 1967
• Terms of Articulation, published by Clayton Eshleman’s press, Caterpiller (sic), also in 1967

All three are chapbooks, saddle-stapled, without pagination. Not a Word, which has more than 50 pages of text, is by far the largest & most professionally published. Mules Balk is very clean in its design, but published via mimeograph save for the cover. Everything on the cover of Terms of Articulation, in contrast, appears to have been done by hand – unsteady hand at that – in crayon or magic marker, multilithed in 300 copies & available, the back colophon notes, through the Asphodel Bookshop in Cleveland or the Phoenix on Cornelia Street in New York City.

 

Typically for that era, d’s name was presented in three different ways in these books. Oyez followed the standard capitalization & put a period after his first name. Matter went with all lower case & no period – d, after all, was his full first name. Caterpiller kept the lower case, but punctuated the name.

 

These are, so far as I know, the only books alexander ever published. He edited a little magazine for awhile, Odda Talla¹, the title also of the longest poem – three pages – in Mules Balk. It was because of the magazine that I first met d, having been directed there I think by Clayton. I sent him some work & got back a note suggesting that maybe he wasn’t doing any more issues for awhile. Then I sent him a note to tell him that I was thinking of a doing a publication myself, being at that point utterly clueless as to what that might entail.

 

Which is the point at which d alexander showed up at my apartment door one day in Berkeley, carrying with him his address book or rolodex. Paul Blackburn, he explained, had done this for him when he was first thinking of starting a magazine, and it was something he thought should be passed on. Were there any addresses of poets that I wanted? Which was how I first got in touch with Jerome Rothenberg & Armand Schwerner.

 

I never knew the man well – he was eight years older, working as a software programmer at Stanford as I recall. And since I didn’t drive, the one time I ever was at his house near La Honda occurred when d hosted an afternoon reading there for Daphne Marlatt & I was able to hitch a ride over with Ken Irby & David Bromige. The last time I saw him was at Vesuvio’s the somewhat-less-than-swank bar immediately down the street from City Lights Books in San Francisco. He was there with some of his co-workers, who seemed unaware that they might have found some of his poetry at the bookstore next door.

 

Then I’d heard he’d passed away. When exactly I’m not sure – there are two poems of his in the 1971 Caterpillar² Anthology, taken from the fourth issue of that publication. But there’s no sign of him in George Quasha’s Active Anthology in 1974, in some ways the last pure blast of Projective Verse. By the time Caterpillar morphed into Sulfur at the end of the decade, the poetry scene had changed.

 

alexander was a first rate practitioner of the projective poem, with all of its twitches – variable spacing, Poundian abbreviations (wd for would, etc.), tight linebreaks, occasional instances of creative punctuation (•) floating in the middle of a line. A lot of the poems in all three books are love lyrics, poems in celebration of womanhood, a mode that was quite popular in the wake of Robert Creeley’s first books, but which seems to have receded considerably since then, with the notable exception of women’s writing, where it means something different.

 

At its best, alexander’s poetry is sharply tuned to its environment, a marvel of economy. Here is an untitled poem from Mules Balk:

 

for the

sign

wch is

 

to

be associated

w/ yr name

 

is yr

fingers

presst

 

against

my

face

 

where

name

is

 

character

written on,

into,

 

script

 

for a

thing done

 

or what will be

done

for us

 

I read these three books almost as I might new fragments from Sappho, archaeological shards from a time & culture that surely have fled. But there were wonders in that city – alexander is not the only such example, tho he may be one of the best – and it’s a shame that they seem so close to disappearing altogether.

 

 

¹ Two words that, according to Google, appear nowhere in succession on the internet, at least until now.

 

² Which Clayton was now spelling conventionally.