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ARC OF LIGHT, DARK MATTER

by Charles Alexander

In designing a circle of stones about a pool for a zen garden, one would take a single rock and move it ever so slightly out of alignment, knowing that the mind's eye would then have to respond, participating in the creation of circularity itself, a far more powerful, vivid effect. Gertrude Stein employed this same gestalt principle of the absent subject in her portraits and in Tender Buttons, enabling language and meaning to suddenly blossom like the unfolding of a rose. Now Charles Alexander pushes the envelope of what is possible in writing even further, to the ends of the universe. And beyond. What begins in the eye as a paragraph becomes in the ear a line, 53 of them in fact, one line poems rich with news, life, war, sex, parenting, the texts at hand, the spicing of mulled thought, humor, bright southwestern colors, and an ear to die for. The comma, that pointer, the least understood of all our elements of punctuation, shapes, modulates, paces "a phrasal rhythm denying the sentence," leading the reader onward, inward, "winged-static, designed to repsond abundantly, falling forward into technology writing a program or batch of phrases to imagine a universe where bent light is generosity and peace with no desired for stasis..." This is the most sensuous, intelligent, rewarding writing I've read in ages.
- Ron Silliman