The reality is that some of the greatest contemporary poets are published in obscure limited editions that attain little visibility in mainstream culture. Perhaps this was always the way but it feels more jarring now when the makings of our already flawed worlds are being dismantled ruthlessly around us.
In his final book, Our Death (2019), the English poet Sean Bonney wrote about this process with an almost prescient sense of his own death which came just a few months after publication. The book, though, is not entirely doom laden or defeatist. He writes, for instance:
You are not absolutely defenceless. For the torch of the incendiary, which has been known to show murderers and tyrants the danger line, beyond which they may not venture with impunity, cannot be wrested from you.1
Still, in the final lines of a section entitled ‘From Deep Darkness’ he does compose a form of last will and testament:
My five senses I leave to the invisible moons of Pluto, like a cluster of burst and eclipsed stars, like the city’s swifts, flickering in and out of calendrical time, where coffee cups and typewriters and habits and all the rest become a violent disk of knots and tumors trapped somewhere far outside of the known world, because obviously after five days without sleep your heart gets into some fairly interesting unknowable rhythms and your connections with the earth and its five senses become increasingly tenuous and I think at this point of Will Alexander’s essay ‘A Note on the Ghost Dimension’, I don’t know if you’ve read it, he writes in it somewhere about the missing five days of the Mayan calendar, which apparently is a time when monsters and poisons will appear, and I don’t know much about the Mayan calendar, but after five days without sleep I know a lot about ghosts and monsters and poisons, and a lot about how the missing five days could be taken to mean the fate of the five senses themselves, and how those missing five senses have been kidnapped and held for no ransom on some irrelevant island deep within the center of some capitalist astrological system. My tiny racist island I leave to the monsters and poisons.2
And Our Death remains a tough book to track down. Just as the essay he mentions above by the poet Will Alexander—‘A Note on the Ghost Dimension’—can be found, with some difficulty, in a 2012 collection of his essays and prose, Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat. The ‘Note’ is couched within a futuristic vision falling in the long wake of September 11, 2001:
The void exists in the illusive dunes of Afghanistan. These upper relics of ghosts charged with the most ferocious diplopia. The mind of the American soldier as if eight months out on Mars, void of provincial guidance, his god refusing to appear, each day and night a poisonous cinnabar smoke. Waking and sleeping amidst the language of the asteroids.3
Alexander imagines the ever-recurring fall of an empire in which escape only resides in breaking the cycle of self-immolation:
Now, the twin towers and their ongoing aftermath, with the burning glass, and bodies falling through the air to secular burial grounds of dread. But by adherence to unilateral attack America opens itself up to the powers of the fumes of retaliatory ghosts. If all the orchards go astray and burn what will rescue us from Andromeda? If the oceans turn a green Venusian liquid what will survive? Statistics no longer thrive. Popular astrology is misleading. Yet the five empty days on the calendar of the Maya persist in my vision. Days when monsters appeared, when nights reversed and people hovered in a poisonous neutrality. Let’s say it like this. Our bodies are invisible documents because our language continues tracing those other stellar locales where we invisibly glide to other galactic possibilities far beyond the suicidal repartee which the American tenor so fitfully engages. In twenty billion years a new sun will be forming, with green light burning beyond human debate. Only a vatic recitation can overcome rehearsals for destruction.4