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If it is an oddly futuristic arcana that Will Alexander invokes in his poetry and prose,
it is at the same time the most familiar form of defamiliarization. Looking into the
drawings that often accompany his texts, those scorings of his "Mime Tornadoes"
and "Psychotropic Squalls," often produces the same sort of vertigo felt when looking
into deepest space through the most advanced of telescopic technologies. Our sense
of being at the edge of the new is tempered by our knowledge that the light reaching
us images ancient events. Alexander's science is a fiction that presents us with ancient
evenings reflected "in a mirror of scratch paper sonnets" (Stratospheric 33). His is a
future anterior that comes to us out of a tradition of African-American re-imagining. Sun
Ra devoted a lifetime to telling us of "other planes of there," "other worlds they have
not told you of," worlds that seemed placed simultaneously in ancient Egypt and deep in
the future. The Art Ensemble of Chicago has built a career around their motto, "Great Black
Music, Ancient to the Future." Amiri Baraka's album of poetry and music It's Nation Time
billed itself as "Afrikan Visionary Music" and carried cover art in which the ancient inscriptions
of black Africa gave onto a futurist dawning of a new day past the pyramids. Each of
these artists has contributed to a history of pan-African modernity, an internationalist,
African-inflected surrealism that leads directly to Will Alexander's front door.