Charles Alexander : Pushing Water

"'[T]hrough the tunnel pushing water': the first appearance of this image in Charles Alexander's serial poem arises as if in a dream, and that sense of dream persists throughout this long and complex work ('the dream pushes up from under the water'). Yet, 'pushing water' also becomes a metaphor of body, of breath, of heartbeat, blood and brain, of consciousness itself, time and history, rendered in diverse poetic forms. Alexander embraces language and the bodies of work that comprise the touchstones of English poetry from the 'word hoard' of the Anglo-Saxons through Shakespeare and Greville, Dickinson, and Williams, Olson and Creeley. Without having done an actual word count, 'love' and 'syllable' (the beat or rhythm of the word) seem to me to be the most frequently used in this poem of love, language, and love of language."

— Beverly Dahlen

Charles Alexander is a poet, an artist, and a book publisher. His collections of poetry include Hopeful Buildings (1990), Pushing Water (1998), Four Ninety Eight to Seven (1997), Etudes: D& D (1997), near or random acts (2004), and Certain Slants (2007). Pushing Water collected Alexander’s ongoing serial poem; in the words of Patrick James Dunagan, the collection “joins the likes of Louis Zukofsky’s A or Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day as a practiced endeavor towards meeting the daily business of living with writing: a testament to the abiding determination to have the daily practice of writing and reading serve as a guiding force through life.” Alexander is also the author of numerous chapbooks, including Some Sentences Look for Some Periods (2013).
 
Trained in bookmaking and letterpress, Alexander is the founder and director of Chax Press. He has taught at Naropa University and the University of Arizona. He lives in Tucson with the painter Cynthia Miller.

PAPERBACK. 5.75x10 inches. 222 pages. 2011.