On Fractal Song

STATEMENT ON FRACTAL SONG

October 27, 2016

I've been writing for many years, but putting 37 poems into a book is a new adventure.

FRACTAL SONG is a new adventure.

Published on October 1, 2016, the book will be launched on Thursday, November 3, from

6:00 to 7:30 p.m. at the New Orleans Museum of Music and Cultural Arts/Crescent City Books,

124 Baronne Street.

FRACTAL SONG was published by Joe Phillips of Black Widow Press in Boston.  It emerged from my friendships with other poets and writers ----

Hank Lazer (Tuscaloosa, Alabama) urged me to construct the book.

Dave Brinks (New Orleans, Louisiana) read the manuscript and told Joe Phillips to publish it.

Lenard D. Moore (Raleigh, North Carolina) made some excellent suggestions about the arrangement of poems.

Kalamu ya Salaam (New Orleans, Louisiana) was generous and brotherly in writing the "Postscript" for the book.

I think of the book as a Southern product, my collaboration with other writers.  FRACTAL SONG is available for $15.00 from Amazon.com and Barnes& Noble.com.

I hope the book will provoke readers to agree that Black Lives and Black Minds matter equally, or, as I  proclaimed in "Race War(p)"

RACE WAR(P)

The scream, a fragile hologram,

twirls the hope of art, dreams

to affirm its action, to disperse

tsunamis of discontent.

Color thunders.  Fury emits funk.

Enough is quite enough

but less than a sentence parsed

in a nation  of virgin vices.

Bogus trumps, aquatinted tropes

or alabaster promises prevail.

I was more specific about lives and minds in "(Just)(Ice)

(Just)(Ice)

Televise.

Fear-tinted  faces flow

along the flute of glass,

depart and return

with subtle hue and cry

in the red voicing

a spider would web your mind:

prisons rise and fall.

Trapped in a trumpet

an idea tries to flee

a monotone of agency,

a failure born when

in the red voicing

a bullet would blow your mind:

matters fall and rise

behind a mirror of class

star and bar whisper

a lie birthed again

on flag-squared mappings

in the red voicing

a demon could eat your mind:

a piece of air survives.

Tell. Advise.

When people read FRACTAL SONG, I want them to think about minds, lives, and words.