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.
