Explode
Epic Poetry
by
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If I could write language that borders on ramification Nineteen Seventeen race riot in Houston between soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry and white townees Two blacks and Eleven whites dead Martial Law Declared Ten Thousand Black people marched down Fifth Avenue Thirty-Six blacks swung from trees Eighteen Twenty Two House Negro betrays Denmark Vesey Eighteen Thirty Nine Joseph Cinquez killed a captain and took over the Amistad Rebels captured off Long Island on August Twenty Sixth Slave revolt on the Creole in Eighteen Forty One sailed to the Bahamas home free Harriet Tubman Escaped death nineteen times for three hundred slaves Eighteen Forty Nine President Lincoln drafts the Emancipation Proclamation and submits to his cabinet in Eighteen Sixty Two Shot in Ford’s Theater in Eighteen Sixty Five Fisk in Mississippi Morehouse in Georgia Howard University in DC W.E.B. Dubois born in Massachusetts Sixteen blacks lynched in Tennessee in Eighteen Seventy Four Eighty-Nine blacks hung in Nineteen Hundred and Eight Sixty-Nine in Nineteen Hundred and Nine Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas in Nineteen Forty Southern University in Texas Negro Veterans lost their eyes said the NAACP grim in Nineteen Forty Seven Nineteen Twenty Five Malcolm X born in Nebraska Louis Armstrong recorded the first of Hot Five and Hot Seven come Jazz Nineteen Forty Eight Rosa Ingram and her babies condemned to death for the murder of a white Georgian said it was self-defense Nineteen Fifty Five Black people walk rather than ride buses in Montgomery Charlie Parker’s gone Dogs Double shifts Billy Clubs, blow-torches Mobile classrooms, whips and burned churches tear gas and rope cattle prods, bullets, chains…. Prison AIDS and dope If I could write a poem with miles language it would be….a poem called Trumpet Resistance
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About the Book
Postmodern fiction is the quintessential question -- elusive as the answer for the meaning of life or the 21st Century response to Langston Hughes’ rhetorical question, “What happens to a dream deferred… does it fester and sore…or explode?” The found art in Explode are poesy movements: Dada, (“Contrapposto poets succumbing to peaches… Dogs suspended like meat in Seoul.”) The imagery is an installation of words in broad brushstrokes, (“White horses straddled the hull, and Ishmir smiled at me, when a glass of tea, shifted on his tray.”) Sounds like Jazz, (“See Sisyphus scorn at amber headlights in Paris dew… skin seeking skin and birds seeking the flutter-of-feathers.”) Looks like Impressionism, (“This day of rest I worship Santa Barbara and the celestial trip I straddle…To be able to dry my canvassed toes with the heat of Golden Pecan… And the fervent chill of observation.”) Expressionism, (“On the Orange Line… I saw dog paws tattooed on her thigh and red daisies on her boots… My prism came from within and landed on my skin.”) Realism, (“Chronos’ eating children again, consuming, regurgitating, the piss Ellison smelled in the hallway, the blood he saw at the top of the stairs,”) and Surrealism, (“In random chimera conceits I think… of blue nights and black mornings… the full moon in the white Winter sky, with pink Cirrus lips, demons and febrile mouths, Rimbaud, and blackbirds in epic simile, Squirrels that wait for green lights.”) Explode is art responding to poetry and poetry responding to art in esoteric beginnings and sublime endings. Imagine, Octavio Paz’s elucidation of modern art, “... a frankly truthful work, opening out like a fan.” Explode is practical beauty – necessary Word.
About the Author
Author E. Maria Shelton Speller, spent the early part of her career in the United States Air Force; BFA with honors from Northeastern University is a member of ZICA Creative Arts and Literary Guild and Boston’s own Zone Poets. Published by Arula Records, “Spoken Live at the Lizard Lounge!” Featured reader at the Lizard Lounge, the Cantab, and Squawk Coffeehouse,