Elaine Speller

Explode: Epic Poetry Elaine Speller

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.