Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

Celebrating National Poetry Month 2025

4/6/2025

(2025 National Poetry Month poster featuring a quote by poet Naomi Shihab Nye and artwork by Christy Mandin)

A recent article on the poetry of Marc Thomas, the author of Talking to the Machines and Oher Poems, made me think about why, and how much, I have always enjoyed celebrating National Poetry Month. As with Thomas’s work, which I first became aware of during a Local Author Day event in Savannah, Georgia (USA), it has largely been about the discovery of what different poets bring to their individual applications of literary craftsmanship.

A lot of people cheered and applauded when the news broke in 1996 that the Academy of American Poets was launching observations of the inaugural National Poetry Month (NPM) annual celebrations. The Academy encouraged individual writers and organizations everywhere to participate in ways that suited them best. Creatives in my hometown responded to the call by putting on events where many would expect to find them: like libraries, schools, bookstores, and coffee shops. Others hosted happenings at unexpected locations: like nightclubs, churches, bars, parks, and river-front walkways.

As one of the organizers of such events, I was happy to help make spoken-word presentations by both local and national talents, as well as literary panel discussions, accessible to members of diverse communities. In addition, my position as an editor for the Savannah Literary Journal allowed me to publish works by such future city and state poet laureates as: Darryl Lorenzo Wellington of Sante Fe, New Mexico; and, Anis Mojgani in Oregon. Possibly more thrilling than anything else was occasionally witnessing an audience member “catch fire” for the first time and begin composing their own lines at one event, then reciting them at the next.

An Alignment of Voices

It is well known that poetry, as many understand it today, had its beginnings long before written expressions of it. Common belief proposes it developed during prehistoric times as an extension of, or variation on, storytelling. My own theory is that poetry initially evolved out of instinctive spontaneous prayers uttered as appeals to nature or to unknown, but suspected, higher powers. Viewed through such an intuitive transcendent lens, it was amazing to observe how different neophytes, centuries later, made their personal connections to this ancient practice.

There came, year after year, scholars who adapted their long-restrained literary passions to such academic formulations as sonnets, odes, and villanelles (a favorite among friends at the Poetry Society of Georgia) with respectful nods to Japanese haiku (with which I’ve experimented for a series of angel poems published in The River of Winged Dreams). Numerous cultural heritage enthusiasts aligned their voices with the French surrealists, Spanish ballads or romancero, traditional African praise poems, or the jazz- and blues-influenced writings published during the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement.

(Aberjhani quote graphic from “Beyond Literacy Link A dedicated space to ponder, reflect, and converse about life, literacy, and learning.”)

Particularly notable was the fact that members of an entire generation––during those late 1990s days as annual observations NPM expanded––took their poetic cues from slamfests, spoken word open mics, and the fluidity of Hip-Hop lyrics often composed in a heated flow of spontaneity. For a lot of such poets, that meant generally foregoing textbooks and, instead, memorizing recordings and recitals. At the time, I was a bookseller, and was as amazed as I was amused when dictionaries of rhymes began to outsell sonnets by Shakespeare or collected poems by Maya Angelou.

The AD Community Experience

Just as I took immense pleasure in participating in different forms of NPM during its earliest days, I experience a similar kind of joy upon joining the AuthorsDen community years later (just after completing Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance with Sandra L. West in 2003). The AD members with whom I connected were so faithful to their relationships with poetry and so generous when it came to mutual supportiveness that they often inspired both the poet and the essayist in me to write about them. These are a few examples:

• VISIONS OF THE POETS, Part 1: Andre Emmanuel Bendavi ben-YEHU
• Visions of the Poets, Part 2: The Hanging Man Dreams.
• Visions of the Poets, 3-A: Journey Through Universes Beyond the Visible

My background as a journalist and encyclopedist made writing the above somewhat automatic, but I became speechless when various members presented their assessments of my work in poetry or essays by them.

Coming Full Circle

All of this brings me back, full circle if you will, to Marc Thomas’s Talking to the Machines and what the first section of the book says about humanity’s current uneasy relationship with generative artificial intelligence. The satisfaction which some take in being able to prompt generative AI to construct lines of text which mimic human composition is easily understood. Like current rapid-fire AI developments in general, it is innovative, exciting (even mesmerizing), and provides a kind of service useful for supporting different endeavors. Despite its documented threat to the relevance of human-generated works. That such poems impressively duplicate academic formulations well enough cannot be denied because, ironically enough, the formulaic nature of some poetry makes doing so, arguably, easy for digital programs.

The experience, nevertheless, of prompting software to produce a composition is very different from the experience of deeply contemplating a love affair, wrestling with the world’s injustices, appreciating the wonders of nature, or intentionally confronting painful truths, and transcribing those meditations into written or spoken verse. The soulful depths of the stories behind how certain poems emerge out of lived realities is a part of that mysterious essence which has defied scientific explanations for centuries and continues, even now, to confirm what it means to be an authentically creative artist.

Celebrating National Poetry Month. Quote by Aberjhani.

None of this is meant to take anything away from AI’s ability to enhance productivity in a variety of professional situations—or for that matter to improve the quality of human life overall. In my own flesh-blood-and-spirit-generated human life, AI (along with human coaches) has helped me create objective literary criticisms, which I have edited for accuracy and clarity, to post in my AI Literary Chat Salon. I have also used it as a tool in the production, or editing, of some original concept art creations. And yes, the increased efficiency is appreciated.

What it cannot do for me is replace the psychic and spiritual infrastructures that give meaning to words like community, personal growth, and intimacy. What none of us should prompt AI to do, I would propose, is delete the connections and practices that go beyond providing meanings to endowing what we call existence itself with soul-infused value, and enriching it with an innate kind of poetry worth celebrating in small or big ways every day of the year. That includes this one.

Aberjhani
National Poetry Month 2025

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Author Octavia E. Butler & The Fire This Time

1/22/2025

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Introduction

Long lauded for her masterful blend of science fiction and realistic social observations, author Octavia E. Butler’s name over the past decade has grown to command greater and greater attention as a highly-significant American master of literary innovation. That conviction has intensified with the tragic fires which decimated communities in southern California during the first half of January 2025 and left survivors on edge as they waited to see what a years-long drought, and the legendary Santa Ana winds, would deliver in the second half.

The historic tragedy, along with the return of Donald Trump to the U.S. presidency, led many posting on social media to bestow the word “prophetic” upon Butler’s classic 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, due to the author’s seemingly prescient allusion to them. Butler herself famously coined the term histofuturism , making her a histofuturist, to describe her method of researching and analyzing past societal trends to gain understanding of problematic present-day conditions and devise strategies for correcting such dangerous imbalances.

The cautionary implications of Butler’s work were evident enough 15 years ago that she was one of 5 Notable Women of the Past and Present featured in my special Black History Month and Women’s History Month article series published on AXS’s former Examiner platform in 2010. It should be noted that Butler’s novel did not become a New York Times bestseller until 2020. For the first time since the Examiner platform folded, the tribute article to Butler is presented (with minor edits) in full along with the review of Parable of the Sower then included. [Although fire caused extensive damage in Los Angeles County’s Eaton community within Altadena , where Butler is buried, her grave-site reportedly sustained minimal damage.]

A Grand Dame of Sci-Fi

Octavia Estelle Butler achieved the unprecedented feat of winning three major science fiction awards––the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus Awards, all in 1985––before going on in 1995 to also win the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. This achievement, in addition to a number of other honors, established Butler as a “grand dame” of science fiction. It also placed her within the genre on a level comparable to that of Toni Morrison or Alice Walker within mainstream literary fiction.

The daughter of Laurice and Octavia M. (Guy) Butler, the author was born June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California [where approximately 8,000 structures have been destroyed by fire in January 2025]. After attending Pasadena City College, California State University in Los Angeles, and the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop, she went on to launch her literary career in 1976 with the publication of the novel Patternmaster. Over the three decades that followed, until her death February 24, 2006, she would publish almost a dozen more novels including Kindred and Parable of the Talents; and the short fiction collection, Bloodchild and Other Stories.

Innovative Literary Vision

Butler’s work explores and expands the basic language of science fiction. In particular, she utilizes an interest in such subjects as psionic abilities, genetic engineering, different forms of power, and advanced alien intelligence to explore more earthbound themes of racial and sexual awareness. The various categories into which human beings place each other might be seen through Butler’s literary glasses as hierarchies that do more harm than good by encouraging and sustaining degrading forms of dominance rather than mutual respect or tolerance. In an essay for NPR titled U.N. Racism Conference, she observed the following:

“Back during the early 1960s there was a United Nations television commercial, the audio portion of which went something like this: ‘Ignorance, fear, disease, hunger, suspicion, hatred, war.’ That was it, although I would have added, ‘greed’ and ‘vengeance’ to the list. All or any of these can be the catalyst that turns hierarchical thinking into hierarchical behavior. Amid all this, does tolerance have a chance?

“Only if we want it to. Only when we want it to. Tolerance, like any aspect of peace, is forever a work in progress, never completed, and, if we're as intelligent as we like to think we are, never abandoned.”

The author was particularly noted for her creation of unique yet believable female characters and her accomplishments in this area paved the way for such contemporary Black women speculative fiction writers as Tananarive Due and Nalo Hopkinson.

Speaking to Los Angeles Times reporter Jocelyn Y. Stewart, Tananarive Due stated, "In black speculative fiction, we are a tiny family and Octavia Butler was our matriarch.”

Parable of the Sower

precisely as many say it is doing in 2025Within the first dozen pages of Parable of the Sower, readers encounter a typical family armed with guns on their way to church, a headless corpse, a naked homeless woman, a community walled in by terror, and a young woman dreaming of stars.

The dreamer is 16-year-old Lauren Oya Olamina, the would-be-sower and teller of the parable. The place is California. The time 2024-2027 A.D. And nothing in America is how it used to be. The world to come, as Butler presents it in this novel, is one ruled by the more brutal forms of anarchy [with the threat of autocracy steadily increasing, precisely as many say it is doing in 2025].

(Original photograph of Octavia E. Butler by Cheung Ching-Ming. Edit with Butler quote by Bright Skylark LP)

Everyday life becomes an actual war between the “haves” and “have-nots” battling over each other’s few pitiful possessions. Children are stolen into slavery; women are raped at will. Dogs roam the land as wild killers. Policemen are barely distinguishable from criminals, and drug-crazed maniacs run around setting fires for the high of their lives.

Such is the world in which Lauren finds herself as she comes painfully of age. Black, bold, and brilliant, she has the misfortune of having been born with “hyperempathy.” This hyperempathy “is what the doctors call an ‘organic delusional syndrome’… I get a lot of grief that doesn’t belong to me, and that isn’t real. But it hurts.”

The syndrome is one that literally puts flesh on the spiritual equation that hurting another is equal to hurting oneself. The disadvantages of her condition are magnified that much more when she is constantly forced into gunfights to save her own or someone else’s life. For example: “I knew at once that I’d hit him. He didn’t fall, but I felt his pain… Then he toppled, and I collapsed with him.”

Described as a “sharer,” Lauren deals with her condition and her world by immersing herself in the composition of “Earthseed.” At first, “Earthseed” is nothing more than a kind of juvenile poetry that aids her understanding of life in general. She later decides it is nothing less than a revelation of universal truth regarding the permanent nature of God as on-going change:

“Any change may bear seeds of benefit./ See them out./ Any change may bear seeds of harm./ Beware./ God is infinitely malleable./ God is change.”

For Lauren, serious change comes at the age of eighteen when marauders kill her family along with numerous others and burn down their neighborhood. She is forced to team up with two neighbors she has never really liked. They set out somewhat vaguely for possibly Oregon, Washington State, Alaska, or Canada. As they travel, like Dorothy and company on their way to see the Wizard of Oz, they are joined by others searching for the magic of sanity. Ex-slaves, former prostitutes, a once-wealthy doctor, and orphaned children all eventually find their way into the caravan, all courageously led by Lauren.

Despite constant violence, hunger, and the threat of firestorms sweeping across the land, they maintain their vows to protect each other and even find love among their numbers. Nearly at the bottom of hell, Butler’s characters levitate naturally toward a sense of family in order to survive and flourish. Racially, socially, and temperamentally mixed, they manage to achieve a strained but functional unity. Without realizing it, Lauren evolves into a kind of warrior prophet, a futuristic Harriet Tubman leading her rainbow coalition of survivors beyond the reach of Armageddon.

From the quotes at the beginning of each chapter, readers know that Lauren’s ideas and teachings inevitably become “Earthseed: The Books of the Living.” The book is clearly a manual for surviving social, political, and personal chaos. Lauren leaves little doubt as to where she stands:

Embrace diversity.
Unite––
Or be divided,
robbed,
killed
by those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity.
Or be destroyed.

Octavia Butler set her novel some thirty-five years in the future from the date she wrote it, which as of this writing (in 2010) places it fifteen years in the future. Most of what Parable of the Sower has to say regarding contemporary times is implied rather than overtly stated. However, the man Lauren eventually marries, Bankole, realizes that all the horrors of their time are not new:

“In the early 1990s while I was in college, I heard about cases of growers doing some of this––holding people against their wills and forcing them to work without pay. Latins in California, blacks and Latinos in the South. Now and then, someone would go to jail for it.”

Imagine that: a man in what was then the future commenting on a past so eerily relevant to what is now the present.

by Aberjhani
Author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
and creator of Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

For More on Octavia E. Butler
and California Wildfires

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The Day I Heard James Baldwin Had Died

8/2/2024

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Dear Readers,
Please enjoy this excerpt from a work in progress presented in honor of the James Baldwin Centennial 2024.

On December 2, 1987, I was proudly seated in front of a brand new word processor, a technological upgrade from my plug-in electric typewriter, tapping away at the keys to complete the first draft of a novel when news came that author James Baldwin had died at his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France. Because of a promise I had made myself just a year earlier, while preparing to end a four-year tour of duty with the U.S. Air Force in England, the announcement made no sense at all.

Since I had neglected during all that time overseas to cross the English channel and make my way to Baldwin’s home to express gratitude for his ground-quaking literary labors, which had granted me permission to pursue a career as a writer, I swore to myself I would one day, after publishing a book or two, travel back across the Atlantic as a civilian. This time, I would go straight to France to correct my past mistake.

There was supposed to have been time. He was only 62 when I left Great Britain and made my way down to the Ft. Lauderdale-Miami end of Florida. I was certain I could make it back and spend at least a few minutes interviewing him––or having a drink, or quietly comparing notes on evolving human conditions––in about five years or less. According, however, to the news, that would no longer be possible. How was it that would no longer be possible?

It should have been easy enough to comprehend the words of the excited news anchor’s voice, informing me from a different room where my older sister was watching television, that “Famed African-American author James Baldwin has died...” Only it wasn’t easy at all.

On that same day, I had babysat an infant niece for an hour and wrote with unbroken concentration as she napped in the cushioned bassinet beside my makeshift desk, unbothered while waiting for her mother to get off work. A confrontation with a nephew battling an addiction to crack cocaine had flared up like a summer storm and rolled quickly away, as did the sound of a man and woman hurling profanities like bricks at each other while they walked past the house.

If I allowed domestic events like these to stop me from completing my work when Baldwin had produced masterpiece after masterpiece while constantly fending off poverty, racism, and a barrage of social phobias and personal anxieties, how would the word “author” ever come to apply to me?

Then the news was announced again and my sister called out to make sure I had heard it. I flinched in anticipation of hearing how this great man had died: a reference to “cancer” of some kind stabbed like a switchblade between my eyebrows, sending the many images of him with cigarette in hand flickering around my aching head, while other photos of him debating one point or another with influential Whites rose up flashing lights of defiance.

An Immense Metamorphosis

“We are in the middle of an immense metamorphosis here, a metamorphosis which will, it is devoutly to be hoped, rob us of our myths and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us back our personalities.” ––James Baldwin, “Mass Culture and the Creative Artist: Some Personal Notes,” (1959) from The Cross of Redemption, Uncollected Writings, p. 7.

It was a strange thing that just before the solemn pronouncement had been delivered, no matter what interruption threatened to silence it, the reportedly deceased author’s voice had been swirling all around me. Like a river of jeweled leaves, perfumed lava, and steamy waves of morning light surging with encouragement and determination, flowing alongside mine while I feverishly typed, typed, paused, and typed away.

What had I been writing? A novel about a young black woman and a young white man who both worked as sharecroppers on the same plantation in 1920s Georgia. Both had been abused in different ways by different members of the wealthy family that owned the farm and by others who worked with them. They had heard rumors about places up North where two people like them stood a chance of becoming something besides what others demanded they become at any given moment. It was the kind of story Baldwin, or Margaret Walker, or Jean Toomer, I thought, might have encouraged me to give my best shot. But now?

The river of inspiration and confirmation which carried me from doubt to effort was one I recalled first springing forth and sluicing along passageways of membranes and waking conscience when, as a teenager, I read everything by Baldwin local librarians dared place on shelves.

Exactly how I first became aware of him I’m not certain, but have a vague memory of pulling a copy of The Fire Next Time from a plastic bag of paperback books which one of my older sisters had brought home from the nursing facility where she worked. After that in the months and years that followed: the essays Notes of a Native Son, and No Name in the Street; the short story collection Going to Meet the Man; and the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain, Another Country, and Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone. There is another uncertain memory of picking up a copy of Giovanni’s Room and someone cautioning that it was not a book I should read until, possibly, later. Which I did.

A Dialogue with revolutionary poet Nikki Giovanni and A Rap on Race with anthropologist Margaret Mead made a gift of the illusion of actually speaking with him. I did not, in those introductory days, understand everything I read by him but the outraged music that pushed and coaxed his language to overflow from one paragraph to the next made re-reading, until comprehension did set in, more pleasurable than painful. Having access to such empire-defying words, at a time when Black men and women could still find themselves dangling and dripping blood at the end of a noose just for being Black men and women was, no minor thing.

By Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days
Author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah

For more reflections on James Baldwin and his enduring impact upon our modern lives and times, please enjoy the following:

Letter to James Baldwin (in lieu of a ‘Letter to Barack Obama’)
Editorial Note: This letter was first published in June 2010 as “Dear James Baldwin ...
A Commanding Voice from the Past Speaks with Brilliant Clarity to the Present
Photograph of author James Baldwin in Istanbul, Turkey, where he completed some of his most ...
Shakespeare's Face Reinterpreted: The Second Coming of Artist Rocky Bettis
for a James Baldwin Centennial Project and received several Google search results referencing Baldwin’s essay ...
No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin by Meshell Ndegeocello
Greeting Flannery O'Connor At The Back Door Of My Mind (autographed collectible)
Letter to James Baldwin (in lieu of a ‘Letter to Barack Obama’)
Editorial Note: This letter was first published in June 2010 as “Dear James Baldwin ...
Embracing the Whole of Life: Notes on James Baldwin at 100
“Embracing the Whole of Life” digital painting of James Baldwin ...
African Americans Far from Home (part 1): In Search of Dreams Deferred
adapted for the screen by director Spike Lee in 2009). Fans of iconic author James ...
A.I. Literary Chat Salon
Audre Lorde August 2023 Author Artist Aberjhani Author-Artist Aberjhani Author James Baldwin ...
Springing Forward with Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah photographer unknown at this point) of a young James Baldwin holding a copy of his essay collection ...

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Shakespeare's Face Reinterpreted: The Second Coming of Artist Rocky Bettis

3/5/2024

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(“Shakespeare Considered Sepia” 2024 digital painting by Aberjhani based on original 1623 First Folio engraving by Martin Droeshout.)

“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.”
– Stella Adler (from Stella Adler on America's Master Playwrights)

1. Different Times and New Places

Have you ever noticed how that ultimate icon of English literature, William Shakespeare (1564–1616), sometimes pops up in places where you might least expect to find him? That was my experience twice in February 2024. The first instance occurred while I was conducting research online for a James Baldwin Centennial Project and received several Google search results referencing Baldwin’s essay, “Why I Stopped Hating Shakespeare.” The great “Bard’s” name had not been included with my query, while Baldwin (1924-1987) had recently been the subject of a Google Black History Month doodle, so the search result seemed odd.

The second instance would occur after I learned an artist, Rocky Bettis, whom I had met only once before back in 2020 (when the pandemic was growing more lethal by the day) had a new exhibit at the Gallery Espresso Coffee Shop in downtown Savannah, Georgia. It had opened February 1 and was scheduled to close April 1, 2024. Our first meeting had been completely accidental and occurred when I happened to spot an installation of his paintings in a in a car port in a lane off Liberty Street. The unexpected discovery produced an essay titled “Encounter with Artist Paul Cezanne in Downtown Savannah.” News of the Gallery Espresso (GE) exhibition was exciting because in the midst of surviving the masks-on and masks-off days of the pandemic, I had lost contact with Bettis.

It was also exciting because at a different once-upon-a-time in my life, the GE coffee shop had been located at 6 East Liberty Street, where the world-famous Book Lady Bookstore is now nestled. Until 2003, it was a favorite venue where I joined many other poets on Friday nights to share our open mic joys and grievances. Various obligations had made visits, for me, to the relocated site at Bull and Perry Streets (just off Chippewa Square) somewhat rare. Space for works of fine art at the previous setting had not been as plentiful, but, many of the poems published in I Made My Boy Out of Poetry were written specifically to perform before its weekend late-night audiences. One example, titled “Two Poems & A Funky Red Rhythm,” was dedicated to a trio of troubadours, known as The Receding Wave, who hosted the open mic. The strength of their impact upon my literary aspirations might be evident from this excerpt:

… I stood behind a tree and watched as they flowed
toward each other, the two poems and the funky red rhythm.
And seeing them, the things they did, my clothes burned away
and drops of white flame poured from my scalp,
trailed wet fire down my spine and steam across my chest.

Was I insane, moving blindly towards them until they
pressed upon me, one swallowing me as if I were a sword
coated with chocolate, another lashing me with a flurry
of sacred tremors, and the third--twirling my soul like a baton?
I screamed, and I died, and my mind got lost in the flood of its tears.

(from I Made My Boy Out of Poetry)

Interior view of The Book Lady Bookstore at 6 East Liberty Street, former location of the Gallery Espresso Coffee Shop where open mic poetry nights were often held during the 1990s and early 2000s. (photo by Cedric Smith)

The times and location had changed but the city’s creative flow was still going strong. Once I found out the best way to message Bettis, I did so and asked if he might be able to join me one afternoon at GE and chat for a bit about his new work. Was I surprised when he answered “Yes”? In fact, I was. On the agreed-upon day, I needed to meet someone else as well regarding a different matter, so made it a point to arrive earlier than either of them. As I stepped through the door, the aromas of the shop’s signature Arabica beans flavor filled my nostrils and lungs at the same time that my eyes fell upon vibrant canvases filling nearly every wall-space above tables, fireplaces, and passageways, hanging next to people seated at every eclectic arrangement of vintage-style furniture and couches available. The overall interior design reminded me of a cozy country club lodge.

A few steps deeper inside the shop, hanging on the wall to my right was a large vertical portrait called “Muse 4# holding close” (24x48”) depicting in sun and earth tones against a background of charcoal shadows, a woman who appears to be breastfeeding an infant. She could, I felt, just as easily have been an American holding on to hope after escaping an extreme climate-change catastrophe. Or a mother near the edge of war-smashed Gaza praying her body still possessed what her baby needed to stay alive. The title gave no reason to believe either scenario but the calm blend of resignation and determination on the subject’s face led me to consider the possibilities. Another artpiece of the same size, “Muse 5# with braid,” hung to my immediate left and radiated an equal intensity, but with an alternative palette suggesting a different potential storyline altogether.

Part of the coffee shop’s appealingly unique interior design is a short banistered ramp that leads up to the slightly elevated service bar and divides the spacious seating areas in half. Joining the line waiting to order, I took note of two paintings above the fireplace to the left and a group of four more above a fireplace to the right. The top left canvas was titled “Forest by the tracks” (24x20”) and the one beneath it called “Dream State” (22x28”). Both struck me as exceptions to what I saw when looking from a distance at the collection filling the room. Common to all, I felt, was a respect, or passion, for the uncaged personality of the paint and other devices lending themselves to the purposes of the artist.

Much of the work struck me as neo-expressionistic character studies, homages to major influences, like “Mr. [Auguste] Rodin” and Gustave Klimt, animal portraits, and figures potentially inspired by Celtic mythology. By contrast, the dense vertical lines of “Forest by the Tracks” evoked memories of scenes which unfolded along the railroad tracks running through Savannah while “Dream State” showed a reclining figure adrift in painted mystical slumber. Of the four paintings positioned above the second fireplace, the two which captivated me the most were the enigmatic piece titled “Lady with Rose” (23.5x22.5”) and the starkly raw “Resting Boxer” (18x24”).

That Bettis can claim the distinction of being self-taught––like such notable creatives as Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), and Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890)––to my knowledge is true. And yet, it is equally true that in addition to his own uncanny inventive instincts, he has been an exceptional student of the classic talents which animated his need to give visual expression to the intriguing layers of what it means to exist. His instructors by way of cultural arts legacies have been acknowledged on websites such as Pinterest and LinkedIn: “I am inclined to study more and more styles as my path unveils itself[.] Some of my most prominent influences are Da Vinci, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Courbet, Klimt and the prolific Modern Art Masters.” The story, moreover, is now a well-known one of how his move from a suburb of Chicago to Los Angeles to Savannah eventually resulted in a galvanizing, and perhaps transformational, face-to-face experience with the statues of geniuses standing outside the Telfair Museum.

2. Mr. Shakespeare, Is That You?

At Gallery Espresso, while my body moved steadily toward the line of customers near the back center of the shop, my attention went in another direction: toward an elegantly-dressed Victorian figure occupying a vertical canvas on the south wall. A canvas to its right, I believed, was Bettis paying minimalist tribute to one of Klimt’s romantic works. On both sides of the painting was a small antique-ish table occupied by a single young woman. Going by their focus on laptop screens before them and the plugs in their ears, I guessed they were likely SCAD students doing homework, or remotely-stationed entrepreneurs taking care of a different kind of business.

The painting which had attracted my attention, at first, reminded me of work by the Greek painter Dominikos Theotokopoulos, popularly known as El Greco (1541-1614). Staring at it, I could imagine Luther E. Vann (1938-2016), my late co-creator on ELEMENTAL, the Power of Illuminated Love, musing out loud: Wow, check that brother out! What this brother needed to do was get a closer look. But I did not want to interrupt the people seated at the tables so decided to wait and see what kind of opportunity might present itself. While doing that, I ordered a small cappuccino. Then I turned from the counter and found myself confronted by an abstract “Male Study” (24x36”) composed of softly-colored geometric panels enclosed within the outlines of a form close to that of a humanoid robot’s. Things were getting more interesting by the moment.

The more I stood looking at the paintings arranged throughout the coffee shop, the more I assumed they had been produced over long stretches of time during the pandemic lockdown. That assumption would soon prove erroneous.

In the middle of trying to spot any painting which I may have seen at his 2020 car port exhibition, I noticed one of the young women near the portraits on the south wall packing up her laptop and preparing to make her exit. The moment she moved, I did too, and like an interplanetary explorer claiming a new planet for his own, draped my jacket over one chair and placed my shoulder bag in the other, then went back to the service counter to pick up my cappuccino.

Returning to the table with some minutes to spare before my expected parties might arrive, I took out my old-school pen and notebook to write down the name of the 24x48” oil-and-pastel-on board painting which had drawn me: Shakespeare. And there it was: my second unexpected encounter with the great author of timeless plays, sonnets, and histories within a week of repeatedly finding his name bound to that of James Baldwin’s. (I was now also prompted to recall not a poem from I Made My Boy Out of Poetry, but a story called, “Angels and Shakespeare.”)

()Photograph of Savannah-based artist Rocky Bettis at the Gallery Espresso Coffee Shop by Aberjhani C2024)

It is widely-accepted that the two most accurate portrayals of the historic Shakespeare are the image of him by English engraver Martin Droeshout (c. 1560s-1650), from the title page of the First Folio (1623) of the writer’s plays; and, the Shakespeare Memorial Bust at Stratford-Upon-Avon, debatably sculpted by either one Gerard Johnson (1612–1623) or his brother Nicholas (?-1624). Who lives, really, long enough to verify such things definitively? Given his historical status in the world-transcending multiverse of literature, admirable depictions of Stratford-Upon-Avon’s most famous son exist in many different mediums. Some attempt to conjure what the artist believes the author must have actually looked like. Others have sought to endow him with a form they believe most suitable for paying tribute to someone whose labors have provided the foundations of careers for generations of cultural arts workers after him.

Anyone physically viewing and contemplating Bettis’s Shakespeare can see that his approach bypasses attempts at imaginary realism to reach through time in quantum-leap fashion and propose a very singular take on the man often proclaimed more renowned and studied than any other writer (though Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison gains more traction with each passing year). Writing in scene 1 of Macbeth, Shakespeare’s King Duncan suggests, “There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face.” Do I agree with that? Maybe not. Studying the canvas in front of me, I felt like I was watching a painted telepathic conversation between the playwright and the artist, a mind-to-mind and soul-to-soul chat which revealed at least some of the components of their psychic constructions.

The subtly-mixed palette and features which comprise Shakespeare’s face and torso, with an abstract expressionistic background of cool and warm hues embracing both, began to share stories and meanings with which others might or might not agree. The face is not a mask for wearing falsehoods on the outside but a collage of truths for living bravely on the inside. If the luminous forehead can be considered symbolic of the Elizabethan “Golden Age” during which Shakespeare lived, the region of shadows surrounding his eyes might be said to speak of moments which for some were not so golden during the same time-frame. The even darker areas of his iris and pupil, to certain viewers, might indicate something close to demonic while to others they might shine as metaphors for the mysteries of the human heart and spirit which the Bard explored through dramas, comedies, and verse. The sensitive lines of the mouth, surrounded by the stronger borders of mustache and dark pointed beard, communicate a quiet dignity and challenged strength. Although the broad elegant collar looks nothing like wings, it nevertheless brought to mind this sentence near the end of Angels and Shakespeare: “I picked up a copy of Shakespeare’s complete sonnets, a slim handsome edition done in classic black leather binding, and I thought about the theory that Shakespeare may have been an angel pretending to be human.” And yet that same collar also made me think of piano keys and within the rhythm of brush strokes and fingered pastels I saw the sounds of an innovative jazz flowing in every direction.

3. Human-generated Beauty

Various academics these days rightfully debate different aspects of Shakespeare’s legendary status and its impact upon what we accept as myth or authentic in our lives. Insofar as I believe in healthy dialogues that help correct bias-heavy narratives which encourage inflicting any form of social injustice upon someone else, I agree with them. At the same time, I support the intent of artists seeking to serve humanity through their visions of who we have been, who we are, and who we may yet become, and I believe Shakespeare was an artist who overcame whatever was least within himself to gift to the world the best of himself.

How, I wondered, might he interpret this interpretation of him if he could stand there beside me in a coffee shop in the heart of downtown Savannah looking at Bettis’s channeled vision of him in 2024? How would he respond if I said to him that the painting and his own treasured texts sang to me of such things as the codes, links, and encryptions, the sparkling laughter, shit-bitter tears, adventurous intimacies, and the dreams fulfilled floating beside the ones deferred? All of which, I would add, comprise the reality of one person’s unvarnished biography.

Exactly how long I stood there allowing my imagination to run as wildly as it did, I’m not sure. At some point, I was joined by a podcast project partner, and a little later by Bettis himself in the company of a friend (who did not stay long). The last time we’d met, I was wearing a COVID-resistant mask in the open car port where his art hung. He had been comfortable without one. Enough boosted vaccines were circulating through my system and the pandemic was far enough behind us that, this time, I also went without a facemask.

The purpose of our meet-up was supposed to be simply to say hello and express relief we had both survived the plague (that approximately 7 million globally did not survive is something too quickly ignored). I began to think it might have been a better idea if I’d requested a formal interview as I gave in to the temptation to ask how long it had taken him to paint the canvases surrounding us. The answer, I anticipated, would be one or two years. Instead, he said, “About three months, maybe a little bit more.”

“What? Really?”

That’s pretty ducking amazing, I thought, while scanning the room again. He explained that two of the larger pieces had been completed before receiving the invitation to exhibit at GE, but the remaining 18 were completed between October 2023 and the end of January 2024. Some had been in progress as sketches or evolving images. It would have been less surprising if we had been talking about art prints generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

The whole world learned in 2023 just how pervasive AI’s presence already was/is in our lives. Museums and individual creatives alike had already started looking to it for solutions to challenges concerning productivity and innovative concepts to present to the art-loving public. While many experiments with AI art (including a few conducted by me) have proven irrefutably dazzling, one arguably major downside has been its often obvious artificiality. Among the most appealing qualities of human-generated beauty is its ability to accommodate flawed sincerity. However different critics, and time, might assess their value, the images which filled the Gallery Espresso at that moment spoke to me as much of the depths of spiritual legitimacy and intimacy as they did of future uncertainty and vulnerability.

Much more astonishing than learning Bettis had produced so much in what I considered a relatively short period of time, was hearing him describe the conditions under which he had done so. It turned out he had actually been in the process of making some major life changes. For one thing, he was relocating from the downtown Lafayette Square area where he had lived and worked in the shadows of the spires of the Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Divine, and just around the corner from the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home. In addition, he was preparing to take on a new job. Particularly significant was that his art supplies had been depleted and he was not yet in a position to replace them.

As serendipity would have it, another artist who had decided to seek inspiration in a different country needed to do something with the art supplies she was leaving behind. Bettis’s dilemma became her opportunity to place the materials—complete with paint, brushes, canvases, and other essentials––in the hands of someone who could make good use of them. I considered that story almost as amazing as my own first sighting of the artist’ work when major surprises included a portrait of Hercules as Atlas with the world on his shoulders, and another Paul Cezanne etched with hieroglyphic-like markings.

4. In Conclusion

Exactly where the artist sits on the current spectrum of 21st-century artistic intentions may be less clear than some might prefer. His path is clearly his own and sits comfortably apart from contemporary powerhouses such as Ai Weiwei, Suzanne Jackson, Kehinde Wiley, Yayoi Kusama, Banksy, or Marcus Kenney, just to name a handful. The one thing I did not doubt as I left Bettis’s Gallery Espresso exhibit was that as much as he had already surprised me and those admirers who opted early on to invest in his creative gifts, he likely would continue doing so for quite some time.

By Human Author-Poet Aberjhani
Co-Author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days

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Surrealistic Poetics of Jazz and the Confederate Monument

9/26/2023

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Surrealistic is, undoubtedly, one of the better words to describe a crowd of people gathered near the Confederate Monument in Savannah’s Forsyth Park with their attention focused on something which the figure portrayed atop the structure likely would never have imagined possible. The crowd’s collective passion on Saturday, September 23, 2023, was surging to the sounds of jazz flooding the air as the week-long Savannah Jazz Festival began its weekend wind-down.

Up on his memorial perch, if the battle-weary Confederate soldier’s bronze eyes were able to take in the scene, he likely would have gasped at the throngs of Black, White, Brown, Yellow, and in-between shades of humanity spread across the park on the grass, on blankets, beneath tents, around the Forsyth Fountain, on benches, and lined up at multi-ethnic-flavored food trucks. Back during his 1800s Civil War time, he would have been staring at a very different scene. Filling the area then would have been wounded comrades, captured Union soldiers, and scrambling slaves. The noise of moans, grunts, groans, and impatient orders would have sounded from every direction.

On this warm early-fall sunny day in 2023, what might have amazed him more than anything else were the musicians taking to the stage, some yards away, with intentional brilliance and purpose: The Demetrius Doctor Trio and The Wives, the Martin Lesch Band, the Savannah Jazz Hall of Fame, and Buckwheat Zydeco, Jr. and Ils Sont Partis Band. (And this was just the line-up while I was there, not the performers from the night before or those who would be playing until long after my departure.) What possibly may have astonished him above all else was the musicians’ polyphonic often racially-diversified artistry, and the way pockets of people danced so uninhibitedly to their blood-stirring beats.

He might have been exceptionally moved, toward any given emotional expression, while listening to the Demetrius Doctor Trio’s closing medley. Imagine his heart and mind struggling to process the sight and sound of the Trio’s talented White bass player accompanying his fellow Black musicians on their closing jazz-infused medley of these songs: Burt Bacharach’s “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” easing into Stevie Wonder’s “Love’s In Need of Love Today,” and blending that with the third verse of brothers James and Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” commonly referred to as the Black National Anthem. Interestingly enough, with its absence of any actual reference to race, in another twist of historical surrealism the soldier could have assumed the words applied to his own struggles:

… God of our weary years
God of our silent tears
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light
Keep us forever in the path, we pray
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee
Shadowed beneath Thy hand
May we forever stand
True to our God
True to our native land
--(James Weldon Johnson)

Could it be those words, and all the people gathered before him on the campground, were in honor of him? Were all those laughing, chatting, strangely-dressed souls there to celebrate the sincerity of his dedicated, although failed, efforts to keep sons and daughters of African descent in chains? To maintain a power structure more beneficial to his wealthier kinfolks than to himself? What a magnificent thing that would be! Except something in the silent language of numerous faces made it clear it was more unlikely than likely.

Pathways to Recognition

Good poetry, of which James Weldon Johnson wrote a lot, has a way of drilling through rigid biases and opening pathways to recognition of our common humanity. Along with giving myself a break from hurricane recovery repairs, poetry was another reason I chose to arrive at the jazz concert when I did. According to the festival’s program, saxophonist Jody Espina was scheduled to become the 47th inductee into the Savannah Jazz Hall of Fame. As it happened, I had first met Espina some 14 years prior and wrote about that encounter in The River of Winged Dreams:

“...'Sounds Scribbled Mixed-Media Platinum’ was written during a sound painting performance, featuring Savannah’s Creative Force Artists Collective and jazzman saxophonist Jody Espina, at the Jepson Center for the Arts. My purpose for attending the event was to write a news article about it but as the painters and sculptors created their extraordinary works, while Espina and his ensemble exploded jazz throughout the atrium of the Jepson Center, my pen insisted on dancing to their creative beat and the poem wrote itself in the space intended for my notes….”’

Things like that, whether I want them to or not, sometimes happen in my world when it comes to poetry. I’m not going to include the entire 40-line poem with this blog post but here are two stanzas from it:

Such a human being, one observes,
takes to the air on his saxophone
as though it were Pegasus
even as his legacy-blessed hands
channel light through the golden womb
of an artist’s lexicon
conducting pantomimes of creative bliss,
signaling xylophonic spectrums of possibility unlimited.

He ripples like Low Country marsh grass––
and painters smear genius
upon canvases of parallel motion.
His heart pounds his fists with fire––
and keyboards rendezvous naked with strings
and percussions that amplify passion’s brilliant voice.
His eyes explode poems––
and sculptors mold lightning into tangible vision.
--(from The River of Winged Dreams)

My plan at the festival was to place an autographed copy of River in Espina’s hands if I got an opportunity to do so. It did not work out quite that way but one of the festival volunteers was kind enough to act on my behalf and deliver the book to him backstage. The book in my hand was yet another image which might have caused the Confederate statue’s eyebrow to creak upward an inch or so. Not to mention the sight of a black mayor on stage long enough to put in some valuable face time with the jubilant crowd during this election year.

What might that exhausted soldier have thought about the broad-ranging scope of the music itself? Every variation of it tended to put a smile on the face of programmer Theron “Ike” Carter, a friend and another Hall of Fame inductee who prefers the term "African-American classical music" to the word jazz? Would that dedicated soldier have been able to appreciate the way it is celebrated around the world for how it embraces diverse cultural traditions and, by its nature, advocates on behalf of international unity? Would he realize its value as an effective instrument for promoting and even implementing democratic principles? Maybe yes or maybe no.

For the moment at hand, it was enough for those who had not been wiped out by the pandemic, annihilated by climate change, or erased from the world by 21st century gun violence, to be in the park occupying their own niche in history with a sense of something very close to an exhilarating sense of anticipated liberation.

Aberjhani
Author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Creator of Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

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Celebrating National Poetry Month 2025

An Alignment of Voices

The AD Community Experience

Coming Full Circle

Aberjhani
National Poetry Month 2025

Feel free to use this form to contact Bright Skylark Literary Productions or the section after it to comment on this article.

Author Octavia E. Butler & The Fire This Time

Introduction

A Grand Dame of Sci-Fi

Innovative Literary Vision

Parable of the Sower

For More on Octavia E. Butler
and California Wildfires

Please use this form to contact Author-Artist Aberjhani, or the one below it to comment on this article.

The Day I Heard James Baldwin Had Died

An Immense Metamorphosis

By Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days
Author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah

For more reflections on James Baldwin and his enduring impact upon our modern lives and times, please enjoy the following:

To contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark LP, please use this form. To comment on this article, please use the next section.

Shakespeare's Face Reinterpreted: The Second Coming of Artist Rocky Bettis

1. Different Times and New Places

2. Mr. Shakespeare, Is That You?

3. Human-generated Beauty

4. In Conclusion

By Human Author-Poet Aberjhani
Co-Author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days

Feel free to use this form to contact author-poet Aberjhani at Bright Skylark LP. To comment on the above story, please use the form in the next section.

Surrealistic Poetics of Jazz and the Confederate Monument

Pathways to Recognition

Aberjhani
Author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Creator of Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

Contact Author-Poet-Artist Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Celebrating National Poetry Month 2025

An Alignment of Voices

The AD Community Experience

Coming Full Circle

AberjhaniNational Poetry Month 2025

Feel free to use this form to contact Bright Skylark Literary Productions or the section after it to comment on this article.

Author Octavia E. Butler & The Fire This Time

Introduction

A Grand Dame of Sci-Fi

Innovative Literary Vision

Parable of the Sower

For More on Octavia E. Butler and California Wildfires

Please use this form to contact Author-Artist Aberjhani, or the one below it to comment on this article.

The Day I Heard James Baldwin Had Died

An Immense Metamorphosis

By AberjhaniCo-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem RenaissanceAuthor of These Black and Blue Red Zone DaysAuthor of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah

For more reflections on James Baldwin and his enduring impact upon our modern lives and times, please enjoy the following:

To contact Aberjhani at Bright Skylark LP, please use this form. To comment on this article, please use the next section.

Shakespeare's Face Reinterpreted: The Second Coming of Artist Rocky Bettis

​1. Different Times and New Places

2. Mr. Shakespeare, Is That You?

3. Human-generated Beauty

4. In Conclusion

By Human Author-Poet AberjhaniCo-Author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem RenaissanceAuthor of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days

Feel free to use this form to contact author-poet Aberjhani at Bright Skylark LP. To comment on the above story, please use the form in the next section.

Surrealistic Poetics of Jazz and the Confederate Monument

Pathways to Recognition

AberjhaniAuthor of Dreams of the Immortal City SavannahCo-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem RenaissanceCreator of Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle

Contact Author-Poet-Artist Aberjhani at Bright Skylark Literary Productions

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Aberjhani
National Poetry Month 2025

For More on Octavia E. Butler
and California Wildfires

By Aberjhani
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days
Author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah

1. Different Times and New Places

By Human Author-Poet Aberjhani
Co-Author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Author of These Black and Blue Red Zone Days

Aberjhani
Author of Dreams of the Immortal City Savannah
Co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Creator of Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle