Visionary Vibes: A Blog by Aberjhani

Moving Forward with Hope and Determination: Conversations with the World 105

1/24/2021

“Considering Green on a Global Scale” art graphic by Aberjhani for Bright Skylark Literary Productions.

The question of how to move forward is not one which has been weighing heavily upon citizens of the United States only since the January 6, 2021, domestic terrorism attack on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. It is also one which people in communities around the world continue to contemplate deeply after a year of battling the COVID-19 pandemic, and, as mutant variants of the virus have started emerging across the globe. To date, some 417,538 people have died from the coronavirus in the United States and 2,122,872 have died globally.

As part of a collective strategy for moving forward, Americans have placed new leadership in the White House in the form of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris. Populations worldwide are also employing a strategic philosophy popularized by African-American civil rights icon Rev. Jesse Jackson at the 1988 Democratic National Convention when he urged attendees to: “Keep hope alive... On tomorrow night and beyond, keep hope alive!”

Keeping Hope Alive on Social Media

Hopefulness became the theme of a popular social media post when the Filipino ABS-CBN News channel chose on the U.S.’s presidential Inauguration Day to share the quote below with more than 5 million followers on Twitter and almost 3 million on Facebook :

ABS-CBN News “Final Word Tonight” for January 20, 2021, featuring quote on hopefulness by Aberjhani.

The quote is from a poem which has become my most-frequently quoted: “Angel of Healing: for the Living, the Dying, and the Praying” (published in The River of Winged Dreams). Given the circumstances of the times, that people quote it frequently enough to make it a trending topic is not very surprising. Aside from the quote seen here, it is also the source of, among others, the well-known “Dare to love,” and “Compassion crowns the soul” references. The poem is a blend of haikus and free verse.

Screenshot of Global Trendsetting page for ABS-CBN News on Twitter January 20, 2021, “Final Word Tonight” quote on hopefulness by Aberjhani.

In addition to the quote shared on January 20, 2021, ABS-CBN News the next night presented these powerful words by presidential inauguration poet Amanda Gorman:

ABS-CBN News “Final Word Tonight” for January 21, featuring quote from presidential inauguration poet Amanda Gorman’s poem, The Hill We Climb.

Ms. Gorman’s inauguration poem, “The Hill We Climb,” is as heavy on determination as it is on hope. The two combined are what give the word resilience inspired meaning and applicable substance. That, perhaps more than anything else, is the way to continue moving forward.

Aberjhani
Co-author Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Creator of the Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle Collection

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Sustaining the Sweet Joyful Howl of Poetry in the 21st Century

4/3/2016

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“Individuals often turn to poetry, not only to glean strength and perspective from the words of others, but to give birth to their own poetic voices and to hold history accountable for the catastrophes rearranging their lives.” --Aberjhani from Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays. ©Postered Poetics based on original poetry Spencerian calligraphy art by G.A. Gaskell. #NPM16 #PocketPoem

The launch of National Poetry Month, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, in April 1996, came just three years after the debut issue of the Savannah Literary Journal in 1993. In addition to 49 poems by 35 brilliant writers with regional and national reputations, the 1996 edition of the journal featured six works of fiction and three pieces of creative nonfiction.

My contribution to the journal that year was a personal essay but the title of it, Angels and Shakespeare (later published in I Made My Boy Out of Poetry), revealed the central place verse has always held in my life. So did this epigraph borrowed from the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda:

“For this reason Monday burns like
oil... and it howls in passing like a
wounded wheel...”

(Pablo Neruda, from Walking Around)

Both National Poetry Month and the publication of the journal (up until 2001) could be considered as invitations to readers, writers, and publishers to explore a more deeply intimate relationship with language. These invitations coaxed them as well to experience the different levels of power words can wield when endowing our lives with either newly-claimed or wholly-unexpected meaning.

The responses, now 20 years down the timeline, have mushroomed into a worldwide cultural mainstay where National Poetry Month (NPM) is concerned. In regard to the Savannah Literary Journal, published by the former Savannah Writers Workshop, it has confirmed the value of one of the city’s most prized artistic legacies.

Of Bloggers and Nobel Laureates

But what should we say of poetry as a whole during the last two decades when life as so many once knew it shape-shifted into a spinning mass of digital signals, globalized communities unbounded by geographic borders, and astounding varieties of terror clashing head-on with determined demands for liberty?

Former Poetry Society of Georgia member Gerald Chan Sieg (1909-2005) receiving the Savannah Literary Journal Irene Tromble McAlister Literary Prize from editor Robert Keber in 1999. (photo Bright Skylark Literary Productions Collection)

That now populous demographic of humanity known as bloggers did not exist in 1996 and programmer Peter Merholz would not condense the term “weblog” to invent the word “blog” until 1999. Nevertheless, poetically-inclined bloggers during the first and second decades of this 21st century have done a great deal to ensure poetry occupies a prominent position within the global imagination and humanity’s collective ethical consciousness.

Moreover, the ever-mindful Nobel Prize Committee actually saw fit in 1996 to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012) "for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality." And in 2011 it bestowed that same honor upon Sweden’s Tomas Tranströmer , "because, through his condensed, translucent images, he gives us fresh access to reality."

A Movement Designed to Inspire

Obviously the Academy of American Poets’ commitment to recognizing, honoring, and documenting literary excellence within the work of American Poets did not begin with the establishment of NPM. That happened back in 1934 when founder Marie Bullock surveyed America’s literary landscape and came to a certain conclusion.

Despite the quietly-evolving cultural canonization at the time of such poets as Langston Hughes (1902-1967), Jean Toomer (1894-1967), Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), E.E. Cummings (1894-1962), T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), and other American quill-masters of the period, it became apparent that more needed to be done to place poetry on some level of esteem comparable to what it stirred in the literary capitals—such as Paris, London, and Dublin––of Europe.

National Poetry Month more than half a century later represented a game-changing upgrade from previous efforts. Since its start, affiliated programs each successive year have helped observations to grow in scope and influence. Initiatives such as Poem in Your Pocket Day (observed this year on April 21), the Dear Poet Project, and Poem-A-Day (via email) contribute immensely to sustaining the sweet joyful howl of poetry in these new millennial times. The key words and hashtags that dominate social media every April––like #npm16, #pocketpoem, #jazzpoetry, #celebratingpoetry, and the tagged names of favorite poets––denote only one small measure of how successful the campaign has become.

Cover of Academy of American Poets Journal Vol 50 NPM16. “Greens, Biopsy 2” Digital C Print 2007 by artist Yedda Morrison.

It also did not hurt when citizens of the United States elected a lover and writer of poetry, Barack H. Obama, as their first African-American president in 2008. The following is from a 2009 essay written to commemorate both NPM and Jazz Appreciation Month:

…The birth of the Academy meant the birth of a movement designed to inspire, cultivate, and preserve the voice of American poets. And although it likely was not his intention to do so, President Barack Obama extended that movement not only by bearing the “stigma” of being an accomplished wordsmith but by inviting Elizabeth Alexander––an author of several books but of whom many had never heard until Obama spoke her name––to serve as his Inauguration Day poet.

(Aberjhani, from All that National Poetry Month Jazz)

If there is one thing populations of the world have needed, and received, from poetry for the past two decades, it has been inspiration. But not only inspiration in that classic form which reaffirms the value of faith.

Poetry in our post 9/11 era provides the kind of inspiration that defiantly raises poets’ voices against the brutalities of war, the insanities of terrorism, and the indignities of oppression in all its toxic forms. It empowers the simplest of lives to confront the most extreme sorrows with courage, and motivates the mightiest of offices to humbly heed lessons in compassion.

Although the last edition (to date) of the Savannah Literary Journal was published in 2001, its legacy continues to stand as a richly inspiring one. Many of the poets, essayists, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers featured in its pages have since gone on to win national and international acclaim in various fields. These are but a few listed in no particular order: Janice Daugharty, Linda Rocheleau, Darryl Lorenzo Wellington, David C. Hightower, Susan Johnson, Lily Keber, Ja A. Jahannes (1942 -2015), Errol Miller, Kathleen Thompson, Toussaint St. Negritude, Dufflyn Lammers, Anis Mojgani, and Vaughnette Goode-Walker. Again, these represent only a few.

Most would probably tell you their greatest contributions to the literary arts thus far have not been particular poems or stories or books. They have instead been the relationships cultivated with the hearts and souls who heard what they had to say and then drew from that hearing enough motivation to speak their own truths to power and pain and joy.

Despite the Cacophony

Whether through contributors to literary journals, the sustained dedicated efforts of members of the Academy of American Poets, or bloggers content just to have a platform where they could post lines at will, poetry has maintained a dynamic living breathing presence in the world.

Despite the cacophony of bombs and bullets which so often drown out the music of laughter (or possibly because of them) poetry at this point in history may very well be more commanding than any other previous time. There are many reasons to believe its potency, and its beauty, shall grow even stronger in the future.

Aberjhani
© National Poetry Month 2016
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

2016 National Poetry Month poster featuring a florilegium with text excerpted from poems by diverse classic and contemporary poets. The poster was designed by Debbie Millman and produced by Emily Weiland. NPM16

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Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

3/9/2016

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Title graphic with image of French artist Claude Monet's 1890 painting "Champ d'avoine" (Oat Field) in background at the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia. (photograph by Aberjhani)

When the doors of the Jepson Center for the Arts opened to the public in Savannah, Georgia’s, downtown Historic District on March 10, 2006, it served as one more important reminder that the city is much more than a time-capsule filled with unique Civil War memorabilia. It is also home to many creative progressive thinkers eager to see a more sensible social and political balance than those presently evident.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the most avant garde facility within the complex of the Telfair Arts Academy museums. The Center’s cultural and educational value to Savannah since its opening has been demonstrated many times over. It proved especially momentous to this author personally when the publication launch for ELEMENTAL, the Power of Illuminated Love (co-created with artist Luther E. Vann) sponsored by the Friends of African-American Arts, was held there May 29, 2008.

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

The following year I returned to the center on March 22 with the intention of reporting on an exciting multi-media event taking place there. It featured a group of visual artists referred to as the Creative Force Artist Collective creating abstract paintings and sculpture while jazz saxophonist Jody Espina performed with a live band and audience members danced to the free-flowing vibes. The energy was so intense that I stopped jotting the notes I had been taking to write my story. Instead, my pen joined in with the flying paintbrushes, wailing music, and dancing souls by spontaneously writing the poem titled “Sounds Scribbled Mixed-Media Platinum at the Jepson Center 3/22/09.” The following is an excerpt:

A man sitting monkey-like
on the rooftop of his brain
calculating the precision
with which sunbeams
seduce moonlight
is only as spectacular maybe
as a river passably scatting
red-wine imitations of Louis or Ella.

But a man leaning un-harnessed
over the blue-diamond cliffs
of his jazz-baptized soul
as he weaves southern adagios
and spur-of-the-moment riffs
into new millennium bebop Mozart suites
makes for a different order of musical flora:
worthy of sonic revelations painted abstract divine.

––Aberjhani (excerpt from Sounds Scribbled Mixed-Media Platinum at the Jepson Center)

The complete poem was later published in The River of Winged Dreams. For me, the event that inspired it and the poem itself came to symbolize one of the ways that the Jepson Center for the Arts had come to exert a powerful regenerative influence on the city’s evolving cultural identity.

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

Flashing forward to January 2016: I took a trip to the Telfair Museum of Art and Jepson Center for the Arts to conduct some field research for my current book-in-progress. The first surprise as I walked through Telfair Square toward the Telfair was discovering that it undergoing heavy-duty maintenance and repairs. The building was surrounded by scaffolding and the museum’s iconic trademark statues were sheathed in plastic. It would seem administrators wanted the senior museum at its best in time for the younger gallery’s birthday.

The Telfair Museum (as seen from Telfair Square in Savannah) undergoing repairs and maintenance in early 2016. (photograph by Aberjhani)

Inside the Jepson, I was fully prepared for the splendor that greeted me as I viewed the Monet and American Impressionism exhibit in the Steward Galleries. Given the combination of how French artist Claude Monet’s (1840-1926) singular brilliance had defined, and transcended, an entire era in art history so powerfully that its impact was celebrated in the Southeastern United States two centuries later, breathtaking splendor was about the only thing anyone could have expected. What I had not been prepared for were two different but equally-stunning exhibits in the form of photographs by Jack Leigh and the captivating oversized collage canvases of Mickalene Thomas.

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Readers of the book The American Poet Who Went Home Again know that I had the great honor calling John David "Jack" Leigh II (1942–2004) my friend. He was one of those to whom the book was dedicated and also the subject of the essay titled Bound Moments: Jack Leigh’s Beautiful Southern Adventures. To this day, I still find myself fascinated by the story of how he evolved from a disciplined athlete into an inspired photographer:

“…That was my secret life, my night life. My real life was playing football and being an all-American kid and doing things that fulfilled the image of a young southern boy. The art aspect remained a latent dream but it did guide me to where I was going.”

– (from The American Poet Who Went Home Again)

In truth, I had forgotten that he spent time documenting the construction of the Jepson and turned the labors of its creation into printed black and white art. Jack Leigh was a master at extracting beauty from the mundane and framing the ordinary within angles that revealed the extra-ordinary. His “Building the Jepson Series” of photographs were not in an exhibit room on the day I visited but lined along the hallway walls leading to and from the second-floor elevator, where they were sure to capture the attention of anyone walking that way.

It was fitting that I should have encountered Jack here because one of our last recorded interviews had been about The Land I’m Bound To (2000), a 25-year retrospective of his work at the Telfair commemorating W.W. Norton’s publication of his book of the same title.

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The inclusion of the Mickalene Thomas at Giverny exhibition across the hall, in the Levitt and Varnedoe Gallery, from the Monet paintings in the Steward Galleries deftly demonstrated art’s capacity to transcend boundaries and connect diverse human stories. It also highlighted the artist Mickalene Thomas’s passion for honoring beauty in classic and innovative settings with stringently-applied standards and techniques.

Mounted video of artist Mickalene Thomas, whose work was on display at the Jepson Center for the Arts in Savannah, Georgia, at the same time as French artist Claude Monet’s. (photo by Aberjhani)

Few might imagine that a 21st-century African-American woman artist would find as much inspiration and motivation as Thomas apparently did during her stay at the 19th-century French artist Monet’s famous home. But they would discover, eventually, that the discourse sustained through her visual and verbal meditations on the impact of Monet’s aesthetic standards is an important one elevating both discussions on contemporary art and (some would argue) the quality of it.

Thomas’s supersized canvases of reclining Black Women in juxtaposition to her studied interpretations of Monet’s home present beauty, tradition, and intellectual daring as self-defining aesthetics in and of themselves. To walk into a gallery and suddenly view Mickalene Thomas’s depictions of Black Women in particular is a psychologically jarring experience. For African Americans in particular, a chasm of divided awareness can crack open and you find yourself inside shaded regions simultaneously celebrating triumphant legacies of the past and mourning destructions of Black Life and Beauty in the present.

The Promise

With the range of creative talents that have been able to find expression and representation at the Jepson Center for the Arts since 2006, any and all tributes in honor of that fact are fully appropriate. And yet, more exciting than what the facility’s administrators, docents, patrons, and visitors have accomplished thus far is the promise of what may yet be accomplished in the years to come.

Aberjhani
© 3/9/2015
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

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Giving Hope and Compassion a Chance in 2016

1/1/2016

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S14 Painting copyright by Tomas Alen Kopera with animation by George RedHawk

Astonished might be the best word to describe my response to the extraordinary gif featuring the reportedly blind Native American George RedHawk’s amazing animation of Polish artist Tomasz Alen Kopera’s 2014 oil on canvas titled “S14.” That it had been posted by the TedX Colombo chapter along with the following quote from The River of Winged Dreams doubled the intensity of my surprise:

Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.

“Hearts rebuilt from hope resurrect dreams killed by hate.” ― Aberjhani, The River of Winged Dreams http://t.co/wOyhpOTmZa
— TEDxColombo (@TEDxColombo) October 14, 2015

The image of the flame-breathing eagle (or possibly hawk?) atop the head of a man appeared to me like an angel of the more fiercely hybrid variety described in traditional texts of the King James Bible. I was struck by the parallel that the TedX Colombo group drew between it and the quote. And then the sense it made not only became very clear but reminded me of Emily Dickinson’s famous lines:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all …”
( Emily Dickinson )

Hope in this New Year 2016, after the carnage and heartbreaks that have dogged humanity since 9/11, cannot make a difference in the form of nothing more than passive contemplation. It has to exercise strength in the manner described by Charter for Compassion as compassionate action. But before anything else can be employed to make a meaningful difference, hope itself has to remain intact within the hearts and souls of individuals.

The word hope (or a form of it) appears some 29 times in The River of Winged Dreams and 39 times in Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry. On this first day of the year 2016 I find myself invoking the word not so much for myself––though there are many reasons I probably should––as for all those who may have reached a point where they feel there is no such thing as hope. Or if there is, that it is meaningless in the face of calamities currently overrunning humanity. Those who believe that to be the case are at liberty to give it meaning of significant applicable substance.

Consider, for example, the millions of refugees whose determination has gone beyond redefining their individual lives to changing the course of history itself. Think of the wrongly-imprisoned men and women whose faith saw them through years of agonizing injustice and whose examples of forgiveness inspire so many others. Witness those whose struggle to breathe the toxic air of outrageously polluted cities have turned their desperation into rallying cries for nations to take definitive action to correct the extreme destructiveness of climate change.

The Bridge of Silver Wings

The short excerpt below is from the introductory essay “Deliverance in Action” which was first published in The Bridge of Silver Wings poetry collection and later included as part of The River of Winged Dreams. It is shared at this time with the hope that humanity in 2016 can reverse the deadly trends of the past and create new life-sustaining legacies truly worth celebrating:

The truth is we do not always know how we go from falling off the edge of one cliff to running with determination beside the ledge of another. The Bridge of Silver Wings is what I’ve come to call the unknowable unquantifiable process of deliverance in action.

It is what saves a given soul when that soul no longer has any idea how to save itself. It may be described as Creator, divinity, the angelic, love, good fortune, dharma, grace, faith, or any number of ways that provide hints but no irrefutably definitive explanation. It arrives when there’s no logical reason to believe it shall and provides not only a sense of salvation but one of transformation. Whereas the conditions of a specific life may not undergo any kind of miraculous change, the manner in which a person perceives and addresses those issues do. With a revised awareness of what is required to bring balance, healing, hope, and prosperity back into one’s life, a person is often able to achieve exactly that.

The journey across The Bridge of Silver Wings can be extremely frightening. At the same time, it can be filled with the kind of joyful revelations and thrilling affirmations of one’s self and destiny that are experienced only when one dares to take it.
          (from The River of Winged Dreams)

Is the happiness that everyone wishes each other at the beginning of a New Year possible? It certainly would not seem to be for the millions around the world who find their very existence threatened by potential immediate deletion with every second that passes. The good news on this day and every day of the year is that those conditions do not have to remain the same.

Aberjhani
© New Year Day 2016
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

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The Haunting Splendor of Marie Uchytilová’s Memorial to the Children of Lidice

12/13/2015

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“If the idea of loving those whom you have been taught to recognize as your enemies is too overwhelming, consider more deeply the observation that we are all much more alike than we are unalike.” ©2015 quote and art by Aberjhani (from Splendid Literarium: A Treasury of Stories, Aphorisms, Poems, and Essays) Art inspired by original sculpture by Marie Uchytilováe

After learning about the amazing works of the late sculptor Marie Uchytilová (1924-1989), especially her masterpiece “The Memorial to the Children of Lidice," it became easy to see why a growing number of people are inspired by her. Yet she should be much better known and more celebrated than she is at this time.

Is the lack of recognition of her powerful creative contributions to humanity because of her gender, or due to her national origin of Czechoslovakia? Or might it be because humanity is still committing in so many different ways the atrocity she documented through her great historical work? Whatever the reason may be, the overwhelming evidence of the artist’s singular accomplishment speaks for itself. The minimal credit allotted her implies a case of guerrilla decontextualization by omission.

The “Memorial to the Children of Lidice” is also sometimes referred to as the “Memorial to Children Victims of War.” On days such as the United Nations’ Human Rights Day, or Day to End Racism, or World Peace Day, it can be difficult to think of such children. They’re the ones who never lived long enough to fight for their rights. They never got to present humanity with whatever unique gifts of creative vision, persuasive leadership, social influence, or scientific aptitude they may have possessed.

What can be most difficult, when thinking of them, is that we have made such little progress since the horrendous massacre (part of an act of retaliation ordered by Adolph Hitler) that occurred on June 10, 1942, in the Czech Republic village of Lidice, not so very far northwest of Prague. That massacre which “The Memorial to the Children of Lidice" documents so hauntingly.

Intensified Brilliance

One of the great miracles of those who sacrifice everything––as Marie Uchytilová did––for the sake of creating an enduring masterwork of consciousness-raising art is that their voices always manage to reach hearts eager to hear what they have to say. What Uchytilová’s voice had to say to this author’s heart inspired the creation of the quotation artwork posted with this essay.

Someone might very well rummage through hidden details of her life and come up with reasons to challenge my assertion that the gifted sculptress deserves greater acknowledgement than has been granted. I would, then, still have to contend that while one might choose to dismiss her, it is hardly possible to imagine ignoring the intensified brilliance of the souls of 82 children emanating from the bronze splendor of her tribute to them.

Aberjhani
© Human Rights Day 2015
Bright Skylark Literary Productions

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Moving Forward with Hope and Determination: Conversations with the World 105

Keeping Hope Alive on Social Media

Aberjhani
Co-author Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Creator of the Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle Collection

Sustaining the Sweet Joyful Howl of Poetry in the 21st Century

Of Bloggers and Nobel Laureates

A Movement Designed to Inspire

Despite the Cacophony

Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The Promise

Giving Hope and Compassion a Chance in 2016

The Bridge of Silver Wings

The Haunting Splendor of Marie Uchytilová’s Memorial to the Children of Lidice

Intensified Brilliance

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Moving Forward with Hope and Determination: Conversations with the World 105

Keeping Hope Alive on Social Media

AberjhaniCo-author Encyclopedia of the Harlem RenaissanceCreator of the Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle Collection

Sustaining the Sweet Joyful Howl of Poetry in the 21st Century

Of Bloggers and Nobel Laureates

A Movement Designed to Inspire

Despite the Cacophony

Painting Poems and Living History at the Jepson Center for the Arts

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine​

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company​

The Evolution ofPhotographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty ​

The Promise​

Giving Hope and Compassion a Chance in 2016

The Bridge of Silver Wings

The Haunting Splendor of Marie Uchytilová’s Memorial to the Children of Lidice

Intensified Brilliance

Aberjhani

Archives

Categories

Aberjhani
Co-author Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance
Creator of the Silk-Featherbrush Artstyle Collection

Sonic Revelations Painted Abstract Divine

Claude Monet and Esteemed Company

The Evolution of
Photographer Jack Leigh

Mickalene Thomas and the Art of Honoring Beauty

The Promise