Aberjhani's Blog: Notes of a 21st Century Digital Scribe, page 4

Art and Words Make an Exceptional Kind of History

(Official Postered Chromatic Poetics for Aberjhani’s Bright Skylark Literary Productions ©2022 with copy of 2022 Flannery O’Connor Review ant detail from “Closer to Where You Are.” Art on cover of FLOCR titled “Sermon in the Valley of Broken Angels” by Aberjhani.) Regular readers of this blog may recall I previously stated my non-fiction book, Greeting Flannery O’Connor at the Back Door of My Mind, was only one part of a planned trilogy of creative works to address the layered complexitie...

Acknowledging Achievements and Fine-tuning Aspirations

(Dancing the Gratitude Tango art meme by Aberjhani ©2022 for Bright Skylark Literary Prods) Pandemics, wars, racism, and climate change have ways of derailing some of our very best stated intentions. Start-ups fail to get started. Planned families get put on hold. Dream vacations remain dreams to be pursued another day.

While my Bright Skylark Literary Productions has taken more than a few unsettling hits of its own this year, I’m grateful for what has been achieved up to this point. Moreo...

Conversations with the World 110: Some 2022 Thoughts on Love and War

"Some 2022 Thoughts on Love & War" art graphic meme by Aberjhani. During a month when many were celebrating humanity’s treasured capacity for expressing love, the ruling oligarchs of Russia convinced themselves the brutality of bombs, bullets, rape, and highly-sophisticated campaigns of misinformation could somehow erase one historical truth and replace it with another. On other pages of this same defining period, far-right American extremists continued to allow fear of an imagined future,...

Unexpected Freedom: Juneteenth and the Novels of Robert T.S. Mickles Sr. (part 2)

[image error] As America observes Juneteenth 2022, the word freedom means a lot of different things to people all around the world. To Ukrainians fighting against Russians to preserve the sovereignty of their homeland, it means battling against overwhelming odds to defend both themselves and advocates of democracy. To climate change refugees, it implies a global acknowledgement of their plight and what their dilemma means, or should mean, to all people. In the United Sates, for many students, the word ...

The Jazz Factor: Chronicling Legacies of Black Artists in Savannah (part 3 of 3)

(“Luther and the Coming of Light No. 3” digital art by Aberjhani ©2022) One of Luther E. Vann’s greatest sources of artistic inspiration was the music of jazz. Viewers of his paintings sometimes attempt to describe a certain fusion of impressionistic and expressionistic energy experienced when looking at his work. It may very well be the same energy the painter experienced when imagining himself in a room with Thelonious Monk seated at one piano and himself at another, the two of them trad...

Laureates and visionaries: Chronicling legacies of black artists in Savannah (part 2/3)

"Luther and the Coming of Light No. 2" digital art by Aberjhani)
In his introduction to section two of Luther E. Vann’s Elemental the Power of Illuminated Love, contributing writer Bill Dawers makes this statement:

“Even those already familiar with Luther’s work are likely to find the images collected here startling. (Doubly startling, I imagine, since so many of the works are still in the collection or the artist.) Certain thematic and structural elements are visible across the decades––th...

History and Erasure: Chronicling Legacies of Black Artists in Savannah (Pt. 1 of 3)

"Luther and the Coming of Light" digital art by Aberjhani C2022)
​Introduction .he last thing I expected to find myself writing about as we moved deeper into the year 2022 was a 3-way war between Russia, Ukraine, and professed defenders of democracy around the world. But write about it I have on the LinkedIn website as well as here at Bright Skylark. Hopefully, the articles have made it clear one of my primary concerns regarding the war has been the brutal erasure of history and culture...

2022 Seasons of Compassion Mindfully Considered

Compassion and a pocket poem for National Poetry Month and International Jazz Day. ​It is possible the concept and practice of compassion have never been more consequential than this 2022 moment in world history. Yes, the war and apparent attempted genocide in Ukraine does make the need for greater applications of mindful compassion obvious enough, but so do many relatively recent 21st century events leading up to it. The heartbreak in Afghanistan, the racial re-awakening in the United Sta...

Why Genocide in Ukraine Matters to A Black Poet in America (Pt. 2 of 2)

(“Wings & Poems for Ukraine No. 3” artwork from War in Ukraine series by Aberjhani ©2022)
 Once underway, Russia’s “special military operation” immediately brought to mind all the most inhumane atrocities human beings have committed against other human beings. Mainstream media groaned about how nothing like it had been seen on the European continent since World War II. For me, the specific tools and strategy involved to carry out the slaughter were less significant than the intent to commit it.
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Why Genocide in Ukraine Matters to A Black Poet in America (pt. 1 of 2)

(“Wings & Poems for Ukraine No. 2” artwork from War in Ukraine series by Aberjhani ©2022)The dream, for a Black man living in the U.S. southeast, was a strange one to have during Thanksgiving week in 1991. Within it, I was standing in front of a large map of Europe. On the map, what was then called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) stood out prominently, as if the printed surface had been embossed. Images of its fabled neighboring nations–– Poland, Turkey, Germany, France, Sweden, a...