5 Quotable Poet Quotes You Can Take with You into the Year 2015

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#BlackLivesMatter, #QOTD, Aberjhani, African American poets, African-American authors, American Authors, American poets, Authors frequently mentioned on the web, Best Quotes of the Year, Black History Month, books, Books excerpts, contemporary poets, famous authors, famous poets, famous quotations, famous quotes by famous people, National Poetry Month, Quote art, quote graphics, Quotes for New Year's Day, Quotes for New Year's Eve, Typographics, World Poetry Day

If you’re one of the people who were convinced at the beginning of 2014 that the Quotable Poet had given up on poetry for good raise your hand. Yeah, it looked that way to a lot of us.

Then the year kicked off and the QP got down to business posting and pubbing all the different things he’s about as a writer. Halfway through the year he published the long-awaited Journey through the Power of the Rainbow that’s blazing across the net. He pumped out no less than 5 additions to his Text and Meaning essay series with one aimed straight at Michael Jackson’s XSCAPE album. He paid tribute to literary heroes Clement Alexander Price, Eugene B. Redmond, Coleman Barks, James Baldwin, Henry Dumas and Maya Angelou.

The turn back toward poetry looks like it started with the elegy for artist Allen Fireall and picked up again with the big splash in Poetry Life and Times. It looked like that was gonna be it for a minute. But word is he’s in the new Black Gold poetry anthology he wrote about in “‘Tis the Season for the Magic of Poetry”. He doesn’t say so in the article but check out the contributor names on the back cover graphic and there his name is at the top of the first row. He’s been pubbed in a lot of anthologies but kicking off the year 2015 with new poems in this one is a good follow-up to the essays published in 2014 about #BlackLivesMatter and the whole excessive use of force by police thing.

So what are the quotes you wanna take from 2014 into 2015? They’re lined up right here…

1.

“Fear feeds on fear. On either side of a potentially violent conflict, an opportunity exists to exercise compassion and diminish fear based on recognition of each other’s humanity. Without such recognition, fear fueled by uninformed assumptions, cultural prejudice, desperation to meet basic human needs, or the panicked uncertainty of the moment explodes into violence.”
–Aberjhani (from 7 Ways to Help Replace Legislated Fear with Informed Compassion)

 

2.

“Your loyalty locked around my trembling ankles
like enigma stamping shadows on Mona Lisa’s smile.”
—Aberjhani (from Ode to the Good Black Boots that Served My Soul So Well based on original quote graphic from http://quozio.com/)

3.

“Shine your soul with the same egoless humility as the rainbow and no matter where you go in this world or the next, love will find you, attend you, and bless you.”
––Aberjhani (from Journey through the Power of the Rainbow, typographic quote art by Life Reflected on Twitter)

4.

“Authentic inspiration endows individuals with mental or spiritual energy which they are then able to transform into positive action. It can make all the difference between a man, woman, or child allowing despair to permanently paralyze any dreams they may have for their lives, or, exercising sufficient strength of will to make those dreams a reality.”
––Aberjhani (From Journey through the Power of the Rainbow, quote graphic from AZquotes)

5.

“Guerrilla decontextualization usually involves partial truths made to look complete. It goes beyond simple defamation of character or slander because it sustains an entire culture devoted to manipulating public perception for the sake of financial, political, or social gain.”

— Aberjhani (from Putting Text and Meaning to the Guerrilla Decontextualization Test cell phone mobile quote graphic from recitethis.com)

If you got some fresh quotes you think should’a been included feel free to add them in the comments or put ’em in a message.

MS/25

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March 2014 Quote of the Month and Words for World Poetry Day

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9/11, Aberjhani, African Americans, American poets, Authors frequently mentioned on the web, Black History Month, books, Bright Skylark Literary Productions, Creative Thinkers International, CTI, famous poets, famous quotations, famous quotes, global village, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow, language, literature, modern poets, National Poetry Month, New Millennium poets, Ning networks, Poetry, qouotes on rainbows, quotes for Easter, quotes on survival, social networks, The River of Winged Dreams, Whatsapp, words, World Poetry Day

“The language of the rainbow is a lexicon of light devoted to concepts of faith, unity, hope, endurance, and joy.”
–from Journey through the Power of the Rainbow by Aberjhani (graphic courtesy of Bright Skylark Literary Productions)

Why no poem of the month for February 2014? Because most of us were waiting to see if the announcement that Creative Thinkers International was going offline on February 5 was true. Turns out it was. To us that was a serious Black History Month 2014 moment all by itself.

Investing close to 7 years into building a community from 1 member to a humanitarian organization of more than 500 is not easy to do. But it happened because the Quotable Poet opened the doors of the CTI Initiative after 9/11 to basically everybody willing to share positive vibes with the world. It wasn’t the kind of thing you can compare to Whatsapp with its one-million-people every day sign-ups because it wasn’t just about selfie culture.  It was about making things like bullying, starvation, wars, terrorism, and generally not-giving-a-f*ck go away.

CTI went offline once before but then made a great comeback with new member sign-ups and fresh blogs, photographs, and video posts every other day. The question now is can it do that again? The Quotable Poet did not say straight up that it would but in his last blog post on the website this is what he wrote:

“The need to take one central outpost of the CTI concept offline while continuing to examine the best ways to maintain and further extend its legacy does not mean an end to the resilient singing heart of CTI. It means a metamorphosis–– like that undertaken by the caterpillar which wraps itself in a cocoon before transforming into something very different from what it was–– is in progress.” ––Aberjhani

This can mean a lot of things and maybe that’s his point.

You might have noticed that the quote used at the beginning of this post doesn’t come from a poem in The River of Winged Dreams or Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black. It’s a preview from the collection of quotes Journey through the Power of the Rainbow and might not be from a poem at all but it’s all about hanging in there and toughing it out to see what happens next.

MS/25

2013 in Review Kicking off the Quotable Poet 2014

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Authors frequently mentioned on the web, Authors on Wordpress, creative writers, cultural arts, famous quotations, famous quotes, Internet news, literary arts, National Poetry Month, poets on the Internet, political thinkers, popular New Year 2014 websites, popularlinks, Quotable Poet, the quotable poet, WordPress, WordPress Blogs, World Poetry Day

This is cool WordPress, THANK U, and thank you everybody who checked out this site. We shook the blog up some in 2013 with posts on classic creative writers and political thinkers who influenced the Quotable Poet in some way. Now we’re kicking off the New Year 2014 with a previous poem of the month format. The title for January is Miguel upon the Sand Dunes of Ecstasy and Hell .

MS/25

 

 

 

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,900 times in 2013. If it were a cable car, it would take about 48 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Book Buzz of the Quotable Kind

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Aberjhani, Adam Lambert, celebrities on Twitter, LL Cool J, National Poetry Month, popular quotes, popular tweets, Twitterverse, World Poetry Day

Preview cover of “Dare to Love Yourself as If You Were a Rainbow” book of quotations by Aberjhani. (Cover courtesy of Bright Skylark Literary Productions)

Nobody here is going to say they didn’t see a QP book of quotes in the works because this blog has kind’a been SUGGESTING THAT for the past 2 years at least. The only real surprise with the announcement from Bright Skylark Literary Prods is that the book’s not a done deal already. Check it out: The Buzz on the Pages in Progress

The cover is kickin’ but is this one a permanent deal or what? The title is a big surprise that makes a lot of sense because that one quote has become such a viral standard. The tweets from Adam Lambert and  LL Cool J put it even more out there than it already was.

The always cool LL Cool J sharing love with the Twitterverse.

 

The story doesn’t say anything about when the book might happen. What it is claiming is that the book will have more quotes by the QP than you can find on the Internet on sites like Ranker and Dominus  (strange how none of his quotes are on BrainyQuote or ThinkExist… anybody know what’s up with that?)  

The thing about the increased number of quotes could be possible. But the bet some are making is that the book itself is going to have a lot more than quotes and do a show and tell on why one quote in particular became the title of the book.

Glam prince Adam Lambert showing Tweeters some love.

 

 

MS/25

 

 

Translating the World of the Quotable Poet

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Aberjhani, angel poems, Black History Month, haiku poetry, Han Chinese, Hong Kong, International authors, International Poets, literary translations, microblogging, National Poetry Month, photography, poetry translations, World Poetry Day

(Sculpture of musical angel seraphs from “hkdcsh” photography blog)

Check out Google search results for translations of titles by the Quotable Poet and you get big numbers on product pages selling his books in different countries but what you don’t get are translated editions of the books themselves shifted from English to anything else.  For the man who founded of Creative Thinkers International and an author with the world’s best-selling Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance that seems kind’a odd. But that’s the way it is and anybody who knows different can comment or email and break the news to us.

But on the flip side…translated quotations, essays, poems, and articles by QP Aberjhani keep piling up on the Internet. You can find quotations from his work in everything from Arabic and French to German and Korean and some of everything else. But the spotlight at the moment is on translations for two of his angel poems: Angel of Earth Days and Seasons, and Angel of Peace. If you clicked those links you saw Han Chinese translations by Hong Kong bloggers (not to be confused with espionage hackers talked about on the news) on the Qing and Sina microblogging networks.

Screenshot of microblogger Han Chinese translation of “Angel of Earth Days and Seasons.”

There’s a big Asian tradition of writing and reading haiku so that might be why they’re into these poems right now but it could also be because the QP makes a good Black History Month subject. What’s really interesting is how different bloggers are dishing out their own translated versions instead of just re-blogging a single post. This is another one for:  Angel of Earth Days and Seasons .

PART 2 King of Pop Michael Jackson

Probably the first time anybody translated an online piece by the Quotable Poet was right after King of Pop Michael Jackson’s death when the QP posted “To Walk a Lifetime in Michael Jackson’s Moccasins.” That jam ended up in all kinds of global vernaculars, including Greek, Romanian, French, Italian, and maybe a lot more.

It don’t take much to figure out it mostly had to do with the fact that up until then not a whole lot of well-known authors were publishing positive articles about MJ. Quotable Poet Aberjhani made it personal and set a lot of records straight in the process. He kept that going through a series of articles and poems, including Work and Soul in Michael Jackson’s This Is It and Looking at the World Through Michael Jackson’s Left Eye.  Translations of these a couple of years ago were mostly in Spanish and German but they used to be around in Italian and Portuguese too.

Screenshot of Hong Kong microblogging page featuring Han Chinese translation of angel haiku poem by African-American author Aberjhani.

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2012 in Review for the Quotable Poet

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Aberjhani, boeing 787 dreamliner, book reviews, famous poets, helper monkeys, National Poetry Month, poem of the day, poem of the month, Poets We Love to Quote, quotable poetry, quotable poets, quote of the day, quote of week, quotes, quotes of the year, silver surfer, World Poetry Day

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. This is MS/25, the Silver Surfer’s long lost twin, saying thank you and a new post on the 5 Best Quotes of 2012 is coming up in just a few minutes.

Here’s an excerpt:

The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner can carry about 250 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,700 times in 2012. If it were a Dreamliner, it would take about 7 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.