Cover of first edition of I MADE MY BOY OUT OF POETRY featuring original art by celebrated New Orleans and New York artist Gustave Blache III . Recently I found myself on the verge of crossing over from ambivalence into guilt due to the amount of time and creative energy devoted this year to online journalism and other forms of prose-writing as opposed to a more luxurious immersion into the rich flow of poem-making. There were actually at least two instances in 2012 when I managed to combine the genres: the first came in February when writing about the death of WhitneyHouston and the second came, ironically enough, in August when writing about the life of one Michael Joseph Jackson. Although the poems included with the stories can stand well enough on their own, the fact that they were generated by journalistic concerns instead of employed as an initial means to a necessary end in themselves made me feel somewhat negligent. After all, where journalism was concerned I had ...

                        Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney . (Reuters photo by Jim Young) Supporters of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney at this point can claim with some justification that the media’s treatment of his “47 percent” comments, made at a private fundraiser in May in Florida, fall solidly in the category of guerrilla decontextualization. Yet, of all those powerful men and women who might have flocked to Mr. Romney’s defense in the wake of the PR nightmare that followed, only his running mate Paul Ryan did so with any kind of half-way convincing persuasive immediacy. Many former allies of Mr. Romney are now in fact performing that odd horizontal shuffle called “distancing” that politicians sometimes do so well when the word “stigma” threatens to attach itself to a colleague.  Such tends to be the case whether said colleague is wealthy, powerful, handsome, ugly, or none of the...

Visitors to Creative Thinkers International in many ways are as much a part of the community as our members because they help validate the value of our purpose for being here. We have not kept track over the past five years of where all of them are but our friends at Google Analytics have provided a simple snapshot of the 70 neighborhoods where last month’s visitors were when they dropped in.   For the full list and blog please click the link : Love and Gratitude from Creative Thinkers International - Welcome to Creative Thinkers International

Web surfers who have written about Aberjhani, translated works by him, or shared links to various posts of his work began to experience something unprecedented in early September 2012. It happened while performing an advance Google search on the term “author-poet.” In addition to the expected search return of well-known classic authors and poets who fall into this category, the query unexpectedly generated the above image of various historical and contemporary authors described as: “Authors frequently mentioned on the web.” There between William Butler Yeats and Edgar Allen Poe was the famous photograph of Aberjhani taken by celebrated photographer John Zeuli. Others included William Shakespeare, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, James Joyce, and Charles Bukowski. Please click below to view image and read the full post : Authors Frequently Mentioned on the Web - Bright Skylark Literary Productions