Late-day Randomness...

What's your personality?

You are an ENTP!
As an ENTP, you are Extraverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, and Perceiving.
This makes your primary focus on Extraverted Intuition with Introverted Thinking.

This is defined as a NT personality, which is part of Carl Jung's Rational (Knowledge Seeking) type, and more specifically the Inventors or Visionary.

As a weblogger, your love for a discussion may cause you to debate things more often. You might also flit from idea to idea, not completing one before going to the next. Your largest sense is intution, which makes you a good at understanding what is going on around you - and this could act to your benefit when making blog-like posts over a journal.

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Human for Sale

You are worth exactly: $2,120,594.00.

We hope you can find somebody who is wealthy enough to afford you.

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Tony Brown has an interesting column this week "on political poetry and the sins committed in its name." Some good stuff, one point in particular that I think I'll bring up in tonight's show:

The problem as I see it is that a lot of poets seem to think that talking about the revolution is all it takes to make them revolutionaries.

It has more to do with the idea that the phrase has become, for much of our audience, a phrase that immediately evokes certain images. Each person who hears the word “revolution” in a poem goes somewhere – for some, it’s an immediate rush of recognition and approval; for others, it’s a turn off, maybe even a fear based thing; and for others, it may create a feeling of “been there, done that – here’s yet another ‘revolution’ poem”.

And there are those among all of these groups of listeners who may never really hear the poem, as a result. They go to the place the phrase takes them, and stay there, not hearing anything new and exciting in the poem. Use such a phrase too often and it’s almost as if the phrase becomes dead, in some way; barring poets who can take it and breathe life back into it, it eventually becomes a cliche, a slogan.

He classifies this type of work as "sloganeering, the use of phrases and abstractions that evoke immediate sympathy or emotion in the audience, but which really tell you very little about the situation at hand in the poem." I completely agree.

Years of running the slam at the Nuyorican should give Keith Roach, in particular, a lot to say about this subject!

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Congratulations to Oscar Bermeo for taking food out of my kids' mouths winning the 2004 BRIO Award for Poetry! Seriously, though, if I couldn't win it, he's one of a small handful I can sincerely bow to for receiving the honor.

Of course, I'm fully expecting him to buy me a couple of celebratory beers once he gets the check!

Woot!