Shihan: Flashy Words

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9A_k6Sj-Pg

Observations and thoughts:

1. Extensive vocabulary.

2. Uses ambiguous pronouns to tell stories. "He said......she lost hope."

3. "And I swear to God if I could swear to God I'd ask her" is an interesting take on how often we throw around the phrase "Swear to God".

4. He also refers to God as a woman, probably because we often use male pronouns to refer to God by default. He's playing with assumptions in language.

5. "Pupils become pupils." stood out to me as a nice piece of wordlplay.

6. He invokes a classic nursery rhyme about words when he starts to quote "Sticks and Stones."

7. It is almost impossible to keep up with his incredibly fast delivery.

8. He gets the audience pumped up at the beginning like a concert.

9. He uses a lot of repetition.

10. He makes use of wild hand gestures. A very enthusiastic performance. You can hear the passion in his voice.


11. A random subjective experience that colored my vision of this poem: A few months back I was critiquing all different sorts of poetry with my friends. As a joke, I created this fake poetry jam persona, because I've seen a lot of terrible poetry jams. The intentionally atrocious poem I came up with on the spot as a parody revolved around peace. It contained a line that went something along the lines of "If you piece the pieces of peace together" and another that said, "Peace is a piece of the pie..the American dream...what we're all fighting for..a contradiction." (Insert bongos here.)

Unfortunately, as much as I like Shihan's poem, I can now never take his line "Piece together piece of pieces, peace within me." seriously, because it will always make me think of the most trite thing I could come up with at some party.