this blog is inspired by the movie that thing you do. every time this movie comes on tv I literally sit there and watch the whole movie for a 30 second scene, which is one of the ten scenes here. liv tyler's lines in that 30 seconds stick with me every time! I also admit dear reader that the color purple appears more than once in this list. if I thought about it I probably could have catalogued 10 scenes from the color purple alone! :O for your reading pleasure…
1. God is trying to tell you something – the color purple
2. you a liar and you a cheat – the jacksons: american dream (check in at 3:00)
3. thousands of kisses – that thing you do
4. follow the drip – house party
5. kills your brain cells, son. – lean on me
6. When you figure out you want to spend the rest of your life with someone you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. – when harry met sally
7. the last scene of fatal attraction
8. did I ever ask you for anything?! – the color purple
9. "sista" – the color purple (including "harpo, who dis woman?"
10. proud mary – what's love got to do with it?
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Tuesday, April 15, 2008
Excerpt from CS Mag Cover Story
Here is an excerpt from the CS Mag Cover Story, March 2008. I'll post the full version of the article in June.
Hear Me Say…
by: Amy Jacobs
Spoken word artist Amena Brown finds her voice in unlikely places
“Are you a night owl?” Amena Brown asked as we exchanged a string of e-mails in hopes of finding time to talk. She’s a night owl – and there’s good reason. Amena juggles work as a spoken word artist, a music journalist, a poet, and still manages to hold down a corporate America day job. So, a phone interview at 11:00 p.m. was a matter of necessity – quite frankly, there aren’t enough hours in Amena’s day.
While we spoke at length, Amena probably should have been packing her bags for the back-to-back conferences where she would be speaking and performing during the next few days. Instead she gave me her undivided attention as she told me what it is to be Amena Brown.
BEYOND THE RHYME
Amena is most commonly known for worshipful poetry she’s written and performed at gatherings such as Passion and LeadNow conferences. Her gift for spoken word led her into the thick of ministry, but that was never Amena’s intention. She simply loved poetry, and was willing to walk through each door God opened.
Amena’s mother instilled in her a love for words, and from a young age she found writing to be her greatest form of self-expression. Years later, as she sat in Atlanta coffee bars and clubs, Amena was exposed to a world of performance poetry that changed her life. “I encountered so many people who are great poets. I heard people who are darn good at what they do, people who knew how to say what they wanted to say. I was inspired,” she shares.
Week after week as she looked around the places she went to hear poetry, she saw people crammed into rooms, shoulder to shoulder. Amena noticed that the audience came seeking something – they wanted to hear truth. The topic didn’t matter as long as someone spoke with conviction and talked about the truth of his or her life. “When I realized that’s why people come to these clubs, I remember telling God that I wanted to go into rooms like this and share who He is,” Amena recalls. “Maybe the audience would identify with it and eventually respect that it’s true.”
Although she comes from a heritage of ministry, Amena never had any ambition of performing in church. In her world, people who performed spoken word did it for the love of poetry. Sure she might write a piece of poetry about God, but she would perform it where all the poets were, not necessarily for a congregation of believers.
Today, most of Amena’s Christian audiences want to hear her poems, and lately she’s been asked to perform and lead breakout sessions at conferences. “From what they hear, they think I’m a worship leader,” Amena says. In her eyes, she’s far from being a worship leader. She’s just sharing a gift God has given her, and she’s as likely to do that in a smoky bar as a church.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Made the slam team!
it's 1 am and i should be asleep. monday awaits. but i couldn't let the night pass without blogging. :) the java monkey slam finals were tonight and i made the team along with gypsee yo, chas, and shannon leigh, with bryan patillo as slam master. it was all in all a night of great poetry. from the sacrificial poets courtney and jon goode, to the final round.
shoutouts!: thanks to kimpossible, tim, kwajelyn, celita, ashley, drea, my lovely sister keda, my beautiful mom jeanne, kyana, jon goode, gypsee yo, ebony janice, byron, asha, and myra for showing a sista so much love and support.
this is my third try at making the java monkey team and through the process i have learned that slam is a tricky thing. it's not something to base your value on as a poet. it's a competition, it's numbers, scores, strategy, with a lil entertainment mixed in. i like it because it challenges me, pushes me to take my work and my performance to another level. so at the end of the whole thing you gotta feel good about what you do, about what you say, and at least be able to walk off stage proud of yourself.
kudos to each poet that made it to the finals, the abovementioned and a.p., mista funn, chiara, lady, and stefen. i'll keep you all posted on the prep for nationals.
shoutouts!: thanks to kimpossible, tim, kwajelyn, celita, ashley, drea, my lovely sister keda, my beautiful mom jeanne, kyana, jon goode, gypsee yo, ebony janice, byron, asha, and myra for showing a sista so much love and support.
this is my third try at making the java monkey team and through the process i have learned that slam is a tricky thing. it's not something to base your value on as a poet. it's a competition, it's numbers, scores, strategy, with a lil entertainment mixed in. i like it because it challenges me, pushes me to take my work and my performance to another level. so at the end of the whole thing you gotta feel good about what you do, about what you say, and at least be able to walk off stage proud of yourself.
kudos to each poet that made it to the finals, the abovementioned and a.p., mista funn, chiara, lady, and stefen. i'll keep you all posted on the prep for nationals.
Monday, April 7, 2008
10 Quotes about Poetry
I wrote my first book of poetry in the fourth grade. mrs. perry’s class. mrs. perry was a large woman, jovial with glasses thick like microscope lenses and curly salt and pepper hair that had better body than many of the chicks in the pert plus commercial. it was January and we had read poems and quotes about dr. king.
mrs. perry armed us with white copy paper, markers, crayons, colored pencils and freed our eight year old minds to write poems and draw our own illustrations. once we had written the work, we did what we had no idea many writers must do. we self-published. we were responsible for writing, illustrating, binding, and coming up with cover art. my friend porsha had the genius idea of using old hand towels as the cover. my hand towel had a blue butterfly spread across it which matched perfectly with the electric blue duct tape that would become the book’s spine.
mrs. perry encouraged something that my mom had started in me before I was born. a love for words. mrs. perry’s book assignment showed me the power of not only honoring my own words but that words can be a gift that you leave for others. like an inheritance. today, I don’t have that blue butterfly hand towel or the duct tape, but I’m still writing, illustrating, packaging, hoping that someone will happen upon these words and find encouragement in them. in honor of national poetry month…ten quotes about poetry.
1. Writers don’t write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don’t. ...If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.—Nikki Giovanni
2. I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others.-- Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin]
3. But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents. – William Carlos Williams
4. All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, ’Something’s wrong, let’s change it for the better.’ – Sonia Sanchez
5. One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
6. The trouble with America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy. – Louis Kronenberger
7. My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all. – John Lennon
8. I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. – Pablo Neruda
9. At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet. – Plato
10. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. – Gertrude Stein
mrs. perry armed us with white copy paper, markers, crayons, colored pencils and freed our eight year old minds to write poems and draw our own illustrations. once we had written the work, we did what we had no idea many writers must do. we self-published. we were responsible for writing, illustrating, binding, and coming up with cover art. my friend porsha had the genius idea of using old hand towels as the cover. my hand towel had a blue butterfly spread across it which matched perfectly with the electric blue duct tape that would become the book’s spine.
mrs. perry encouraged something that my mom had started in me before I was born. a love for words. mrs. perry’s book assignment showed me the power of not only honoring my own words but that words can be a gift that you leave for others. like an inheritance. today, I don’t have that blue butterfly hand towel or the duct tape, but I’m still writing, illustrating, packaging, hoping that someone will happen upon these words and find encouragement in them. in honor of national poetry month…ten quotes about poetry.
1. Writers don’t write from experience, although many are hesitant to admit that they don’t. ...If you wrote from experience, you’d get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.—Nikki Giovanni
2. I always write a good first line, but I have trouble in writing the others.-- Molière [Jean Baptiste Poquelin]
3. But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn’t declaim or explain, it presents. – William Carlos Williams
4. All poets, all writers are political. They either maintain the status quo, or they say, ’Something’s wrong, let’s change it for the better.’ – Sonia Sanchez
5. One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
6. The trouble with America isn’t that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy. – Louis Kronenberger
7. My role in society, or any artist or poet’s role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all. – John Lennon
8. I grew up in this town, my poetry was born between the hill and the river, it took its voice from the rain, and like the timber, it steeped itself in the forests. – Pablo Neruda
9. At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet. – Plato
10. Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry. – Gertrude Stein
10 Questions about Making the Band Season 4
first of all dear readers…clearly a sista has fallen off of her top ten game. I’m finally back at it and for my top ten negligence you will receive two back to back top ten lists. that should set us off right. and now the top ten…
so I get hooked into a couple of reality shows. america’s next top model. flavor of love (I know, I know…the first step to getting help is admitting you have a problem! LOL). and diddy’s making the band. I stayed caught up on this show until the season finale. inspired by vibe mag’s 20 questions here are ten questions I had about this season of making the band. things that make you go hmmm…..
1. is day 26 a good band name? 2. is donnie’s album ever gonna come out? 3. do you want to go to the dollhouse? 4. doesn’t aubrey look better without all that extra hair and lashes? 5. don’t you really want to say b---a--ness? 6. is bryan still rocking the clippered eyebrows? 7. how did diddy calculate that b----a--ness is down 15%? 8.. is b----a--ness down a notch because gas prices are so high? 9. didn’t danity kane turn out to be a good band name? 10. was anybody really feeling it at first?
so I get hooked into a couple of reality shows. america’s next top model. flavor of love (I know, I know…the first step to getting help is admitting you have a problem! LOL). and diddy’s making the band. I stayed caught up on this show until the season finale. inspired by vibe mag’s 20 questions here are ten questions I had about this season of making the band. things that make you go hmmm…..
1. is day 26 a good band name? 2. is donnie’s album ever gonna come out? 3. do you want to go to the dollhouse? 4. doesn’t aubrey look better without all that extra hair and lashes? 5. don’t you really want to say b---a--ness? 6. is bryan still rocking the clippered eyebrows? 7. how did diddy calculate that b----a--ness is down 15%? 8.. is b----a--ness down a notch because gas prices are so high? 9. didn’t danity kane turn out to be a good band name? 10. was anybody really feeling it at first?
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