Tuesday, June 11, 2013

If words were weapons

Here's one of the most interesting personality quizzes that I've ever seen: If words were weapons, which poet would you be?

I don't know if there's any valid data being tapped to align your personality with that of great poets, or if the results are randomly generated. In any case, the questions, framed as part of the application process to some organization, are a little out of the ordinary, both amusing and thought-provoking.

Also, I love the use of spider graphs to illustrate the composition of the psyche (and I say this as someone who uses a lot of spider graphs in her workaday life).

I'm Kathleen Raine, "a promising new poet with enormous assertiveness and a willingness to take calculated risks" — a poet I'd never heard of before today. A selection of her poems is available online. Other poet types include Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot ("one of the organization's most admired and feared poets."). Who are you?

It turns out that this quiz is part of the marketing campaign for a novel, Lexicon, by Max Barry. It's classified as science fiction:

Students harness the hidden power of language to manipulate the mind and learn to break down individuals by psychographic markers in order to take control of their thoughts. The very best will graduate as poets: adept wielders of language who belong to a nameless organization that is as influential as it is secretive.

Read the full description on the publisher's website. Consider me intrigued.

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