First Blog Entry

My name is Josh Sharlow. Most girls call me Josh; most guys call me Sharlow. I'm a senior here at SLU majoring in Psychology and minoring in SSES. I originally wanted to go to school for business management, but being a liberal arts school, there isn't much of a focus on business here. So my next choice was psych. I find many of the topics in different psych classes to be very interesting and as a psych major, I find myself evaluating and analyzing everything in my life. I don't plan on really doing anything with my psych degree; it's more of something to fall back on if I need it in the future.

I was born in Miami, Florida but I grew up in Norwood, New York, which is about 20 minutes from Canton, just outside of Potsdam. It's a very small town - smaller than Canton - and it's a rural area, as most areas are around here. After I graduated high school back in 2003, I took 3 years off from college and moved to Miami to live with my Aunt and get to know my father's side of the family as I had grown up my whole life with my mother and her side of the family. Miami is as different from Norwood as you could imagine - city life is much more fast paced and crowded than life here in upstate New York. When I lived in Miami, I was working in South Beach and was living in Miami Beach. Life was good. For different reasons, I moved back up here in late 2005 and talked to the basketball coach here about playing college ball. The paperwork got sorted out and I began attending SLU in the fall of 2006.

I love playing sports. Basketball, soccer, football and baseball. It's been a major part of my life since I was toddler. I watch a lot of movies and I listen to a lot of music. Hip-hop has had major influences throughout my life. The music, the culture, the whole lifestyle. It seems like I relate to and learn from rappers more than I do from teachers and professors. Poetry is one of the foundations of hip-hop. Spoken word is a beautiful and powerful art that gives rappers and other artists the ability to share their experiences with the world. I hope to learn more about the history of spoken word and poetry in this class.

I haven't taken very many literature classes in college so I don't really have any experiences with getting feedback on my work. In high school, we covered a poetry section in my English class and the feedback I received on during then I found to be very helpful. The more positive and negative feedback you can get on poems and written work, the better your final product will turn out to be.

I listen to many hip-hop related poets such as Saul Williams (who I think is coming to SLU in the spring), The Last Poets, and Gil Scott-Heron. I have a strong background built on Jazz and Soul music, so I'm fan of a lot of old school artists as well as the new young & talented artists. Also, there is an HBO show called Def Poetry created by Russell Simmons which spotlights both up and coming poets as well as established, famous poets and allows them to recite their poems and literature on a grand stage for the world to hear. There is so much untapped talent that the show has been able to expose the world to and I have been a big fan since the first episode.

I probably sound like a broken record as I keep mentioning my musical influence in relation to poetry, but through this class, I hope to learn about things like rhyme schemes and word choice when writing lyrics, or how to be effective with delivery and vocals involved with spoken word.

I ultimately want to have a more thorough understanding and a deeper knowledge of everything to do with poetry when May rolls around. That'd be ideal.