Slam+Poetry

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The most obvious poetic device that Taylor Mali uses in his poem "The Impotence of Proofreading" is malapropism. He constantly uses malapropism to outline his message: proofreading is important (not IMPOTENT as it states in the title). This is the only poetic device he constantly uses- the poem is not rich in metaphor or anything else. The theme of this poem is how important it is to go over your work, and not rely on other people for what happens. This is shown as a metaphor in the poem, when he talks about how spell check doesn't always work, the same rule can be applied to many other areas of being. I chose this poem because I liked the message it gave- how you are responsible for your own future. I like the cleverness with which the 'mistakes' were made- like how he replaced Yale with Jail and Princeton with Prison and also 'English teacher' with English torturer'. Of course, it was also very funny :)