1 June 2004. Today is my first full day back from my trip to visit the Atlanta Poets' Group, then my brother Sherm and his wife Pat in Florence, South Carolina. I had to get up fairly early to return the rental car. I jogged back home to keep to my routine of jogging every two or three days. Then I had to take care of getting my failing refrigerator looked at, then replaced when it turned out it'd cost almost as much to fix as to replace (with the second-hand refrigerator I replaced it with). Not really a busy or active day, but I'm beat. Hence, another short entry here. My subject is complex enough for several books, but I'm going to be good for a few cocktail-party-level comments about it, for now. Personality. I've occasionally reflected on my own personality lately with respect to my poems, particularly my solitextual poems, which seem to me to reveal either an extraordinarily limited aspects of my personality, or a full personality with just about nothing to it. What strikes me most is how often I seem to repeat thoughts and/or language in my poems.

Or do I? To find out, I just printed out the eleven poems about my alter ego, Poem, that Mary Veazey published a month or so ago on the Internet. Too limited a sample to tell much from. I fear that the rest of my Poem poems reveal little more about me, though--not that there are that many of them. Anyway, these contain significant amounts of sardonicism, love of nature, regret, pure sensuality, solitariness, passiveness (I just noticed that Poem is just about never doing anything!). . . . A kind of sense of humor plays a role, I think, but is only once overt. Several of the poems mock Poem, none make him look particularly good--unless as evidence of how honest his creator is with himself, if he really is.

The poems seem mainly about (1) achieving oceanic feelings in commonplace or coarse surroundings; (2) the meaninglessness of existence; (3) loss of a loved one; (4) healing or adjusting to loss; and (5) poetry. Needless to say, these are all very standard themes in poetry. Needless to say, I consider themes close to irrelevant in a poem--excuses to use poetic techniques to discover majesties of sight and sound and the other sensory modalities into the poem's recipient. This makes the objects in a poem--which are particularities of its subject matter--important, but as sensual elements, and doors to sensual elements, in a design much more than anything else. Here, though, I'm considering my personality, not my poems. It's psychology, not poetics.

Not that the personality behind a poem has no effect on the range of what the poem will achieve as a poem. A limited personality cannot culminate in a poetry of genuine size, though it can culminate in major intensities. I think my poetry has sometimes found ways to the latter, but I want it to have size, too.

I've also wondered about personality, in general, when discussing Shakespeare on the Internet with fellow Shakespeare-buffs. Bardolators are bothered by my notion that there are only six to eight characters in his plays. My own plays may have only three or four. Which leads to the question of just how many different characters there are in the real world. Of course, we're all as different from one another as snowflakes are different from one another, but how significantly different from one another are we? I think of how minor the differences are between cats, however they delight me, and I've never thought there was that much or a jump from cats to human beings.

According to one website (Humanmetrics) I was recently at, personality can be reduced to what readings on four Jungian scales are. Here's what the site says: "According to Jung's typology all people can be classified using three criteria. These criteria are: Extroversion - Introversion, Sensing - Intuition, Thinking - Feeling. Isabel Briggs-Myers added fourth criterion: Judging - Perceiving.

"The first criterion defines the source and direction of energy expression for a person. The extrovert has a source and direction of energy expression mainly in the external world while the introvert has a source of energy mainly in the internal world.

"The second criterion defines the method of information perception by a person. Sensing means that a person believes mainly information he receives directly from the external world. Intuition means that a person believes mainly information he receives from the internal or imaginative world. "The third criterion defines how the person processes information. Thinking means that a person makes a decision mainly through logic. Feeling means that, as a rule, he makes a decision based on emotion.

"The fourth criterion defines how a person implements the information he has processed. Judging means that a person organizes all his life events and acts strictly according to his plans. Perceiving means that he is inclined to improvise and seek alternatives.

"The different combinations of the criteria determine a type. There may be sixteen types. Every type has a name (or formula) according to the combination of criteria. For example: ISTJ (Introvert Sensing Thinking Judging); or ENFP (Extrovert INtuitive Feeling Perceiving).

A test at the site identified my personality type as INFJ. I took little stock in it because one must answer each question either yes or no; I would have answered most of them 40% yes, 32% no, 28% I dunno, or the like. I have many other problems with the theory that I won't go into now. What is relevant to my discussion, such as it is, is the idea of just four qualities defining a personality. It may be true. If so, one can't expect a poet's output to express much variation of personality, or the characters in a play to vary much from one another.