Category: Found poems

College

                     New experiences

                    New people

                    New surroundings

                                                               When? When will it happen?

                                                                  When? When? When?

First few months

Be ready.

First few months

                                   Who’s to blame?

                                   Drugs and alcohol?

                                   Peer pressure?

                                   Or the attacker?

                                                                  1 in 5 women, 1 in 5 women, 1 in 5 women

GeTtoKNOWsOmEoNeWELLbEfOrEsPeNdInGtImEALONEwItHhImOrHeR.

BeAWAREofyouralcoholordrugINTAKE.

BeawareofyourSURROUNDINGS.

GoToPaRtIeSoRHANGOUTSwItHFRIENDS.

                                     NO EXCUSE

                             FIND THE SOLUTION

1 in 5 women.

1 in 5 women.

I chose to write a poem on sexual abuse in women, particularly in college. College should be an amazing time of new experiences meeting new people, and finding new opportunities and career paths. However, many women go into college with fear because sexual assault is very common within the first few weeks of their first or second semester of their first year of college. This issue is extremely horrific because the fact that there needs to be so much information of prevention, help etc when you step on campus shows that there is clearly a huge problem with sexual assault as it is so common and expected to happen. Why can’t this problem just be fixed? Because it is seen as so common and normal and that needs to change. Hearing excuses to prevent sexual assault such as “Go to parties or hangouts with friends” or “Be aware of your drug and alcohol intake” infuriates me because when you’re in a new environment such as college, you often are meeting all new people, you don’t always have past friends, and how can you really trust new friends? Of course it is important to be aware of your drug and alcohol intake as a safety factor in general however this should be an excuse for sexual assault. More action needs to be taken on this topic and it truly disturbs me that 1 in 5 women experience sexual assault within their first experiences of college.

https://www.womenshealth.gov/relationships-and-safety/sexual-assault-and-rape/college-sexual-assault

By Caroline Donnelly

She asked for it

She should have not been wearing those slutty clothes

She should have not gone out at night

She was alone 

She never said she didn’t want to have sex 

Where were her friends?

She was flirting with me 

Never once did she say she was afraid

She should have been happy I choose her

She is lying for the attention

I thought she liked it rough

He Never Asked 

I choose to write my found poem on the multitude of articles that I have seen over the last couple years about what people say about women who come forward as rape victims. I think it needs to needs recognized that not all rape victims are women and not all rapists are men. But unfortunately a majority of the victims are women and the majority of the rapists are men. This topic is so important to me because all women that I know in my personal life have suffered some form of sexual assault. The majority have not been raped or even violently attacked but they all have been groped, pinched and slapped by men and even other women. It is horrible that we as a society are no longer surprised or even concerned when a woman is catcalled or casually groped by other people. It is horrible that women are taught from a very young age skills to protect themselves against rape and men. Nighttime is never safe for women expect when we are in a crowd of other women and even then there is still fear. The point of this poem is not to instill fear in other women but to show everyone what almost every women has gone through their whole lives. This topic is extremely frustrating and angering to me but I will continue to speak about it till my last breath to help inform other people.

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I chose to create my found poem about disability discrimination and rights. I felt like it tied in well to what we have learned throughout this course about racial equality. It makes me mad whenever I see someone treated differently just because of something that they cannot control. Reading this research article made me upset when it said that women reported more sexual abuse as well as physical abuse.

I arranged the words in the best way to get the message quickly and efficiently to the reader. The hardest part to me for this assignment was figuring out what made me feel upset. Once I did it was pretty easy for me to figure out how I wanted the poem to be setup. This assignment also made me realize that its hard for me to think about a piece of work that makes me feel mad or upset.

Dammeyer, Jesper, and Madeleine Chapman. “A National Survey on Violence and Discrimination among People with Disabilities.” BMC Public Health, BioMed Central, 15 Mar. 2018, bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-018-5277-0.

I wrote this poem based off of the lyrics of the song “Love The Way You Lie” by Rihanna and Eminem. I found this song making me mad because the lyrics describe a toxic, abusive relationship. I did not like how this song was very catchy because it will make people sing about a toxic relationship. The abusiveness in this relationship goes to the point of describing the threat of burning someone alive. I do not like the idea of that at all because it is murder and is horrible to think about.

I rearranged the lyrics to make it into a happy poem. This poem describes a person in love as if they were writing this poem for a significant other. I used certain lyrical lines in the song that were happier and put them together to describe a happy moment or moments in a relationship. At the end of the poem, it says “love you” twice to specify how much the person loves the other. I spaced the lines out to emphasize the certain lines in the song that were happy and to show how much this person loves and cares for the other.

I chose to create my poem about the horrific accident in 2006.  The article “‘WHERE’S KATIE?’ CRASH MOM RECALLS GIRL’S GRUESOME DEATH by Kieran Crowely” is what I based my words i n the poem on. That night a wedding party was traveling by limousine when a car went into oncoming traffic killing 7 year old Katie Flynn and the limo driver. When i first learned about this incident I was in my law class studying murder trials.  I was overwhelmed by this story and the fact that Katies head was not attached to her body.  The driver Martin Heidgen was drunk driving on the Meadowbrook parkway which is very close to where I live.  I was sick to my stomach with this story and I can’t begin to imagine how the Flynns felt.

I chose to use repetition of words like “Katie’s dead,”  like Zong uses and create the overall effect that this 7 year old innocent girl got her life taken from her. I also repeated “ .28” as Heidgen was severely over the point of being intoxicated.   He killed two people that night and impacted many families.  This is an unspeakable tragedy and I chose to limit the amount of words I picked from the article to show how unspeakable it is. To add to how sad this is I used the word “flower girl” spaced out like Zong does because she was on her way home from a wedding where she was the flower girl.

I did my found poem of the song “Black or White” by Michael Jackson. I listened to the song over and over again while I wrote a list of words and phrases that I wanted to put into the poem. After I came up with the list, I put the words and phrases on the paper and moved them around until I was satisfied with how it looked. I did this song for this poem because it talks about how it doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, as racism is still a problem today. The song lyrics that stood out to me that Jackson said was “I had to tell them I ain’t second to none” and “… I told them about equality and it’s true, you’re either wrong or right”. These lyrics show that everyone has their own opinion on what equality is and if someone has a different opinion on equality, they are right. This song shows that people are tired of racism and that it needs to end. Jackson says in this song “I’m not going to spend my life being a color”, in other words, racism needs to end and it needs to end now. This song made me feel sad and also angry because racism is still such a big issue still today. After listening to this song several times in a row, I picked out more information that I didn’t necessarily see before like when Jackson says “it’s not about races, just places, faces”. Overall, I think that I got more out of the song after listening to it several times and it made me think about racism in a somewhat different way.

I picked the song “Goodbye Earl” by the Dixie Chicks because as a kid I always thought the song was catchy and funny but didn’t really know the true meaning behind the song until later on. Listening to this song now makes me upset knowing one in four women experience domestic abuse in our country.  After doing a little more research about the song, I found an article that talked about how after playing “Goodbye Earl”, some radio stations would play a message for victims of domestic abuse and a hotline they could call. 

When looking over the lyrics, I wanted to make sure I emphasized a few things in my found poem in particular. I emphasized/ bolded the lyrics anytime they mentioned ‘she’ or ‘her’ because women in particular face a lot challenges on a daily basis and have the highest rape, domestic abuse and sexual abuse percentages than anyone else.  I also decided to isolate ‘dark glasses’, ‘long sleeved blouses’, and ‘make-up’ to emphasize some of the things women use to not only hide bruising or scars but to hide other insecurities too. We as society might not even notice that someone is going through such a terrible hardship such as domestic abuse because of it being hidden. 

bobbiejean87@gmail.com. “’Goodbye Earl’: The Story Behind The Chicks’ Controversial Hit.” Wide Open Country, 15 Jan. 2021, www.wideopencountry.com/goodbye-earl-story-behind-song/.