Category: Found poems

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By Chloe Fiore Del Vecchio

I have chosen to do my found poem on the article “raped, pregnant, and denied a lifesaving abortion-all at 10 years old” by Debbie Sharnak. The article focuses on this 10-year-old girl in Paraguay who was brought to the hospital with stomach pains. The doctors quickly realized that this discomfort was due to the fact that she was 21 weeks pregnant. This pregnancy was a result of having been raped by her stepfather. As I continued to work on this poem, I felt strong feelings such anger and rage over this violation of natural human rights. How even after such horrific circumstances she is denied the rights to her own body which will only make her face more horrific circumstance, ones that a ten-year-old girl should never face. She should be the one playing with dolls not providing her child with them. Not that I am necessarily pro-abortion, but I do believe that women should have the right to do what she chooses with her own body. Whether you are pro-life or pro-abortion you can clearly see that especially in this case it is essential for there to be exceptions. You cannot expect a ten-year-old to be a mother especially after being this innocent victim, these are not the problems anyone in adolescent should have to endure. At some point you have to ask yourself will saving the life of the fetus prove to do more harm than good, is it worth it for both of the mom and fetus’s sakes? What subsequent life could a ten-year old provide for herself let alone provide for a child, a child is incapable of raising a child. Not only is she unfit to mother a child but this pregnancy itself is high risk for someone at such a young age which can put the ten-year old’s life in jeopardy. This little girl is forced to live with this grief whilst also having to deal with an unwanted pregnancy.

As for my method of creating my poem, I started with taking the entire article and copy and pasting it into a word document. From there I proceeded to go through and delete the words I perceived as unnecessary to my found poem. I took inspiration from Zong!, I went through and used different techniques such as spacing, different fonts, different text sizes, italics, and underlining. I used all these techniques to shed light on particular parts of the poem. While creating this poem I used different techniques for different reasons. For example, I used underling for mostly the main points. I ended up making words I saw as powerful or deep larger.  I also used different spacing mostly to break up different thoughts or ideas. Creating this poem definitely made me realize how much effort M. NourbeSe Phillip put into each and every page in Zong! It also made me realize just how much more powerful what’s not on the page or what else is on the page is besides the actual words.

 For my found poem I chose to focus on the rise of hate crimes against Asian Americans. Since the start of the COVID-19 Pandemic there has been a record high of 2,800 hate crime incidents against Asian Americans since December 2019. In 2019, Federal hate crime statistics showed that hate crimes involving Asian Americans were at their highest level in over a decade. I decided to focus my poem on this topic because I have seen videos and articles on social media of some of the attacks and the brutality that was involved in some of them. The attacks I have seen have made me angry and it makes me upset to see helpless elderly Asian people be attacked for no apparent reason. These violent attacks are a crisis in our country, and something needs to be done to stop them from rising. 

I chose to begin my poem by highlighting the surge of attacks happening against Asian Americans.As I was reading the article, I found many ways Asian Americans have said they were attacked and put those ways in a descending order, so it catches the readers eyes. I also put 4 reported attacks that were in the article to really show that Asian Americans are going through a crisis and are fearing that they will be the next victim of a violent attack. Throughout the poem I also bolded and capitalized many words I thought were important and should be emphasized to show the reality of what’s happening in our country involving Asian Americans. I thought by ending with a quote from a victim of one of these hate crimes would bring out an emotional response from the reader.I was shocked while working on my poem, especially when I was reading about certain cases where Asian Americans are attacked at random and realizing this is happening to people of such old age who are doing nothing wrong. I realized that creating a “found poem” is much more time consuming than I thought. Now I understand why it took so long for Philip to write Zong!. 

Madison Scheuneman

Recently a six-year-old black boy was arrested in North Carolina for picking a tulip at a bus station the charge being injury to real property. When reports of this were made public there were so many disturbing facts that were released such as his lawyer having to give him a coloring book and crayons to keep him occupied, his feet not being able to touch the floor, and the fact that his mother was not allowed in the courtroom with him. The court case was dismissed, but the article that I used to create this found poem entitled “6-Year-old Boy Arrested for Picking Flower at Bus Stop” quoted Lyana Hunter, his lawyer, saying “the earlier you introduce a child to the criminal justice system, the higher the chances are that they will remain in the criminal justice system.” This quote was something that filled me with a lot of sadness and anger because at only 6-years-old this boy’s chances of being stuck within this so-called system of justice have risen when they were already high considering the way in which this system targets black men specifically. Because of this deeply emotional reaction to this quote I wanted to conclude my poem with it as a way to get readers to look to the gloomy future that this boy will face due to the experience and his race.

In order to create this poem, I plucked words from the article to try to draw a parallel between the flower pulled from the ground, and the boy being pulled from the bus stop into a cop car. I also wanted to emphasize the boy’s identity as a six-year-old kid who happens to be black and male because his identity was a key factor in his arrest and will be for the rest of his life. It’s a sad fact but being a black man will not get any easier for him moving forward, which is something I wanted to acknowledge in this poem. To try to mimic what must have been a disorienting experience for this boy, whose name I was unable to find anywhere, I took a page out of M. NourbeSe Philip’s book and chose to play with the white space and the placing of the lines on the page. I also found myself drawn to the repetition Philip uses in Zong! as a means of emphasis as well as a way to force readers to acknowledge the truth of the situation. Writing this poem, which focuses on a very politicized topic, especially after reading Zong! only deepened the idea that all poetry, and art in general, is political with the intent to bring people to a common understanding rather than drive us apart.

Lindsey Branigan

I decided to do my Found Poem about Daunte Wright, an innocent twenty year old black man and father who was killed when he was pulled over for traffic violations and was unlawfully and fatally shot by a police officer. The police officer was reaching for her taser but instead pulled out a gun. I chose to do the found poem on this topic of police brutality and police killings because although it upsets me beyond belief, I am passionate about the fight against it. In the last week and a half alone, there has been the killing of Daunte Wright and also of Adam Toldeo, a thirteen year old boy who had his arms raised and his back against a wall. These shootings of innocent people are heartbreaking, and the microaggressions I hear everyday make my blood boil. Besides the point, with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, it is important for all of us to know their names, know their stories, and speak out against police brutality and police killings.

The way I created this found poem was I found the article and I pasted it into a Google Doc. From there, I started to block out all of the words that I didn’t want and I was going to keep it like that; However I didn’t like the look of it. I then took the blocked parts out entirely and moved the words around on the page with inspirations from Zong! and other poem books that I have read such as Fourtunate by Kim Rashidi and The Last Time I’ll Write About You by Dawn Lanuza. I then made some of the words bold, italicized, and underlined for importance. This poem was pretty time consuming, so I can only imagine how much time Philip takes on her poems in Zong! when it took me much longer than I thought it was going to take to just complete this poem. Philip purposly goes against what is considered “normal” and uses her own sense of language in her writings, which is something I can say I have never thought about until now after reading Zong!.

Erin O’Sullivan

My found poem focuses on the victim of the Brock Turner case and the horrible, recurring issue of rape culture in society. Brock Turner, was a white student who attended Stanford University and raped an unconscious woman, Chanel Miller, behind a dumpster on campus. He was sentenced to six months in jail and was released after only three months. The outcome of this case enrages me and illustrates the idea of white privilege. Brock Turner did not fully face the consequences due to being a white, wealthy male. I decided to focus my found poem on the victim’s statement that she read out in trial.  

While creating my found poem, I took what I found to be the most important parts of the victim’s statement and arranged it in interesting ways to make the reader understand the poem I created. I used different techniques such as leaving spaces, capitalizing and changing the color of certain words to red. By capitalizing words, I felt that I was able to truly emphasize the importance of them. I turned certain words red that I felt were negative and illustrated the damage that was done to Chanel Miller. Another technique I used was leaving spaces after parts that I felt were powerful. This helps the readers pause and really understand the importance of these words. Something else that I felt was necessary was listing everything that Chanel Miller lost after she was sexually assaulted. While writing this poem, I was not only angry at Brock Turner, but I also felt extremely sorry for Chanel Miller. It is so sad to see the pain that Chanel Miller faced. After creating my own found poem, I have come to appreciate and understand M. NourBeSe Philip’s style of poetry more. It looks like a simple type of poem, but I realized that I takes a lot of time, effort and creativity to create these poems. The different techniques Philip’s uses in her poems are extremely powerful and I give her a lot of credit in being able to create an entire book full of these poems. I feel that after making my own found poem, I can understand this type of writing more. Philip’s purposely goes against the norm and creates these very powerful poems.  

Katherine Ferguson

I used the answers that Donna Rotunno, Harvey Weinstein’s lawyer, gave during an interview with the New York Times. What I did to create my found poem was cut the sentences that were said into fragments and individual words. I did this to emphasize what I feel were the most important parts spoken during the interview. I also put spaces in between the words and fragments of the sentences. The spaces that I put reflected the pauses that I feel were necessary so that the important parts were all separately analyzed by the readers. I also decided to underline, bold, and change the color of the text for certain words.

As I was working on the poem, I feel like I was becoming angrier the more I would break down what the lawyer was saying regarding sexual assault. The Harvey Weinstein case alone frustrates me but the more I analyzed the interview the more angered I felt about how the lawyer spoke on her client in a positive way and the victims who were women in a negative way. What I had learned from this experience is that even though you are copying and pasting the words from another source there is still so much thought and time put into found poetry. I also learned that although there may not be many words the emotions you are trying to convey still come across strongly. It did help me think about Zong! in a different way because I feel like I can understand the process and language better since I have now done it. I also understand why Zong! took such a long time to complete as M. NourBeSe Philip has explained because this one page took me a longer time than I had expected.  

The article that I picked to base my found poem on was a BBC article that expressed pro-life ideals and reasonings. My method in creating this poem was that I deleted text and moved the remaining words around the page until I was satisfied. I decided what specific words to use by which I was drawn to as the most impactful in nature. Using the space on the page, I clustered some words for a more desperate feeling, while others were almost excluded on the further right side of the page. What I was feeling while working on this poem was a sadness about the issue of abortion still being unresolved and a slight optimism for the future by the conclusion. I learned from this experience that taking words from an opposing source and shifting them into a new expression creates a strong feeling of satisfaction and happiness. This helped me to think about language in a different way, a way where the words listed can be shaped and nothing is set in stone.