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!.
Hi Lindsey, I thought you did a nice job on creating your poem. This story touched many people and the topic of police brutality and unjust killings of Black people is one of the most talked about things in the media.By making some of the words bold, italicized and underlined it shows the importance of these words and puts emphasis on them.I also liked how your poem read as a story and put the events in order to how they happened.These police killings are happening very often and the way this one happened was so shocking.By underlining and bolding the word “Remembered” it shows that these killings should never be forgotten and society has to always know that this unjust killing of a Daunte Wright took place along with so many other Black people being killed by police.