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 wanted to focus my found poem on the black injustices and police brutality going on in America. The discrimination and racism shown towards people of color has been an on going issue in Americafor hundreds of years. People of color has had to face many obstacles such as slavery, Jim crow, segregration, lack of rights for centuries. In modern day, the injustices that people of color face has to stop since it is becoming more of a life or death matter.
In order to create this poem, I wanted to highlight a fraction of the black people that were killed by police officers. In order to do so I had to get a list of these people and from there I just pulled out a few names from the list and added the reason for why they were killed. I added the reasons to emphasize that no matter what we do, people of color will continue to be targeted and killed for basic human actions, unless there are actions taken to stop police brutality. My found poems highlight the names of these victims similar to the way the Black Lives Matter symbol is with the black background and white writing, and also uses bold and italics. All of these tactics were used to help convey the idea of taking action to end discrimination.
I created my found poem based off of the song “Scars to Your Beautiful” by Alessia Cara. My method for creating this poem was to shape it as an hourglass. The figure that is seen as ideal in society is an hourglass figure. If a girl doesn’t have that they are seen as “not good enough”. This makes it so that girls think the body defines who they are as a person. I decided to start the top line with the beginning of an eating disorder. It starts with a mirror or an image. Then in the middle of the hourglass I went into what society deems as the perfect women. Their body is sculpted whether by plastic surgery or photoshop. There is nothing wrong with plastic surgery unless someone says that that is their natural look. Then it becomes a problem and girls compare themselves to that image. At the very bottom of the hourglass I used words that are the aftermath of the societal views of women. Girls start to starve themselves and have internal scars because they don’t feel that they are beautiful.
While writing this poem I felt a lot of emotions. I personally suffered from an eating disorder (and still do though I am trying to recover from it). I had anorexia and this affected me physically and mentally. I would look at Victoria Secret models and think “I have to look like them or I will never be loved by a man” or “this is how I have to look”. These words like “hunger”, “pain”, and “hurting” all brought back the emotions I felt. I feel like these words are not just ones that I can relate to but words that affect so many of the girls and women in society.
I decided to do my found poem based on lyrics from M and M’s song “Mockingbird” because there always seemed to be an eerie tone to the song that I wasn’t the biggest fan of. For me I wanted to show the parts that were most disturbing to me like the breaking of the mockingbird’s neck and the part about the mom being gone for only the moment. I personally don’t feel like I used the space in the poem for any specific reason when I originally did this but now the space on the page could represent how he feels separated from his daughter and her cousin. I didn’t feel anything while putting the poem together but now that I am writing this it makes me feel emotional. My dad who passed away last year fought and lost a battle with a disease that slowly made him feel separated from society and even his family for close to 10 years. Even though it doesn’t seem like M and M doesn’t seem to deal with this disease my dad did I can see similarities in their situations.
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/.
I wanted my found poem to be on something that I could relate to, so I chose to do my poem on the song, “See You Again” by Wiz Khalifa. This song was written and dedicated to Paul Walker. Paul Walker passed away in 2013, and many people were affected by his death. Dealing with death is a very difficult thing to go through and this song portrayed the feelings of grief and gave hope.
For my poem I wanted to leave a lot of blank space on the page to emphasize the meaning of the words on the page. I also chose to block out some words and to make some of the words bolded. Where I blocked out the word from the sentence it was to make the words around it stand out more. The words that have been bolded are also meant to stand out and be important. The bolded words are very important to me because they emphasize how real and long term death is. While writing this poem I felt very sad because I could relate to this song. My best friend passed away unexpectedly last year, so I know what it is like to lose someone you never thought you would, and so suddenly. Doing this poem has definitely helped me to understand ZONG! because when I first looked at these poems I felt like they were just words on a page, but now I realize that all of the separation and blank space has meaning to the poem.
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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.
My found poem primarily focuses on the song “This is America”, by Childish Gambino. The central message of the song is about gun violence and police brutality within America. As I continued to work on the poem, I developed heavy feelings of sadness and anger due to the injustices faced within our generation today. I specifically chose this song in order to compare it to Zong! as they both display a lot of strong and powerful emotions. For instance, I highlighted my poem’s introductory verses in different colors to create a sense of imagery. The lyric “hunnid band” is in green as it resembles the ideology of money and wealth, and the lyric “contraband” is in red as it resembles a warning or crime. I also bolded repetitive lyrics like black men as it represented the significance of the struggle African Americans face. I felt the usage of repetition within the song was like Philip’s writing style in Zong! as it resembles the importance of how language is used and how it can represent a central idea of a lyric or story. Another strategy I did was I spaced a lot of the words far from one another in order to allow the readers to process the seriousness of the lyrics and allows the readers to take a quick pause and be able to feel the emotions the author is conveying. In addition, writing this poem made me realize it is not that simple as it seems. Every story has a central purpose, and it takes a lot of effort and time to display that idea effectively. Philip’s techniques are very unique within her poems as it develops a sense of creativity by the usage of strong word choice and grammar. I feel that after creating my own found poem it allows me to have a better understanding of how much work goes into this type of writing and why Phillips chose this strategy to write her poems in Zong!
