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!
