Category: Found Poems

Hi guys! I just want to start and say thank you to those who read my found poem, especially to those who took time to comment! I really did enjoy this assignment.

I choose this page out of The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, to do my found poem on. If you’re familiar with the novel, you are aware of Daisy Buchanan’s hopes for her daughter. In her conversation with her cousin, Nick, she states, “I hope she’ll be a fool – that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool” (21). I personally believe that women are born to be so much more than this. Daisy believes that ignorance is bliss; she wants her daughter to grow up in a perfect world, unaware of the hardships she is facing in society. However, with this attitude, Daisy is prohibiting her daughter from becoming a stronger woman in society. In order to overcome boundaries, we must not be ignorant to the issues and hardships around us. The original page is rather degrading to women, boiling them down to be “beautiful little fool[s]” (21). The world has changed since this novel was written (based in the 1920s), and for the better. Slowly but surely, womens’ voices are gaining more power in society.

I wanted to embrace the idea of Daisy’s daughter being empowered and defying societal odds, rather than just being a beautiful toy in soicety. I focused on turning this page around, and enjoyed doing so. This poem is created to give Daisy’s daughter a powerful voice. I believe that women are born in this world to be powerful and force a greater change in society, which is why I focus on how she will show the world this success. Women are advancing in society, thus gaining a voice and defying odds. The line, “Her voice had been a trick of some sort,” portrays the idea that the daughter is ‘tricking’ this ancient idea that men have the upper hand in society. Her voice is acting as a trick because she is able to speak and gain a sense of self in this world. I tried to create a poem that was the exact opposite of the original passage in order to juxtapose these two ideas of how women are portrayed in society.

Hey everyone! My poem is based off of a news article that was written about my friend Paige that died in a car accident this past summer. Paige was the passenger and Bri, her best friend, was the driver. Their other friends were in a car ahead of them so Bri tried to catch up to them. She ended up going double the speed limit and crashed head on into another car. Paige died at the scene and Bri ended up in the hospital for two weeks with non-life threatening injuries.

I chose to do a poem on this because everything about the situation bothers me. Why did this have to happen, why did it have to end up with such an amazing person loosing their life, and why was such little justice brought to the situation. I’m not here to put my two cents in about who is guilty or anything in that manor. I’m here to bring awareness to the fact that people really do just turn their head instead of speaking up for what is right due to age, gender, race etc. If the driver was older, this case would have ended way differently.

I cut out words that made me feel a way no one should feel. A feeling of anger and sadness. I hope this poem has the same effect on all of you that are reading this.

I chose to make my poem using the famous song “B*tches Ain’t Sh*t” by Dr. Dre. The song is extremely degrading to women, yet I know a lot of people (both males and females) who will happily sing along with it. I took the lyrics that were glorifying taking advantage of women’s bodies and demeaning women and manipulated them to a point where it became a poem about a woman who finally took a stand. She chose to leave the man who treats people in this way, and he ends up being the one who is hurting.

The rapper who sings the original verse calls himself Kurupt. I used this word as my title as well because I feel it can truly define part of what is happening in the poem. Synonyms for the word corrupt include dishonorable, untrustworthy, deceitful, shameful and scandalous. The original lyrics of this song support and almost encourage multiple guys taking advantage of “hoes” every night, which can be defined as dishonorable at the very least.

Hi, everyone! I’d like to say thanks to those who take the time to read and comment on my poem. It always amazing to me how a person can do something, seemingly without thinking, yet the final product is able to have so much meaning. That’s really what happened when I was creating this. I could probably write a scholarly article length essay about the meanings that manifested in this piece, but I will try to keep it short.

This poem is created from an article about the Kim Kardashian-Jameela Jamil social media feud over the promotion of “detox” teas. Jamil, an actress from The Good Place, called out several of the Kardashians on Twitter for advertising this kind of thing in an attempt to alert them to the dangerous way they are influencing young girls. The article explains that the “detox” teas are not FDA approved, and research has revealed that they are essentially filled with laxatives and will not actually help anyone lose weight in a healthy or sustainable way.

If you pay attention to nothing else, please take note of the words that repeat and how they almost hauntingly hang around teenage girls.

Hi everyone! I chose to do the poem based off and article from Press Herald. The article talks about the different points of views from different groups of society and law enforcement. There has been a huge dispute in the past fifty years about police brutality and the rest of society. I chose this poem because I grew up with a family full of law enforcement. It is hard to see my family and a lot of my friends to be looked down at because they are cops, but I can see why society might think of them in a negative way. My family and friends have treated everyone with respect no matter the color of their skin, affiliations, religious beliefs, etc. So this poem becomes important to me to not only get one side, but both.

To talk about the poem, the red represents society and how they perpetuate law enforcement and the blue is how the law enforcement perpetuates society. I set up the poem as an explanation so the reader can see the positives and negatives of both sides and understand why my title is, what it is. I feel as though there is a huge misunderstanding and social media/ the news channels do a really good job dividing that line. The hyphenations are there primarily for the reader to slow down and read it word for word and understand the words or phrases. I did not want the reader to fly through the poem and try to understand it as a whole, which is what I think is wrong with our society. I wanted the reader to be able to sit there and take it how she/ he wanted to and try to understand both sides.

Hi guys! I choose to make my poem out of lines from the song “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke, which was a crazy popular song in 2013 despite the controversial views of the song. The lyrics give off a very concerning attitude towards sex and consent. The phrase “I know you want it” is repeated numerous times, and is the chorus of the song.

I did not include every line of the song, but I put the most “uncomfortable” phrases on the page. The term “blurred lines” refers the to the unclear boundaries involved in sexual activities. I found the phrase, “You the hottest bitch in this place” very offensive since he refers to females as bitches which is very dehumanizing to females. The song speaks about a controversial topic the is very prominent nowadays.

Hey guys, I wrote my found poem on a News report titled “Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes rose 3 percent in ’17, FBI finds”(Fitzsimons). I decided to write the poem on hate crimes against LGBTQ people because the world is changing vastly and so are peoples sexualities. People should be accepting of all kinds of people- by race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity…etc. The world has changed greatly since our parents and grandparents generations and perceptions need to start changing also. Hate crimes are increasing by year considering more and more people are coming out as gay, bi-sexual, or transgender, but the opposite should be happening. The rates of people expressing their sexualities should increase while the rates of hate crimes should diminish.

There are many ways to look at and read this poem- which this idea of course came from Nourbese Philips Zong! . If you look at the poem in a whole page view you can see the words in the shape of the word HATE. But then when you look closer each letter of the word HATE is sort of a short poem. Certain words are repeated throughout the poem to make the words more powerful. Some of these words are “targeted” “anti-” “crimes” and “LGBTQ”. The poem is overall negative but by the time you get to the bottom of the page I ask for change- “Why cant we just love?” The population of gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, transgender, gender non conforming people…etc is increasing rapidly with a percent of 4.5 in 2017 (Fitzsimmons), so why cant we just open our minds and change with the world. And even if people don’t like gay people or lesbians why must we express it through hate crimes. Like my mom always said “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all.” Its not that hard!

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Hey guys! My poem is titled, “We The People” and it’s inspired by the preamble. The preamble is the foundation for the constitution and basically covers all the main points as to why the constitution was written in the first place. Although the constitution promotes ideas such as liberty, justice, and an army that provides for the countries well being,  it’s clear that we live in an unequal place. The preamble promotes all these great ideas, but they are not followed through with. As we know from our studies in class as well as what happens in the world daily, there is still racial inequality among minorities. So, I decided to do a poem based off of the preamble, all the great things we as citizens are supposed to abide by.

I repeated the phrase, “we the people” to emphasize how Americans claim to follow the ideas of the constitution but don’t. In addition, I used repetition to show how “we the people” is a statement that excludes certain people. At the bottom of the poem, there is an image of a line with an “X” next to it. This is supposed to resemble what Americans might as well sign to and what they are basically already agreeing to. The format of the poem is the stanzas going downward, which is supposed to represent how America’s equality is slowly going downhill. Creating the poem was actually a lot more difficult than I anticipated and I also didn’t want to offend anyone who feels strongly about America’s constitution. Bringing words together in order for it to be logical and clear is difficult. I liked this exercise however and look forward to making another found poem in the future.

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Hi guys! For my Found Poem I used the lyrics from Billie Eilish’s song “when the party’s over” which is about a relationship that she realizes is not good for her and decides to try to distance herself from said person. I decided to white-out the parts of the songs I wasn’t interested in to try to blend into the paper. For the lyrics to look like they were never on the paper compared to if they were blacked out, emphasizes my acceptance of the words gone rather than the anger that would follow with a black marker. I wanted to make a point to avoid the scribbles from a marker and use lighter strokes with the sponge from the white-out. This allows the tone of the poem to switch from angry to embracing being out of the relationship. I tried to make it simple as I kept in punctuation to keep words separated and clauses clear. It is also supposed to be read top-down and left to right. It’s supposed to be comprehensible and flow like it was once a song but also make sense when one picks out the words to create a similar meaning but different perspective.

The point I’m trying to make throughout the poem is similar to the song’s original meaning. My interpretation of it though, followed along the lines of a friendship that ended badly and was problematic. As you can see, I used white-out on every single line except for one that reads, “Call me friend but keep me closer (call me back)” which for the most part lies in the middle of the poem. The intended meaning of this line is referring to the quote “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer”, which juxtaposes with the lyric that one person calls the other their friend but treats them badly as if they were an enemy. The poem I made out of these song lyrics are supposed to relate to the song’s original purpose of being in a toxic relationship to a different experience with a friend treating you badly for too long. It’s supposed to express that you can move on and avoid walking on egg shells forever.

Hi everyone! For my found poem, I decided to base it off an article of the recent college admissions scandal. My inspiration for where to place each sentence and word was mainly based off of the disorganization of “Zong”. Although my found poem is easier to read than Zong, I still tried to arrange the words and sentences in different places, where I thought they made the most sense. The main word in the found poem that I tried to incorporate in different places is “guarantee” because these families involved thought that everyone for their children was guaranteed until the truth about the scandal came out to the public. Also, I decided to put “The Unspecial Olympics” in the center because it is making a jab at the group of parents and people that are able to provide for their families but would rather cheat their way into a good university.

The message I am trying to send through this found poem is that the college admissions scandal was a very corrupt way of getting privileged, rich teenagers into the college of “their choice”. I say “their choice” because they only chose the school that would make them and their family look good. Many students who applied to universities like USC, UCLA, Stanford, Georgetown, Yale, Wake Forest, the University of Texas at Austin, University of San Diego, etc., could not get in because of the families that bribed their child’s way into a good education, limiting other students throughout the country of not getting into their top schools. The found poem I have created is meant to show how nothing in life is guaranteed, especially when you are willing to take a gamble this big.