Intro to multicultural literature

By: Lily Latham

For my poem I chose to focus on the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”. From first glance of the song, it is not clear why this song would be offensive or wrong but it becomes clear when looking into the lyrics with more thought. The listener realizes that the lyrics seem creepy with the man almost forcing the woman to stay as she wants to leave. This disturbed me because it seems like rape, even if the lyrics were not meant to be creepy when they were written.

The poem is designed to look like a snowflake. This is important to the poem because it came from the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”. The three parts of the snowflake, the left, middle, and right, represent three aspects of personality. These are the id, ego, and superego. In psychology, the id is like the devil on someone’s shoulder and the superego is the angel. The ego is a good mix between the two with conflicting ideas on both sides. The left side represents the superego and the thought of why the woman should leave the man’s house. The right side of the snowflake represents the id, which is the man telling her all the things to make her stay. The center line of the snowflake represents her conflicting thoughts between the angel and the devil on her shoulders. She is conflicted on whether or not to stay because of her id and her superego, which is why she says maybe another drink and continues to stay.

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For my found poem, I elected to rearrange the lyrics to the song, “Love Me,” by Steven Moses. Altogether, the song is about promoting the use of opioids, and also the false feeling of love that can be created while intoxicated. I chose to take a different approach to it, and show the dangers of these drugs.

In my poem, the story switches to a couple that takes Xanax at the same time. A little while after they take it, the female begins to feel like she is dying and soon overdoses, the same happens to her male counterpart. The purpose of this poem was to show the dangers of opioids, rather than promising them. As opioids are dangerous enough on their own, many are often laced with fentanyl, which often leads to an overdose that causes death.

By: Emma Igoe

For my found poem, I chose to focus on drunk driving. I chose this topic because drunk driving endangers the lives of many innocent people, all due to only one person’s foolish decision. Drunk driving is a topic that personally angers me because in most cases, everyone involved in the accident is either injured or killed, except the one person who has made the incident occur.

This poem was made from snippets of an article I have seen a few months ago which angered me, written by Jeffrey Braxton. Within this article, he talks about drunk drivers driving on the wrong side of the road and the effect this has on innocent people and families. As I read this article, I cut out the words that have impacted me the most and what I thought would convey the message clearly. Within my poem, I wanted to use repetition for the phrase “You’re Going the Wrong Way” to reiterate how intoxicated someone can be to not realize they are driving on the wrong side of the road. Operating a vehicle under this condition is extremely dangerous and can be easily avoided, especially with the technology we have today. I believe many people are aware of the effects of drunk driving and know to make the smart decision to not participate in doing so, but not enough people considering many fatal accidents still occur to this day.

REAL you

because LOVE

As it is in you

I want

I need

I need you

I need you

THAT’S love.

All the good and bad

its without a cause

I love you.

The question of what Love is has been a common theme throughout many years, and it can be very difficult to answer what Love actually is. There have been instances where Love is just a word thrown around in order to make others feel wanted. Some individuals do not know whether Love is a feeling or a lifestyle of devotion. At the end of the day, Love is whatever an individual says it is. It all depends on what it means to them. It can be an attachment or a relationship that has taken years to develop. It can be between family, friendships or intimate relationships with others.

I found this important because in our modern day age the idea of Love has been passed around and has even been apart of the Judicial system. The LGBTQ community has been an advocate for Love throughout the years and that it is okay to Love who you want to love because of who the person is on the inside. This poem entails this concept in that there is only a YOU and not a he or she. It’s about the person without a description or a label.

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My found poem was from an article that was titled, “An Economist explains why Women are paid less.” This article was about the wage gaps between genders. I wanted to write something that I could relate to as a female and is also important in today’s issues. After reading the article, I went through and decided to cut out words and statements that stood out to me. I cut the “women are paid less” from the title because the main focus of my poem is the gender inequalities. I repeated it at the end because I wanted to emphasize to the reader the severity of this matter. While working on this poem, I was thinking about why women are still not being paid equally to men. The graph that I took out of the article shows that a global average, women earn almost half that men do annually. I saw that this article was written on March 8, 2019, and wanted to incorporate it in my poem. This demonstrates that this is an ongoing issue that still isn’t solved. 

I really enjoyed reading this informative article and changing it into a poem. I thought it was creative and nice to do something different than writing a paper. I liked how I could take a written article and manipulate it into my own work. Creating a found poem made me look at language differently. It made me realize how powerful words are and that each and every single word no matter how long or short means something. After making my own poem, I can better understand Zong! and how Philip purposely placed those words in a specific order to express the importance of each poem. By. Deirdre Lynch

For my found poem, I chose to focus on the issue of sexual harassment. The poem is based off of the song “Break a Bitch Neck” by Akinyele featuring Kool G Rap. Immediately after reading the graphic lyrics to this song, I knew I needed to talk about it. Derogatory language is unfortunately common in a lot of hip hop and rap music today, and it promotes the taking advantage of women and using them for their bodies. As a woman myself, I found it extremely offensive and repulsive. That is why I used the artist’s words against him to speak from the perspective of the victims of such cruelty.

I started by using words such as “dancin’ girls” and “living dead” to symbolize the way in which sexual harassment destroys spirits and takes lives away from innocent people. I ended the poem with a hint of revolution, concluding with the line “you’re a woman” in order to make is clear that being a woman is a strength… not a weakness. I added rips and cracks filled with flowers along the edges of the paper to correlate with the title, symbolizing the power of women to grow from their experiences and persevere.

After creating my own found poem, I can’t even imagine filling an entire book! I really admire the way in which this form of art can take one thing and make it a completely new one through a new perspective. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that change can only be made if we change our perspective first.

don’t.

no use. 

you know how girls get.

Inside her,                                    

     HurT

          E

          M

          P

   FrusTration

          A

          T

           I

     jealOus

          N

                  

Bad Accusations f  l y

She’s hurt.

He is strong.

She’s half of him.

It’s no use.

NoRoom.SoClose.

SoClose. By Sara Weber

In my writing of SoClose. I wanted to draw the reader’s attention to gender inequalities that are so prevalent throughout the United States and the world. My piece was comprised of words found in the song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” sung by “The Police”. I found this song to make me uncomfortable. It speaks about the temptation that a male teacher has for a female student. As a female student, I have been objectified in the classroom before and have been made uncomfortable by a male teacher. Students should not enter school, a place of learning, and feel uncomfortable or vulnerable.

As a future teacher, one of my main goals will be to make my students feel comfortable. This song makes me realize how important that goal is. A line that struck me in this song is “You know how bad girls get”. While I don’t know the intent that the writer of this song had, I can make the assumption that it wasn’t a good one. This line is a hasty generalization used against women, and it makes me very upset. My goal for this found poem is that the reader understands that women are just as important as men, and should not be made to feel otherwise.

I decided to do my poem on the Plessy V. Ferguson case. I chose this because this court case showed how bad racism was in the past and how it was unfair to anybody who had even the smallest amount of African blood in them. Plessy V. Ferguson was a case in which Homer Adolph Plessy, a mixed race male, who was arrested and jailed for taking an empty seat in a whites only facility on a railroad car after refusing to move. Plessy refused to move to the other railroad section where non-whites would be forced to sit. These sections were separated from the white only section. However, this section was in a much more poor condition than the white only section. This represented many of the different segregated facilities such as water fountains, bathrooms, schools, and any other social places.

My poem focuses on how Plessy was rejected his rights and how it affected the people of the black communities. It begins with the horrors of the dawn of the Jim Crow Era, then the racial segregation between whites and blacks causing such a disturbing image that these segregated facilities were unequal in many ways such as the conditions of these facilities showing that separate was not equal. I later describe Homer Plessy as a mixed raced man who was seven-eighths white and one-eighths black. Though he was mostly white his skin color had caused his arrest. I wonder if he had a lighter skin color would he had been arrested for refusing to move?

This Court case makes me sick because of how unfair “seperate but equal” really was. The fact that the court had rejected his argument and denied that his rights were violated is disturbing. Another reason why this makes me upset is because it did not help others in the black communities, it made segregation worse and caused more troubles for the black community.