For my found poem I used one page from an article describing the Eric Gardner killing by officer Pantaleo. On this page I only used half of it cutting off the other half to make it a smaller surface to bring more emphasis on the area I was working on. At first I wanted to cut the words out and have the words with a little white surrounding them on a black page, but then I decided that it would have more meaning and make the words “pop” more if I just used black marker to black out the words I didn’t want to use. This gave it more meaning showing that there is more white on the page then there is black. The words I chose to keep were the words that you usually see in every article describing a killing of an unarmed black man such as, “a tragedy” and “was doing his job.” It seems like every time someone is killed these are the same words that are just repeated in every article and news cycle. These words just make me feel like the same thing just keeps repeating itself and has no end, a sense of it never changing.
I learned from the experience that found poems, even with only a few words, can have large impacts and several interpretations. When creating these you would think it would take a only a couple minutes to construct but in order to create a good one you have to take your time and think about the meaning and the power each word on the page carries. The background as well as the arrangement of words gives each found poem new meaning.
