Poetic Inquiry: “Hard” Data

By Camea Davis

The poem “Hard” Data is one poem in a five-part series of conclusions from a poetic analysis of Season 2 of Why Change? A Podcast for a Creative GenerationSeason 2 of the Why Change? podcast. 

“Hard” Data  synthesizes guests' responses to the question, “where are you most at home or where are you most grounded?”  This poem critiques the narrative power of numeric data void of stories to contextualize and nuance them. The data in the poem references the number of unique responses respondents gave to the question. There were 26 episodes in Season 2 of Why Change? The hosts asked each guest one of the two questions and when tallied up there were seventeen unique responses. 

The lines of the poem that start with numbers list the 17 unique answers from respondents as direct quotes. Working as a poet-researcher, I studied this numeric data and wondered what meaning these numbers had when I considered the contextual identities of each speaker: their racial, gendered, professional, geographical, familial roles, and other identities. Then I noticed how the seventeen responses converge into just three subcategories. The second list offers a synthesis of the first list as summaries of locations, finding that most of the seventeen responses fit into three categories: a creative place, nature, or with people. The closing line of the poem overtly acknowledges the contradiction of the tasks of the poem - using math to write a poetic analysis and maybe suggests that the notion of “hard” data is improved upon by poetry. 

Read the text of “Hard” Data  below. Then, watch the spoken word version of the poem. 

If you are interested in how poetic inquiry research analysis is conducted, learn more here. 

“Hard” Data

Ask 26 people 
2 questions 
Get 17 answers 

Question: Where are you most at home? 
Question: Where are you most grounded? 

  1. Jamming, jamming out 

  2. With my wife and son 

  3. El Paseo garden on my yoga mat 

  4. At the beach in Puerto Rico 

  5. At home 

  6. In a room with a bunch of strangers full of expectation and want to play 

  7. In my family 

  8. In the wilderness 

  9. Some sort of creative space 

  10. In anybody’s kitchen sitting in front of a plate of food 

  11. With my family 

  12. In the woods 

  13. Activating the active endorphin 

  14. The word of God 

  15. In polarized places where confliction, reconciliation, and resolution co-exist 

  16. At home. Working. Black and comfortable. 

  17. Everywhere. 

Divide responses by identities  
Maybe there was only ever three answers

  1. In some creative space:  where the artist lives inspired 

  2. In nature: where activist can stretch weary body 

  3. With family: where our people sustain us

Math is so unpoetic.