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?
Jamming, jamming out
With my wife and son
El Paseo garden on my yoga mat
At the beach in Puerto Rico
At home
In a room with a bunch of strangers full of expectation and want to play
In my family
In the wilderness
Some sort of creative space
In anybody’s kitchen sitting in front of a plate of food
With my family
In the woods
Activating the active endorphin
The word of God
In polarized places where confliction, reconciliation, and resolution co-exist
At home. Working. Black and comfortable.
Everywhere.
Divide responses by identities
Maybe there was only ever three answers
In some creative space: where the artist lives inspired
In nature: where activist can stretch weary body
With family: where our people sustain us
Math is so unpoetic.
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Davis, C. (2023, May 4). Poetic Inquiry: “Hard” Data. Creative Generation Blog. Creative Generation. Retrieved from https://www.creative-generation.org/blogs/poetic-inquiry-hard-data