Poetic Inquiry: Inspiration

By Camea Davis

The poem Inspiration 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 Generation. 

Inspiration synthesizes guests’ responses to the question, “what inspires you?” 

Each person responded individually by describing who or what inspired them. This poem gathers all the responses and (re)-presents the ideas in a plural voice using “we are inspired by” as a refrain to summarize what inspires the podcast guests as representatives of the Creative Generation. 

The overarching motif in the poem is that respondents found inspiration in other people. The poem describes the types of people pulling descriptors directly from the podcast transcripts. The lines of the poem are primarily offered in two lines of verse each to mirror the idea that the respondents spoke about being with other people. Each word/phrase after “we are inspired by” and each indented second line is a direct quote from a transcript. The next-to-last stanza offers some creative questioning to the audience based on the intersections between respondents’ comments. 

These lines of questioning are intended to demonstrate how entangled all the types of people that inspire us truly are and invite the audience to reconsider how we know a person. The question asks the reader to ponder how people live in more intersectional identities than behind distinct hard boundaries. 

Read the text of Inspiration 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. 

Inspiration 

We, the Creative Generation, are inspired by the people 

We are inspired by the creatives 

The jazz musician, the pianist, the thespian, the choreographer

We are inspired by young people

Young people with books, art supplies, feet that step up, hands that make change 

We are inspired by the women

Daughters, mothers, grandmothers, wives 

We are inspired by the activists 

Vandana Shiva, Jesus Christ, Augusto Boal

We are inspired by the workers 

The organizers, the challengers, that fight like hell to get what they deserve 

We are inspired by the people 

People that are doing the work beyond themselves

We, the Creative Generation, are inspired at the intersections 

Isn’t Jesus Christ a creative? 
The single Black mother with six children a magician? 
Isn’t the Black philanthropist staying true to herself an activist? 
The community a geography unlike the island? 

 That is so inspiring.