Poetic Inquiry: Why Change?

BY CAMEA DAVIS

The poem Why Change?  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. 

“Why Change?” synthesizes guests' responses to the question, “why change?”  Not fearing redundancy, this poem explicitly answers the question by using respondents' direct quotes. This poem is a free verse poem intended to be performed aloud for the audience as the verbal version mimics the cadence and passion of the respondents answers. 

The poem travels from a popular quote by Octavia Butler that more than one respondent mentioned in their initial reply then the poem uses the question why change as a refrain to hold together all the comments respondents gave. The poem has a sense of urgency with short descriptive lines. 

The images and locations in parenthesis in this poem signify when the poet-researcher inserts ideas that respondents referenced but in the transcript line did not state. The poem is urgently moving towards a future that is different from the injustice of the world today to answer the question why change. 

The answer is essentially that people need change and the respondents feel compelled to work towards it in service of a better tomorrow for their people. People here are as specific as their own children to as broad as all humans that share diverse identities. Equally, this poem is a celebration of types of changes that respondents are instigating, experiencing, and aspiring towards. 

Read the text of Why Change? 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. 

Why Change?

“All that you touch, you changed. All that you changed, changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.”
The ancestral voice of Octavia Butler echoes (listen to Black women ancestral knowing) 
Change being our only God, right. 
And so that's the first thing that comes to mind

Why Change? 
Because there is no other way forward
To avoid it is folly 
It is impossible
It is necessary 
It is inevitable, inevitable. 
I mean, change is minute to minute.
To change is to stay alive
to stay relevant
to stay meaningful 

Why Change? 
Change is growth and new things (like plants, dreams, and everything alive) 
We are not meant to stay stagnant (like statues) 
instead
We are protagonists learning, meeting obstacles, and struggling through change 
We are rehearsing the futures we want to be apart of (on stage, in the boardroom, on the Congress floor)
Because possibilities are endless  
It’s possible 
We are possible 
As creatives and imaginative people we have this opportunity to create the change that’s needed and necessary in our world 
Part of our job increases our capacity to wonder (and we are the ones to wonder and work for a better world) 

Why Change? 
Change creates momentum
Leads to personal and professional growth
Perspective shifts (like gears) when we change (directions)
We take those risks
Because we have to! 
We can’t rely on a system that’s not designed for us (magical, Black, brown, Indigenous, refugee, immigrant, global, queer, beautiful, divergent thinkers) 
Because we deserve to be cared for 
Because we deserve to live in societies that love us and where we get to love ourselves

So we need to transform and to change for that
We no longer get to be small
Change is making space for people 
We need each of us to step into the fullness of who we are

Change is wedging that fucking door open
breaking it down 
It's putting up a ramp to make sure it's accessible.
It’s being so loud that it's impossible to like not hear our voices anymore

Why Change? 
That's what we're after moving towards changing the status quo
working towards what's better
Paced change 
And forced change (on the ballots, in the board rooms, in the classrooms, neighborhoods) 
The status quo hasn't worked for many of us
we have a limited time that we're alive on this planet
Bringing our full selves in this exact moment is what's going to change the next 100 years. 
And that's why we have to do what we're meant to do while we're alive 

Why Change? 
we're more interested in transformation than change, because change can change back
Like alchemy, change something to a different thing  
Like chaos theory, change is a science of process other than the state of becoming
it is the science behind what art does
So why change because you are change, you are never just being you are always becoming
I consider it a divine order of the universe.
But we don't want to go back 
Because change is a manifestation of an action 
Action is the basis of existence: the infrastructure of hope and curiosity

Ultimately, the goal is to transform.