NaPoWriMo Day 21: Hypotheses

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “The Hum” by Maggie Smith

• Divinations

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

What are some hypotheses you have the world? Do you suspect everyone is stupid–or, alternately, tilted towards goodness? Was the moon landing faked? Are we a simulation?

Freewrite for 8-10 minutes about some hypotheses you have of the world. You can generate a list, but if a particular idea strikes you, feel free to write about it instead.

Poem: “The Hum” by Maggie Smith

         It’s not a question
     without the mark: How do we live
with trust in a world that will continue

         to betray us. Hear my voice
     not lift at the end. How do we trust
when we continue to be betrayed.

         For the first time I doubt
     we’ll find our way back. But how
can we not. See how the terminal

         mark allows a question
     to dress as statement and vice versa.
Sometimes if I am quiet and still,

         I can hear a small hum inside me,
     an appliance left running.
Years ago I thought it was coming

         from my bones. The hum
     kept me company, and I thought
thank god for bones, for the fidelity

         of bones—they’ll be there
     until the end and then some.
Now what. How to continue.

         I’ve started calling the hum the soul.
     Today I have to hold
my breath to hear it. What question

         does it keep not asking
     and not asking, never changing
its pitch. How do I answer.

Divinations

This moving, vulnerable poem asks—or, rather, "states"—questions at the heart of our shared human struggle. Anyone who has felt betrayed by the world, alone in their struggles, hopeless, powerless, or dubious about the future can relate to the tension and desperation motivating this poem. What do we do with those emotions?

This poem doesn't directly answer that question, but it does bring us to ask it. Central to "The Hum" is the speaker's attention to voice. She addresses this directly when she tells the reader not to interpret each sentence as a question, interrogative though it may be. The poem quite literally tells you how to read it: without rising inflection, without using questions as shields against what is most painful about the world.

I notice 3 interwoven threads in this poem: the power of questions, the search for meaning and survival, and the endurance of the body/soul. Each stanza typically juxtaposes 2 or 3 of these threads, and each thread is bisected across different stanza breaks. As each stanza explores different configurations of the same themes, it arrives at the "unasked" questions driving the poem forward: what question does your soul ask of you? How is this question driving your life forward? Is your life an answer to that question? If so, what is the answer?

To be a poet is to be a scientist. Yes, this requires the metaphor of a page being like a laboratory, but then, aren’t we already dabbling in metaphor? Poets enter into poems with hypotheses; poems interrogate our place in the world, our relationships to one another, our similarities and differences with nature, where we come from and where we're going, our present moment, our human nature, our purpose, our traumas, our identities, our hopes. Poets and scientists alike inquire, experiment, and stumble into truth.

Consider “The Hum”: it doesn't even "ask" any questions, technically, and yet the poem is driven by a questioning of our humanity, our endurance in a terrible world, the existence of our souls, and what those souls beckon us to do.

What questions does your soul ask of you? How do you answer those questions? Such questioning could create doorways into new poems.

Prompt

Write a poem that explores a hypothesis.

Take this prompt how you like. You can state the hypothesis as a doorway into the poem, but then ask whether the poem is better with or without that question once you’ve written a first draft. In any case, this is your license to play, experiment, and stumble into truth: to find answers, even if the answer is another question.