Week 8: Math and Poetry

Artist Interview: JoAnne Growney

Sarah Glaz

This week’s reading genuinely moved me in a way I didn’t expect. I felt a heaviness reading it, partly because I haven’t had much time to read anything outside academic writing lately. The interview felt intimate and alive. It also pulled me back to my own relationship with writing, especially poetry. I grew up in a household with constant argument and loud noise, and poetry became a kind of quiet shelter for me, a place where I could breathe.

One thing I kept thinking about is JoAnne’s long gap in writing. She describes not writing poetry for decades and then returning to it later, around the time her children left home. Even though she downplays parental influence at points, I found myself wondering about the role of life circumstances, timing, and emotional bandwidth. She returned to poetry when she had space again. That made me reflect on my own pause. I stopped writing a few years ago too, and it makes me wonder if writing comes in seasons: not as a personality trait, but as a response to what life allows.

Stop 1
When JoAnne talks about her flamboyant woman math teacher, she says many girls started a math major but “most didn’t stay in math”. That line hit me like a small sentence carrying a big pattern. It immediately made me think about the “leaky pipeline” in STEM: how interest can be sparked, but belonging is harder to sustain. I liked that this observation came through a personal memory, not a statistic. It reminded me that attrition is often a story before it is a graph.

Stop 2
My second stop was the moment JoAnne reflects that a man with talented daughters is more likely to support women, and then she shares the story about the granddaughter in China finding the poem online and reaching out. I paused here because it held both a critique and a tenderness. On one hand, it’s unsettling that women’s support is framed as more likely when men are personally connected to girls. On the other hand, the “sweet connection” across generations and geography felt genuinely hopeful. A poem became a bridge: between a teacher, his family, and someone searching for a name years later.

Overall, this interview reminded me that math lives inside human lives. Not just in achievements or degrees, but in teachers we remember, in who stays and who leaves, and in the strange, beautiful ways “everything connects”.

Also sharing a random poem I wrote a long time back: 

Sushmita Roy (Sushi)

Response Jackie Will’s “DON’T COMMIT ADULTERY”

27 th September 2016

DON’T COMMIT MURDER

In Honduras for cocaine, in daylight, in the crowd,

With stolen guns, bare hands, belts, gasoline, of the woman

Who dressed improperly, dyed her hair red, wore a choker,

Revolted against rape, worked at a bar, of men fighting

against discrimination, religion, defending families, nations,

politicians, by matches, hammers, golf sticks, and knives,

of blacks, immigrants, Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus,

those who know no religion, at the border, in the rain, bedroom

where you caught your wife having sex, broken building, graveyard,

latched room, for being humiliated, in anger or in pain, another with

more money, ex who moved on too quickly, for sex,

or for fun, for the excitement, the chase and run, by skinning alive,

burning, cutting head off straight, rope, strangling, of who didn’t surrender,

to lust, dominion, authority and power, at the backseat of the car,

isolated street, as meat, for theft, robbery, satisfaction, mercy,

argument’s sake, destroyed ego, obsession,

in El Salvador, for not having enough to eat, crushed by the State,

destroyed by neighbors, consumed by drugs, alcohol or law, of police,

child laborers, grandmothers and fathers, pregnant woman, bombing planes,

shopping malls, temples, mosques, times square, water, or terrain.