The poetry of data
These poems are just a few of the many in Muschenetz’s latest book that wrestle with contemporary social issues using a combination of data-driven insights and the poetic form. The format is a unique one: The first time Hayley Mitchell Haugen, founding editor in chief of Muschenetz’s publisher Sheila-Na-Gig, saw the poems, she thought to herself, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Point Blank
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY WRITERS RESIST, WINTER 2023
While cold, hard numbers and poetry might seem antithetical at first blush, from Muschenetz’s perspective, the two couldn’t be a better fit. A former business consultant at Bain & Company who received her MBA at the Sloan School of Management, she released her first poetry book in her 40s, and she’s enjoyed uncovering what the artistic and scientific approaches to understanding the world have in common.
“Even though it maybe feels unintuitive that poetry and science are interrelated, they both make connections that are not immediately obvious,” she says. “They test out theories; they take risks. There’s a lot of nonlinear thinking that happens in both.”
Many of the poems in Power Point were inspired by watershed moments in global politics and culture, particularly ones that would shape the lives of women. From the partisan political theater on display at the confirmation hearing of US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the passage of laws restricting women’s freedoms in Iran and Afghanistan, these events often left Muschenetz overwhelmed with frustration at the state of women’s rights today.
But knowing that women’s emotions are so often dismissed, she looked for a way to turn those feelings into something that she hoped would be harder to write off than standard poetry while still evoking the openheartedness with which people tend to approach art.
“I wanted something that listed just facts but expressed how angry I am,” she says. “I really wanted it to be fact-based. I wanted my sources to be publicly available and almost unassailable.” Her hope was that by repackaging these facts in the form of statistics-driven poetry, she might allow readers to receive the information in a new way—and get them thinking.
From Ukraine to California
Muschenetz’s childhood primed her to understand how global currents can shape an individual life from an early age. Born Yevgenia Leonidovna Veitzman to a Jewish family in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, Muschenetz says her family began trying to leave the country before she was born, hoping to escape the discrimination they faced under the Soviet government. But it wasn’t until she was 10 years old that the family was finally able to emigrate. When they were at last cleared to cross the border, they headed for San Diego, where she decided that Jane would be easier for Americans to pronounce than her given first name. (Ultimately, she would change her last name, too, when she married.)
Muschenetz often felt out of place in her new home, even though she was surrounded by other immigrant kids whose parents had moved to California in search of a better life. In one way she was like many American teenage girls, though: She had a lot of feelings, especially about romantic relationships, whether real or imagined, and she often wrote poems about them.
At age 16, she began submitting her poetry to magazines and publishers, which brought her first taste of writerly rejection. “I was like, ‘Oh, well, I tried. Clearly this isn’t for me.’ Even though in my heart, since I was like four years old, I knew I was a writer and I loved literature,” she says.
