[Ed 27] In Conversation With Lauren: How Language Goes Beyond Language.
On the magic of poetry, how language is wellness, and some (very) belated Olea updates on what's been going on.
Hello all,
It’s been a wild couple of months, eh? Thankfully, I’ve finally got my sh*t together having relocated to Dubai for a new job, and Olea is back on track. This edition showcases the incredible work Lauren is doing surrounding (bilingual) poetry, which will resonate with many of our readers who cherish the vibrancy and fiercely creative element of language. Big up Lauren for taking the time to contribute to this edition of The Olea! Merci mille fois.
In other news, Olea-land has a new intern! Sofía went above and beyond during her role as Olea Ambassador Team 1.0 (March - Sept 2023) organising a meet up during the crowdfunding campaign and acting an invaluable sounding board during the game’s development. In her 3-month internship, she is going to be steering Olea’s Instagram account, taking the reins of The Olea, among other projects and …
and helping release our new edition of Private Joke - Girls Night In - in time for Christmas! The game is PINK and our friends at the factory have already done the mock up. Our photographer in Cambridge, Gabriella, is all hands on deck for the product shoot, so that I can (finally) get the website brushed up and an e-shop on there. It’s all go, go, go, and life is groovy. See you next month.
❤️ , 🫒 .
In Conversation with Lauren
Lauren is a poet, author, mindfulness practitioner, and senior UX content strategist. When she’s not designing more emotionally supportive AI, she’s on a mission to break poetry out of its ivory tower as a tool to support our wellbeing. She loves hacking poetry into the workplace with workshops for creativity and team-building, and performing her pieces in public in NYC and Paris. Her tools of choice on this mission are her two Masters in Literature and Social Innovation, her previous lives as a speechwriter and educator, and an unrelenting sense of humor. She’s the author of the book of poetry Tongues Tied and the co-creator of Cordes sensibles, an EP of poetry and music. You can also melt into her words on mindfulness apps Minderful and RogaLife. She was selected for the 2022 Moving Words competition, an international project bringing poems to the screen with animators and filmmakers.
Lauren! What a true pleasure to share your story in The Olea. Give us a quick fire on who Lauren is. What makes her smile?
I'm a word nerd, poet, UX content strategist and a string cheese enthusiast. For the past couple of years I've been on a mission to break poetry out of its ivory tower as a tool to support our wellbeing. I believe that reading a poem is one of the most affordable prescriptions against chronic gloominess, acute slushiness and recurrent how-the-hell-do-I-do-this-thing-called-life-ness. It's like biting into a freshly-picked, vitamin C-filled orange in the dead of winter. 🍊
As a (bilingual) poet, do you find that different languages evoke different emotions or inspire different aspects of your creativity? How does your multilingualism influence your artistic expression?
I find American culture is way more casual about the expression of emotion, whereas French culture dramatizes it more. The same way I say "I love you" more often in English than I do in French, my writing in English dives more willingly and freely into the exploration of complicated emotional states. I've found that in French, I'll use more puns and wordplay to speak about vulnerable experiences: I haven't yet decided whether that's a subconscious strategy to distance myself with the tenderness of it all or whether the tender almost childlike playfulness of wordplay is actually vulnerability in action. Let’s ask my therapist.
Language is a powerful tool for communication and connection. How has your relationship with language influenced your perspective on bringing people together and fostering a sense of unity?
I think poetry is one of the most connective forms of language. It does this truly magical trick where it uses language to go beyond language. It takes language as a logical construct to evoke, elicit and express non-logical - but deeply human - experiences like emotion, intuition and imagination. By putting into words what lives beyond words, poems are like mirrors that reveal us to ourselves and to others. In doing so, poems say out loud what we feel down low. Similar to comedians, poets point out truths we all subconsciously intuit: they create these “Omg! That's how I feel too!” moments that are incredibly connective. I’m so bamboozled by this that I created a whole workshop for people to experience these aha moments: Finding Wellbeing Through Poetry.
In today's fast-paced world, where communication is often reduced to short messages and soundbites, how do you believe poetry can help us slow down and reconnect with our shared humanity?
Poetry is shockingly well suited for our ADHD world: it says a lot in very few words. Poems are kind of the OG Tweets… if all tweets had depth. Because poems are really good at creating depth in tight spaces. And depth is a measure of time: it slows us down. I know I'm reading poetry if there's a sense of surprise, which stops me in my tracks and suspends time while I'm in the poem. By the time I finish it it's like I've been on a full journey in a few lines only, the same way dreams feel like they last hours when it’s probably actually only been 5 minutes.
Poems are tiny time machines that are the perfect antidote to busyness and the perfect Trojan horse to hack into endless-scroll feeds.
Since I suffer from chronic-not-enough-time-ness I designed this poetry playbook with a bunch of poems that help me slow down and reconnect. I had so much fun making, I added journaling and creative writing prompts to share with other folks. You can download it here for free.
Technology has transformed the way we communicate, but it can sometimes feel impersonal. How do you see the role of technology in the realm of poetry, and how can it be used to preserve the deeply human essence of this art form?
I've discovered some of my favorite poets on IG. Publishing is an industry full of expertise and it's incredibly challenging to get into as a poet. Self-publishing, blogging tools like Medium or Substack as well as social media have given more people the opportunity to share their voice. I know it’s part of the reason I decided to self-publish Tongues Tied.
And sure, poetry might not be as curated on the internet as it is in a bookstore but 1- you'd need to be a connoisseur to peruse the poetry section in a bookstore with confidence anyways and 2- I value creativity as a process more than a product. It's like working out: it's healthy for everyone to do regularly. Even if no one reads your poetry blog, the fact you have the option to put something out there is a win to me.
That’s why I’ve been leading poetry writing workshops in corporate settings. It’s more obvious how creative writing feeds directly into language-related roles like marketing, UX and product, but even if you do hardcore engineering or ops, practicing creative thinking through writing will help you be more innovative and agile in your work.
In a world that often values conformity and homogeneity, how does embracing our unique linguistic and cultural identities contribute to our personal growth and the enrichment of society as a whole?
There's a saying that the more personal the poem, the more universal its message.
Although that might sound counterintuitive, the idea is that the more a poem tells me about a personal, lived, goosebumps-on-arms, toasted peanut-scented, late summer afternoon sunlit experience the more I can imagine myself living, feeling, smelling it. And in doing that I get to recognize what is familiar to me in that experience. By being uniquely specific, a poem invites you into its conversation- it's an incredibly participatory phenomenon. That's true of humans and cultures as well: our idiosyncrasies are doorways to connection.
If we look at where landscapes of future workforces are heading, it sometimes feels like creativity is the golden nugget that will save us. What do you think?
As a word nerd and Lit major, I can tell you I did not expect language of all subjects to be the bleeding edge of tech innovation with the development of large language models like chatGPT and Dall-E. As disruptive as this revolution feels to writers, I had a really great chat with a musician friend who commented that software has been producing synthetic music for years and there aren’t any less musicians.
DJs are a perfect example of how digitalization can evolve creativity: many of them are incredibly talented artists and many of them have possibly never touched an acoustic instrument in their life. I’m curious to see how LLMs might create language DJs.
Poetry has the power to transcend boundaries and bridge cultural divides. In your experience, how has poetry helped you connect with people from different backgrounds, and what lessons can we draw from those connections?
Poetry is incredibly international for one main reason: your brain reacts to it as organically as it does to music so you don’t actually need to understand the language to appreciate it.
I produced an album of poetry in French (called Cordes Sensibles) and for the longest time I only performed it in France. And then English-speaking friends kept telling me how much they were moved by the album although they didn’t understand a single word of what I was saying. So I took my own advice and started performing some of those pieces in the US, and people’s feedback has been incredibly juicy.
Poetry translates our inner world into musical words everyone else can hear, and that’s connection at its core. Seeing people witness themselves and each other through reading and writing poems is my absolute favorite part of facilitating the Finding Wellbeing through Poetry workshops - it’s like group therapy with the lightness of rhymes and rhythm.
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Finding Wellbeing through Poetry workshops
Great piece, thank you! I guess that you have heard of this: https://www.poetrypharmacy.co.uk/
?