Lauren Ducrey is an award-winning poet, speaker, mindfulness facilitator, AI designer (ex-Google) and string cheese enthusiast. When she’s not designing more emotionally supportive AI, she’s on a mission to break poetry out of its ivory tower as an accessible tool to support our well-being. She spent 7 years at Google hacking poetry into the workplace with team-building and leadership training that build on the connective power of language. She also supports individuals writing themselves out loud through workshops, writing courses, and 1-on-1 mentoring. She weaves a poetic community wherever she goes, hosting events and interactive performances 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 political speechwriter and educator, as well as an unrelenting sense of humor.
Her book of poems Tongues Tied and her album of poetry and music Cordes sensibles make words leap off the page in conversation with artwork and original riffs. Her pieces are also featured in Initium Magazine, Humankind Magazine, Fabernovel.com, as well as in mindfulness apps Minderful and RogaLife. Her piece “The Second Cactus” is the laureate of the 2022 Moving Words competition, an international project bringing poems to the screen with animators and filmmakers.
Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.
James: When do you first remember discovering poetry?
Lauren: “I have a vivid memory as a child, probably around six or seven, at Christmas time. I wanted to come up with crafty, affordable Christmas gifts. I remember making tea, soaking paper in it, and then drying it to make it look like parchment. I would write poems to my parents as Christmas gifts. That’s a vivid memory for sure.”
James: Oh, I’m sure they absolutely treasured those and hopefully saved them in their memorabilia box.
Lauren: “They have. That’s part of why the memory is so vivid. They pulled it out a few years ago when I got back into poetry more seriously, and I was reminded of that very cute, crafty poetry moment.”
James: Wonderful. And I think that’s one interesting thing about poetry; it can be very bite-sized. It would be harder to do something like a novel as your gift every year. It’s not very practical, but poetry has this amazing ability to fit into so many different contexts because it can be very short—it doesn’t have to be, but it can be.
Lauren: “Absolutely. I think that’s why we can get into this maybe a little bit more in-depth, but I think that’s why it’s making such a resurgence in the era of social media where bite-sized content is the norm. I love that this form, which is very deep, fits into short format writing so appropriately.”
James: What makes poetry such a unique artform?
Lauren: “There are so many ways I could answer that question. But what keeps coming up for me is how poetry uniquely sits at the intersection of our analytical minds and our emotional minds. It uses language, which is analytical and helps us organize a chaotic world into concepts, to go beyond language. This to me is nothing short of magic. It uses words that point to concepts to evoke and elicit our emotions, our imagination, our intuition, bridging both analytical and emotional realms. I think more so than any other art form. For example, painting immediately dives into the emotional, sensorial realm through color, and dance is extremely embodied. But poetry uses language, which can make us so analytical, to do something very non-analytical, very emotional, and that fascinates me.”
James: And then you can also perform poetry, and poems can take on two lives: how the poem is read on the page and visually displaces blank space, and how the poem is heard and connects with you that way. It’s an amazing art form. You have a very unique background where you have an AI element to your background too. I’m sure many of us have played with AI tools to create poetry and I do not feel threatened by AI tools for the creation of poetry. It’s functional, but it is dreadful, soulless. However, I have found them quite handy for research, to do research in a more contextual way. I use it as a critique tool, you know, on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is a poetry coach, an AI tool can be a two or three as a 24/7 sniff test. But there can be challenges because the AI is aimed to please, so it can be a little bit too happy. What are your thoughts about AI in poetry with your AI background?
Lauren: “For context, I spent seven years designing the personalities of virtual agents like the Google Assistant. The first thing that came to mind as I was doing this work, in relation to my poetry, was just the minutiae of language. This steps away from writing poetry but is about witnessing the impact of the words we choose. When designing for AI, especially with vocal agents, you can’t just spit out massive chunks of text because nobody can parse that much information. Bringing the minutiae of language into mind whenever writing anything truly started to bleed into many different types of writing and communication. Then, getting into writing poetry with AI, you touched upon this with the aim to please. What’s cool with AI is that you can frame it to be the help that you need. You can even prompt it to be a certain type of writing coach for yourself, which in turn grows our self-awareness. As you use it, you’re like, ‘Wait, what is helpful to me?’ And I think AI is playing that role more and more, being a mirror for us humans.
“When we ask, ‘Is AI replacing what makes us human? Is it creating the art we want to create? Is it replacing human interactions?’ What remains human? That mirroring is a really interesting value of AI, really questioning what makes us human. I was just working on a course on creative AI, and in all the creative AI explorations that go back to the ’30s, there was a screenwriting AI created in the ’60s and ’70s, music AIs were created after that, and there was Kurzweil’s cybernetic poet that generated poetry. What all these people say is that what was most interesting in the process wasn’t necessarily the output, to your point that it’s kind of soulless, but what creating the AI tool taught them about the practice. So, what do we learn about music by creating an AI tool that can help us make music? What do we learn about our own writing practices as we use AI as a tool, not just to spit out poetry but as a tool for us to write poetry? I’ve noticed I use it a lot as a kind of thesaurus on steroids.”
James: A contextual thesaurus.
Lauren: “Yes, exactly. When I’m trying to get to an idea, I’ll describe what I need a word to describe, and with that nuance added, it gives me a list of ten words. From those ten words, I find inspiration, and it’s a back and forth, which I think is a really important thing to stress with AI. It’s going to be quite boring and monolithic if you just expect to ask it one thing and get an answer. It’s truly a conversation.”
James: You’ve managed to bring poetry into corporate workshops, including Google, and have now taken the leap to start your own business. How have your workshops evolved over the years? I don’t think there’s 10,000 Laurens that are running around doing this type of programming. This is pretty unique and Innovative.
Lauren: “Thank you. I haven’t found other versions of me. But what I did find, which was somewhat unexpected, was the number of people within tech, and Google for one, that are passionate about poetry and using language creatively. That was a big learning. It was an instinct, and I thought, if there’s one of me in my team, there might be others. Google is very creative, with a lot of journalists, game designers, novelists, and poets. I was like, okay, there must be more, and I got confirmation of that. Within the very analytical, logical-minded world of tech, people are thirsty for spaces where they can practice their creativity but also connect with others on a more emotional, vulnerable level. That’s been the massive takeaway from these workshops, which were based on the premise that we spend so much of our working day working that left-brain analytical, logical muscle, and our performance is often judged by that metric. But what baffles me at the same time, we’re kind of implicitly being asked to be very emotionally intelligent without many tools. I mean, at Google, there’s literally this kind of ask to thrive in ambiguity, right? And ambiguity is not about being logical and analytical; it’s about being really comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing precisely the next step in your project. To me, that is poetry because poems ask more questions than they offer answers. When you read a poem, you get comfortable in that not knowing, in the ambiguity. So, for me, I was like, okay, we need to learn how to get comfortable with ambiguity. Boom, poems. And again, poems because they’re steeped in language. They’re not completely removed from our day-to-day interactions that are all in language; we’re writing emails, we’re writing pitch decks, everything is through language. So, it’s related enough to our day-to-day work, but it’s bringing us into that space of emotional awareness and of practicing ambiguity that we can then pour back into our work. That’s the cycle that I saw being performed in these workshops.”
James: What have you learned from the participants in your workshops?
Lauren: “I learned that people want to be seen for more than just their job title, which is a big one that comes out of this. It’s like, ‘Wow, I was reminded that I’m a human, even if only for an hour in my work day.’ And that while I’m a data analyst, I’m actually also creative, which, you know, in my heart of hearts I know, but it’s different for people to have others recognize that in them through conversation. I think that witnessing is a key component, and from that stems a lot of energy. You might wonder, ‘Why am I going to take an hour out of my work day to do something seemingly totally unrelated to this deadline that I have?’ Well, because people exit these workshops and they’re like, ‘I am so energized and so inspired. I’m actually excited to go back to my totally unrelated job and nail it, maybe with a new point of view, refreshed and reinvigorated.’ That’s been effectively transformative.”
James: Walk through one of the lessons you bring to participants during your workshops that listeners of this podcast can take away with them.
Lauren: “One of the workshops I’ve been doing for the longest time focuses on team building and leadership skills, and interestingly, we don’t even write poetry in this workshop. There’s no anxiety about putting pen to paper, although that’s an option in other workshops. The idea here is that I share a bit about the psychology of poetry. There’s some really interesting research on how our brain reacts to poetry as instinctively as it does to music. Anyone can hear poetry, even if your rational and analytical mind doesn’t ‘understand’ it.
“Once we’ve established the basis of how poetry can move you and act as a mindfulness practice—because poems are like microscopes onto reality, allowing you to notice what’s happening around you in your environment, your thoughts, and your emotions—you get to experience this by listening to a poem without reading it. We’re very visually oriented, usually, especially at work, where we’re constantly looking at screens. You get an opportunity to sit back, listen, and practice receiving words like you would listen to music, which is a great practice in conversation. In conversation, we’re so used to listening to someone and halfway through their statement, you’re already anticipating your response, thus not fully listening. In work, this can lead to a loss of key information, like literally not hearing a spec on a project you’re working on, or if you’re a manager, missing out on the emotional tenor of what your report is trying to share with you, which might be difficult or vulnerable. I think in leadership, that’s a really important skill to have. So, we practice that listening, and then we go into conversation where you actually get to read the poems and unpack them with the people in your group.
“This is where I like to say that poems become a table runner on which we can disagree productively, which is also a rare opportunity at work. Most people, at least I know for myself, want to agree with their coworkers. It’s hard to be in that productive disagreement space because it can feel like you’re contradicting your manager, which is really scary, or even in life, our public sphere is getting more and more polarized, and I think we are losing skills to have constructive disagreement. So, this last part of the workshop really focuses on how you can disagree on a poem. It’s just a poem, but people get into spaces of sharing about their personal experiences of life, how they differ from others, but also how similar they often are. That’s what comes out of these workshops, like ‘Wow, we’re actually all kind of going through the same work stress or the same family stress, the same friend stress.’ Can we recognize our commonalities and then have constructive conversations based on just our human connection?”
Listen to the full interview on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast to hear Lauren recite her poetry.
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