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Hello and welcome to this week’s newsletter. October has arrived, the evenings are drawing in, and we seem to have entered one of those particularly busy stretches at the Poetry Pharmacy, with new things appearing on the shelves and plenty going on in all three of our shops.
We have a new prescription. Poetic Intelligence is our latest bottle of Poetry Pills, created in collaboration with the Association of Business Poets *as an antidote to Artificial Intelligence, and a celebration of that much stranger, messier and more mysterious thing: the human imagination.
Inside are poems to encourage curiosity, creative thinking and those unexpected leaps and connections that don’t necessarily follow the most logical route from A to B. Poetry doesn’t always give us the answer; it can slow us down, make us look again, leave room for uncertainty, surprise us, or send our thoughts off somewhere entirely unexpected.
At a time when we can summon information, answers and even words at extraordinary speed, Poetic Intelligence makes a small case for another kind of intelligence: imaginative, intuitive, emotional and curious.
An Antidote to Artificial Intelligence, for the Cultivation of Wonder & Original Thought, & the Preservation of the Wild Human Imagination.
Take when thoughts become predictable.
Shop Poetic Intelligence
* We created Poetic Intelligence in collaboration with the Association of Business Poets, a growing professional community founded by Dr Kate Jenkinson. Its members include poets, coaches, facilitators and organisational professionals who bring poetry into the workplace as a way of encouraging creativity, fresh thinking, better communication and human connection. In other words, they’re interested in what happens when we make a little more room for imagination in places more accustomed to spreadsheets and bullet points.
Mother Tongues
Yesterday, for National Poetry Day, with its theme of Wonder, something really wonderful happened at the Poetry Pharmacy on Oxford Street.
Mother Tongues was the idea of Michał Kamil Piotrowski at the Experimental Writing School, as poets came together throughout the day to read, listen and share work, bringing different languages, cultures, histories and voices into our little space inside Lush.
In the middle of Oxford Street, surrounded by one of the busiest shopping streets in the world, an independent poetry business filled a corner of it with people reading poems to one another. There was something quietly radical about that. Human beings standing up and speaking in their own voices, and others stopping to listen. It was multilingual, multicultural, generous, surprising and properly wonderful.
Thank you to everyone who read, listened, travelled to be there, helped make it happen or simply wandered in and wondered what on earth was going on.
On National Poetry Day, it felt like a very good reminder of what poetry is for.
Next Stop for the travelling Dispensary: Leeds
Next week our lovely York team are packing up a selection of Poetry Pharmacy remedies and heading to Lush Leeds as part of LushFest.
From 8–10 October, you'll find our very mini Poetry Pharmacy dispensary inside the store, stocked with Poetry Pills and poetic remedies for all manner of emotional ailments.
If you're in Leeds, come and say hello, have a rummage through the dispensary and meet the team.
Lush Leeds | 8–10 October | 11am–4pm
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