Being immersed in narratives is often said to be a means of making readers forget the passing of time. As such they may have a beneficial impact on our wellbeing not least due to our capacity to empathise with fictional characters. Poetry, by contrast, forces us to pause. Lyric poetry in particular tends to focus on states and stasis. Thus, while we naturalise texts by narrativising them, we struggle with the “unnaturalness” of poems that force us to pay attention to friction, to see, hear and voice it. This methodology helps us engage in a continuous process of understanding not only ourselves but the experiences of other people and cultures and, paradoxically, to find new narratives while doing so.

 Creative friction is explored in the Poetry Lab (Lyriklabbet), set up jointly by Halmstad city library and Halmstad university in the spring of 2017. Here poetry’s artifice and segmentivity – as opposed to naturalness and flow – is taken as a starting-point for slowing down time and dwelling on emotions and mental states. The main object is to promote a sense of wellbeing through an experimentation with words and the embodiment of voice. Existing poems are studied as well as fresh poems composed by lab members out of material that comes their way in everyday situations. In this presentation, we will be demonstrating how we work in the poetry lab. An important aspect is the use of sound technology as an instrument for challenging the naturalness of the poetic text. By manipulating, rearranging and recontextualising the text through the recorded voice the multidimensionality of the poetic material is foregrounded. The creation of such a sound archive is quite simply a means of staying sound.