Announcing the Lawless Research Corporate Poet Laureate
I’m proud to announce Lawless Research’s first corporate poet laureate, Johannah Racz Knudson.
Johannah Racz Knudson
Johannah works from Fort Collins, Colorado as a writer, writing coach, and content strategist. Her poetry has appeared in Sycamore Review, Superstition Review, Puerto del Sol, Northwest Review, Peregrine, GSU Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from Colorado State University and is a two-time winner of the AWP Intro Journals Award.
Poetry helps us make sense of an increasingly complex world.
Poetry has fascinated me since I was a teenager, when my older sister introduced me to the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The words of this 19th century Jesuit priest spoke directly to the heart and mind of my 16-year-old self: O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall/Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.
Across the span of a century, I found someone who understood. Someone who could express the inexpressible.
Poems continue to hold sway with their brevity and musicality, their surprising yet just-right line breaks, their words jamming into each other like ice floes or blending into rivulets. Good poetry addresses ambiguities in a way that uncovers latent layers of meanings.
Why a poet laureate for a market research company?
We’re a research company and having a corporate poet laureate is our experiment. In the Lawless Research laboratory, we’ll test whether poetic exercises help stimulate creative thinking through wordplay, metaphor and rhythm. We’re already rediscovering the joy of writing (and laughter) with Johannah’s intriguing poetry assignments.
We’ll explore how poetry can help us interpret survey data, uncover patterns and identify underlying meanings. Poetic thinking unleashes the right brain and enriches left-brain analysis, opening doors to greater insights.
Please join us in this discovery process. What do you think? Could poetry help your business?