I remember exactly where I was when I created my LinkedIn profile (Cafe 84 in Pembroke’s Mill Lane site), much in the same way people remember when their significant other first said ‘I love you’. I also remember the exact thought that coursed through my head as I scrolled through people’s perfectly curated profiles, bright shiny internships and editorial positions: Adrianne Lenker doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile. I should not have done this.

Emergence into the real world aside, I honestly feel that LinkedIn and Adrianne Lenker exist in antithesis. Competition, exaggeration, congrats-on-one-year-as-social-sec; these are things absent from the Lenker universe, and very much present in the Cambridge one. I’m certain I don’t just speak for myself when I say anyone remotely creative within Cambridge has, at one point or another, felt the need to weaponize their creative output, to ‘LinkedIn-ify’ it. If that isn’t you, congratulations. I would love to sever the little clump of cells in my brain that make me competitive to a fault. However, my brain is regrettably wired to the point that LinkedIn is no longer a safe space for me.

“In a space like Cambridge that applauds Linkedin-levels of output and speed, often above quality, Adrianne Lenker provides parallel ways of being”

In a space like Cambridge that applauds LinkedIn-levels of output and speed, often above quality, Adrianne Lenker provides parallel ways of being. Those who know her will know she’s an multidimensional, intricate artist; the opening couplet of her most famous song, ‘anything’, (‘Staring down the barrel of the hot sun/Shining with the sheen of a shotgun’), is still one that sticks in my mind for its subtlety and wit. I’ve read one of her songs, ‘ingydar’, out loud at an open mic as a poem before:

Early еvening, the pink ring swallows

The sphеrical marigold terrain

Sleepily, Venus sinks and hollows

The stationed headlight of a plane

Her wordplay and lyricism form her as both a musician and a poet, an artist whose songs feel as though they’ve been dug up fresh and whole and somehow transmuted to the digital. Yet, though Lenker’s poetics involve extended metaphors and beautifully constructed imagery, it’s not those kinds of lyrics that rescue me from my self-inflicted LinkedIn hell-hole. It’s the steadier, simpler lines about the beauty of flowers in a vase, the stillness of unpacking clothes from a suitcase.

In a recent interview, Lenker ruminated on her consciousness of wanting to maintain what she calls “poetic distance” from “stating things simply as that, being aware of the pronouns - of ’I’s and ’you’s.” In her words, “I’ve wanted to maintain a frame of emptiness that people can fill in. But I didn’t care about that this time.” It’s those spatial moments that drop any precedence of “poetic distance” — “leaning on a windowsill” (‘Sadness As A Gift’) or “freezing at the edge of the bed” (‘dragon eyes’) — wherein Lenker recalibrates our attention, drawing our focus to something as small as a dragonfly’s wing or the dappling of light on skin. Mundane moments (“stove light glows like a fire/we’re sitting on the kitchen floor”) are imbued with a delicate poignancy (“just when I thought I couldn’t feel more/I feel a little more” in ‘Free Treasure’).

“Lenker places such full-bodied importance on the moment, the individual action in isolation, separate from any external pressure of having to ‘be’”

Lenker isn’t toxically positive; plenty of her songs concern grief, disconnect, and loss. Rather, it’s the ability to locate stillness that permeates this branch of her writing: the ability to notice. Allegra Krieger, an artist I feel has picked up on the same thread as Lenker, sees this stillness as "that fragile plane," where she can "exist without a body or name" (‘Lingering’). For Lenker, "every second [is] brimming with a majesty" (‘Sadness As A Gift’) — there is a poetic resonance in the world’s most minute details.

In A Philosophy of Walking, Frederic Gros writes that "by walking, you escape from the very idea of identity, the temptation to be someone, to have a name […] the walking body has no history, it is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life." I see this description of walking reflected in the process of truly listening to Lenker and Kreiger’s music. The smallest moments contain multitudes, and in noticing that, you grant yourself respite from the continual pressure to produce, to understand, assimilate and move on. Lenker places such full-bodied importance on the moment, the individual action in isolation, separate from any external pressure of having to "be". To love, to experience fully, and internally, is enough.

Now obviously, this spiel won’t do you well in a job interview. I understand that LinkedIn can be useful, and that deciding nothing matters but my internal monologue may cause issues. But I think this reminder to pay radical attention, to linger, to observe, is important. Cambridge moves perpetually forward, and yet the world keeps spinning.

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