Teaching Poetry to Engineers

Last semester I taught a poetry workshop at a tech company. The engineers were skeptical at first — they signed up because HR called it 'creative communication skills training.' By the end, three of them were writing poems voluntarily, and one submitted to a literary journal.

Engineers and poets have more in common than either group thinks. Both seek precision. Both care about structure. Both know that elegance — whether in code or verse — comes from saying exactly what you mean with no wasted parts.

The breakthrough moment always comes when an engineer realizes that a poem, like a function, should do one thing well. That constraint — say one true thing in as few words as possible — turns out to be exactly the kind of problem engineers love solving.