![\"Poetry](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.attorneyatwork.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Poetry-for-Professional-Development.jpg?resize=770%2C495&ssl=1\" "\\"\\"")
This meeting could have been an emoji. Two hours with Marvin and Lorraine, the undynamic duo, and their grayscale slides\u2014each one packed with more bullets than a Kentucky road sign. And just when you think it\u2019s over, they open a Q&A. Like a dam breaking, the gold-star associates raise their hands to ask questions they already know the answer to. You\u2019re eyeing the seventh-floor window for possible self-defenestration when a gravelly voice cuts through the back-patting.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe woods are lovely, dark and deep.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n It\u2019s MacEvoy, intoning in his best Logan Roy. The room falls quiet.\u201cBut I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep \u2026 and miles to go before I sleep.\u201d <\/p>\n Then he walks out.<\/p>\n MacEvoy\u2019s one of those partners you want to sit next to at every meeting. His briefs read like Thoreau. His sentences are precise and concise. You finally ask him how he does it. Without hesitating, he pulls \u201cThe Ode Less Travelled,\u201d<\/a> Stephen Fry\u2019s remarkable argument for poetry, off his shelf and hands it to you.<\/p>\n Reading it, you realize something: poetry for lawyers isn\u2019t about becoming literary.<\/p>\n Yes, I am serious. Do you wonder sometimes why your briefs don\u2019t persuade? Why negotiations stall? Why client relationships are stale? You\u2019re not alone. Your senior partner is wondering the same thing. How do you cross that invisible, intangible talent barrier and transform from a beige fifth-year associate into a gold-plated rainmaker?<\/p>\n MacEvoy has a point. There is science behind how poetry improves professional communication skills.<\/p>\n Creative writing is not about flowery prose. Successful prosody, memorable essays, and stories that stay with you for years are built on the author\u2019s precision with words. Writing good poetry, considered by most writers the most estimable use of one\u2019s talent and skill as a scribe, is transformative. <\/p>\n Poetry teaches economy of language. It delivers brilliant examples of how every word must earn its place. Attorneys, perhaps more than journalists or busy authors, write under a constraint.<\/a> Besides the obvious constraint of time, they\u2019re under a constant demand for clarity and concision. While the best legal writing instructors certainly emphasize this, a practice of writing poetry comes at it from a different place. It is a struggle to write good poetry. A serious effort fraught with setbacks and failure. But that\u2019s a good thing. The struggle is the point. The difficulty level develops writing chops that brief writing can\u2019t reach. In a very real way, you will light up new avenues of creative force in that part of your mind that controls language.<\/p>\n According to Harvard Business School, 71% of employers are looking at emotional intelligence<\/a> over technical skills when evaluating you for a position. Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand and manage your emotions, as well as recognize and influence the emotions of those around you. Certainly, your faculty for discovering precedent and your stunning IQ are factors in your favor, but they are ground-level attributes. Everyone vying for partnership or a leadership position is good at their job. All of them are smart. Maybe smarter than you.<\/p>\n What sets any candidate apart is the ability to have rich conversations, to show interests in something other than yourself, your next win or the bottom line. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Emotional intelligence is why you are more likely to claim ownership of mistakes than blame someone else. Also, keeping a lid on your emotions by really understanding them, by exploring them in depth, means they are less likely to surprise you \u2014 or burst out of your mouth during a tense meeting.<\/p>\n Wallace Stevens (1879-1955): The Insurance Executive Poet<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Stevens was an American modernist poet who worked at Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company for most of his career, writing some of the most philosophically complex poetry of the 20th century while maintaining his day job in corporate America. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry while managing complex legal cases. His success as a lawyer was surely informed by a precision with legal language informed by his poetic mastery.<\/p>\n Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982): From Partner to Poet Laureate<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n MacLeish resigned his law firm partnership to pursue poetry and playwriting. MacLeish combined legal training with poetic vision in public service, acting as the Librarian of Congress while winning three Pulitzer Prizes, including one for his poem, Ars Poetica, which included the line \u201cA poem should not mean\/but be.\u201d<\/p>\n Monica Youn (1971\u2014): The Election Law Poet<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Youn is a former senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, where she specialized in election law and campaign finance reform, and a National Book Award finalist for poetry. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and was a Rhodes Scholar.<\/p>\n Poetry isn\u2019t a distraction from legal work\u2014it\u2019s training for it. But let\u2019s list those rewards here to drive the point home. Remember, though, creative writing of any kind involves stretching your language faculties beyond what they\u2019re used to. And, like yoga or playing the glockenspiel, you will start out terrible. Consistency is key, and with practice comes improvement until eventually you\u2019re turning out passable verse. This will develop those linguistic tendencies and deliver tangible, measurable results: <\/p>\n A regular practice of reading poetry helps you recognize the precise distinctions between feelings that business language bulldozes with its flat nature. You see the gaps between ambition and desperation, between confidence and swagger, between bafflement and wonder.<\/p>\n Take Wallace Stevens.<\/a> Reading his poetry will help you perceive the space between what\u2019s stated and what\u2019s implied. Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s careful observations<\/a> develop sensitivity to what remains unspoken in a room. This literary training translates directly into those intangible assets that are professional superpowers: the ability to read a client\u2019s hesitation, to sense a colleague\u2019s unstated concern, to recognize when someone\u2019s saying one thing but feeling something else entirely. <\/p>\n Poetry teaches professionals to think in layers, understanding that meaning exists beneath surface statements\u2014 a gold-plated skill for negotiations, management and any work requiring insight.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Poetry slows you down. The pace is deliberate. Unlike emails or reports streamlined for skimming, poems drop you into a walking pace, teaching you to sit with ambiguity and tolerate not immediately understanding everything. <\/p>\n Reading a poem daily builds emotional patience. When a professional reads Frost\u2019s \u201cStopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening\u201d<\/a> and sits with its melancholy beauty, they\u2019re practicing the same attention they\u2019ll need when a team member struggles to articulate a concern, or when they must navigate their own disappointment after a setback. <\/p>\n Poetry normalizes complexity, teaching that not every emotional experience resolves neatly or quickly.<\/p>\n Finally, reading poetry across different voices and perspectives fosters empathy by exposing professionals to emotional experiences that are far removed from their own. A corporate lawyer reading Mart\u00edn Espada\u2019s tenant advocacy poems encounters the lived reality of housing insecurity. A tech executive engaging with Louise Gl\u00fcck\u2019s<\/a> stark examinations of family pain develops vocabulary for loss they may have never personally experienced. This expansion of emotional range\u2014understanding grief in cultures different from your own, recognizing joy expressed in unfamiliar ways, feeling the particular frustration of injustice you\u2019ve never faced\u2014creates professionals who can work effectively across difference. They\u2019ve practiced inhabiting other perspectives through verse, making them more attuned to the diverse emotional landscapes of colleagues, clients, and stakeholders they encounter daily.<\/p>\n Poetry\u2019s heavy. Reading every day is actual mental calisthenics. It\u2019s the difference between taking selfies at the gym and benching your own weight. Everyone talks about critical thinking, but not everyone knows what it looks like in practice. The truth is, it\u2019s weird. More art than science.<\/p>\n Imagine yourself walking into the meeting first, a full 45 seconds before anyone else, and your senior attorney glances up from her mocha chai latte and says something utterly ambiguous. Like she\u2019s speaking argot or cockney rhyming slang. Then she just stares at you, expecting an answer. You could whip out a piece of paper and try to measure out a SWOT analysis, or get your Paul Elder list going, but do you really have that kind of time?<\/p>\n Now imagine you\u2019ve been reading the works of Anne Carson<\/a> or Olivia Cronk. Then you\u2019ve been in the ambiguous trenches. You\u2019re used to wondering what the poets were thinking when they put a particular string of words in a particular order. You\u2019ve been practicing reverse-engineering their thought process, which is preparing you for your senior counsel\u2019s strange utterances.<\/p>\n Poetry trains you to ask: What\u2019s actually being said here, and what\u2019s the subtext, and what am I missing?<\/strong> The insidious brilliance of this daily practice is that poetry refuses to let you be lazy about ambiguity. In professional life, people want everything simplified. They want the TL;DR, the executive summary, the three bullet points. But the good stuff\u2014the actual insights that separate you from every other schmuck with an MBA\u2014lives in the ambiguity.<\/p>\n When you read a poem every morning, you\u2019re practicing holding multiple interpretations in your head simultaneously without freaking out that you don\u2019t have THE answer. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n That metaphor could mean three different things, and maybe all of them are true. Sitting with that discomfort daily means that when you\u2019re in a meeting and the data points are contradictory, you don\u2019t panic and force a premature conclusion. You\u2019ve got the intellectual flexibility to say, \u201cHold on, let\u2019s look at this from another angle.\u201d<\/p>\n And here\u2019s where it gets professionally lethal: Poetry teaches you to spot bullshit. <\/strong>Because a poem uses precise language\u2014every word is load-bearing\u2014you develop an eye for when people are hiding behind jargon, when they\u2019re using five words because they don\u2019t know the right one, when the impressive-sounding statement is actually empty. Read enough poetry and you train your brain to sense when a colleague\u2019s elaborate explanation is compensation for not understanding the problem, or when the confident presentation is really just verbose nothing. That instinct alone is worth more than most professional development courses.<\/p>\n The lawyers who read poetry daily aren\u2019t just thinking better\u2014they\u2019re thinking differently.<\/strong> They\u2019re making connections nobody else sees because they\u2019ve spent years watching poets link the industrial revolution to a broken marriage, connect Greek mythology to contemporary politics, find the universal in the intensely personal. That\u2019s pattern recognition on a completely different level. While everyone else is thinking literally and linearly, these lawyers see the whole board. And that, my friend, is how you end up three moves ahead.<\/p>\n Reading poetry daily is basically cross-training for your brain, except instead of building muscle, you\u2019re building the capacity to make completely unhinged connections that turn out to be brilliant. <\/p>\n Most professionals think in templates\u2014the five-year plan, the proven framework, the way we\u2019ve always done it. Poetry says forget all that, what if we came at this from the perspective of a 14th-century mystic having a nervous breakdown? You read enough poems, and your cognitive defaults start shifting. Your brain stops reaching for the standard playbook and starts asking weirder, better questions.<\/p>\n This matters professionally because the obvious path is where everyone already is. If you\u2019ve spent your morning with a poem that compares corporate mergers to mycorrhizal networks or whatever, your brain has been activated in ways that spreadsheet-brain hasn\u2019t. You walk into that problem-solving session with connections nobody else can see because you\u2019ve been training in lateral thinking.<\/p>\n Poetry also gives you permission to be deliberately strange, which is an underrated professional superpower. <\/strong>Most people are terrified of sounding stupid, so they self-edit into oblivion, pitching only the safe ideas. But you\u2019ve been reading poems where someone compared their depression to a mechanical bull or their career ambitions to a Victorian autopsy. Nothing you say in a conference room will ever be weirder than what you read in your morning poem. So, you get bold. You throw out the sideways idea. Half the time it won\u2019t land, but the other half? That\u2019s where the breakthroughs live. You\u2019ve trained yourself to access weird on demand because you\u2019ve normalized it as part of how sharp people think.<\/p>\n And here\u2019s the advantage nobody talks about: poetry teaches you to remix. <\/strong>Every poet is stealing\u2014taking the language of medicine, architecture, pop music, legal documents\u2014and reassembling it into something new. You read enough and you start doing it instinctively. You\u2019re a tax lawyer, but you start thinking like a designer. You\u2019re in corporate law, but you borrow frameworks from ecology. The innovation everyone\u2019s desperate for? It\u2019s usually just combining two things that don\u2019t typically go together. The truly dangerous professionals aren\u2019t just smart, they\u2019re dimensionally weird. They can hold a normal conversation and then suddenly suggest something absolutely unhinged that somehow works.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not a personality trait you\u2019re born with. It\u2019s a muscle you build, one strange association at a time.<\/p>\n Before I launch into prescriptive poetics, let\u2019s set some goals. You\u2019re already busy. Permanently weeded. You work 83-hour days, 45 days a week. I know. I\u2019m married to a lawyer. Balancing your work and life is a lot like trying to balance on a ball while wearing skates in a hurricane during an earthquake that\u2019s on fire. I get that. But adding this new thing to your routine is easier than you think, and worth the trouble. Worth it for all the reasons listed, and because it will open a small window of proof that you can do something beautiful every day \u2014 and that you have a life outside of law. <\/p>\n Here\u2019s what you do.<\/p>\n Habit chains are a thing<\/a>, and your morning cup is a sacred act that you probably pollute by reading email while your joe goes cold. Instead, wedge a slim volume of verse into that brief moment. Along with starting your day with a jolt of caffeine, you can start your day with poetic insight.<\/p>\n Daily reading is the cornerstone of many serious readers and is positively mandatory for writers. A daily connection to literature is to expose your bright, sizzling consciousness to the kind of sentences someone labored over until they became sublime. But don\u2019t worry that cracking open that book is too much of a commitment. You\u2019re not going back to school here. This is poetry for fun. It\u2019s your antidote to the steppy-steppy morbidly sober factotum you\u2019ll spend the rest of your day with.<\/p>\n Make it fun. Make it stupid. Read poems about puppies or football or whatever you want. That\u2019s just fine. There\u2019s a collection out there somewhere that meets you at the edge of your interest.<\/p>\n The goal is to recognize excellent language. The purpose of a daily poetry reading habit is to align yourself with the brilliant employment of words. That sense of syntax will seep into your own writing and somewhere, in some sentence, it will add memorable color to your work.<\/p>\n One of the best books on poetry as a practice is \u201cThe Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within\u201d<\/a> by Stephen Fry. It\u2019s good because Fry makes you realize writing poetry can be something you do just for fun. A hobby. You don\u2019t have to be good at it. In fact, no one has to know you poet. Fry has written thousands of poems, yet he keeps them locked in a drawer. Never publishes a word because his work is purely for his love of the form, for self-reflection, and as a way to make sense out of a crazy world.<\/p>\n One of Fry\u2019s useful admonitions is to carry a notebook<\/a>. That way, when you find yourself in one of those rare, spare moments, or when you\u2019re inspired, you can easily open to a page and drop a few artful lines. <\/p>\n When you commit to writing a small poem every day, you develop the habit of a poetic mind.<\/strong> Like reading poetry, writing poetry aligns you with the dignity of fine composition. You get used to writing with the intention of exploring below the surface of a thought. (Although you don\u2019t have to; you can write about ridiculous things, as many great poets do).<\/p>\n By exploring the rules of poetic form and trying to write in iambic pentameter, in the form of a sonnet or a villanelle, you will encounter one of the great gifts of poetry: failure.<\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Poetry isn\u2019t easy. <\/strong>By writing regularly, you\u2019ll \u201cfail up\u201d to a new level as a writer. Because expressing yourself effortlessly only comes after endless effort. But if you do it\u2014if you write every day, express yourself poetically\u2014effortless mastery will come.<\/p>\n There is so much value, on so many levels, to memorization. Choosing a poem to memorize means reading a lot of poetry until you come across a piece so resounding you must somehow make it part of you. The work of memorizing a poem makes you intimately familiar with its sound, with its meaning, and with its beauty. It also means you carry with you a thing of beauty as perfect as a painting in a museum, except it\u2019s always there, ready for you to recall it and feel the words. <\/p>\n It also means you can recite the poem on demand, which makes for a killer party trick, or, as MacEvoy showed, a stirring way to comment on the boredom you feel.<\/p>\n MacEvoy read the poems. He memorized the lines. He built the linguistic muscles that let him say exactly what everyone was thinking in eight perfect words. You can do that too. It\u2019s not hard. It\u2019s just daily. Five minutes with Billy Collins. Ten minutes with your notebook. The occasional memorized verse for when you need to make an exit. That\u2019s the practice. That\u2019s how you stop being another beige associate and start being the lawyer everyone wants to sit next to.<\/p>\n Pick up a poetry book tomorrow morning. See what happens when you give words the attention they deserve. Here are some recommendations, along with links to the books mentioned above.<\/p>\n Image \u00a9 iStockPhoto.com. <\/p>\n Sign up for Attorney at Work\u2019s daily practice tips newsletter here<\/a> and subscribe to our podcast<\/a>, Attorney at Work Today.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n You don\u2019t need to be. Most lawyers aren\u2019t poetry people\u2014until they try it. Start with accessible poets like Billy Collins or Mary Oliver, who write in plain language about everyday observations. If the first collection doesn\u2019t click, try another. The goal isn\u2019t to become a literary critic; it\u2019s to spend five minutes daily with language used precisely. That habit alone changes how you write and think.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Five minutes for daily reading, 10 to 15 if you\u2019re writing, 20 if you\u2019re memorizing something. All of this is less time than you spend scrolling through emails before your coffee gets cold. The practice doesn\u2019t require clearing your schedule\u2014it requires redirecting five minutes you\u2019re already wasting.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Precision with language, pattern recognition across complex information, comfort with ambiguity, ability to read subtext in conversations, metaphorical thinking that connects disparate concepts, and the capacity to explain complex ideas through vivid imagery. These aren\u2019t soft skills\u2014they\u2019re the intangible assets that separate competent professionals from indispensable ones.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Poetry forces you to recognize fine distinctions between emotional states that business language flattens. You learn the difference between ambition and desperation, between confidence and arrogance, between disappointment and devastation. This vocabulary for nuance translates directly to professional contexts\u2014reading a client\u2019s hesitation, sensing a colleague\u2019s unstated concern, recognizing when someone\u2019s words don\u2019t match their emotional state.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nPoetry: The Analog Practice That Built the Greatest Legal Minds<\/h2>\n
There is a Real, Tangible Connection Between Creative Writing and Workplace Success<\/h3>\n
Your Technical Skills as a Writer Will Blossom, But There Are Even Greater Rewards<\/h3>\n
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Three Legal Luminaries Who Were Poets<\/h2>\n
These Attorneys Understood Something Most Miss<\/h2>\n
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Enhanced Communication and Improved Legal Writing Skills<\/h3>\n
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Emotional Intelligence: A Lawyer\u2019s Competitive Advantage<\/h3>\n
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Critical Thinking and Analysis: The Logic of Poetry<\/h3>\n
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Anti-AI Creativity Value<\/h3>\n
Developing a Poetry Practice for Your Professional Development<\/h2>\n
First, Coffee and Couplets<\/h3>\n
Then Maybe Write Some?<\/h3>\n
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The Last Practice of Poetry Is to Memorize It<\/h3>\n
Great Lawyers Become Great Because They Do the Work<\/h2>\n
Recommended Reading for Poetry Practice<\/h2>\n
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by\u00a0Stephen Fry <\/li>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.attorneyatwork.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/06\/AttorneyatWork-Logo-%C2%AE-2021-1.jpg?resize=372%2C106&ssl=1\" "\\"\\""){kind=logo}
<\/a><\/figure>\nFAQ: Poetry for Professional Development<\/h2>\n