Poetry

On a blog about (mostly) technology, poetry probably seems out of place, but I beg to differ. Like anything in science or math, once you get beyond the facts and figures, you start to see a beauty and elegance in the natural order. From a programming perspective, poetry is a lot like code obfuscation or cryptography, where you take perfectly functional and readable code and turn it into something more compact and challenging that still works.

So basically, poetry is like a puzzle, where you read it to try and find hidden messages and marvel at how the author expressed an idea with carefully selected words. But what I find most fascinating is how someone else can read your poem and see something you never intended. At that moment, your poem takes on a life of its own and becomes more than the sum of its parts.

I know you’re asking how any of this is useful so let’s liken poetry to stargazing. When you stare into the night sky, do you just count the stars or do you try and connect the dots to form the constellations? If you do the latter, you’ve just given yourself a great way of navigating the seas. How’s that for usefulness? That’s where I see the value of poetry — it gives us a way to think outside of the box to push the envelope of the status quo.

Poetry forces us to think and re-think our ideas so that we can capture the knowledge AND the experiences in the fewest possible words. Can you imagine what we could accomplish if we approached everything else with this mindset?

I wasn’t content to imagine so I wrote some poetry (long ago), which I’ve grouped together here:

• Life
• Growth

Please don’t expect to find answers to the universe here because I’m still searching for those. But as Robert Frost once said “…and that has made all the difference.”