Last week, The Atlantic featured an essay by Joshua Bennett, author and literature professor at MIT. It wasn’t about artificial intelligence or quantum computing. It was about poetry.
Bennett describes how his future engineers, scientists, and coders quietly formed a group chat that grew into a collective called The People’s Poetry. These students spend their days building technologies that may shape the future, and they spend their nights writing poems together.
The image is striking: tomorrow’s technologists reach for an art form as old as language itself. Why? Because even as AI promises to think and write for us, they are practicing what should never be outsourced: attention, ambiguity, tenderness, and meaning. At The HOW Institute for Society, we have written that ethical AI starts with us, and these students seem to understand that instinctively. What they are cultivating through poetry are not just artistic habits, but the very capacities leaders need most.
Poems as Micro-Revolutions
It’s tempting to dismiss poetry as irrelevant to business. Who has time for metaphors when the quarterly report is due, or when the AI summary can give you ten key takeaways in seconds? Poetry feels risky in a corporate boardroom. It doesn’t resolve; it lingers. It doesn’t promise a return on investment; it opens a door.
And yet, at precisely the moment when so many leaders feel pressure to become less human (more automated and more armored), poetry reminds us how to be human again.
Ross Gay, in his poem Sorrow Is Not My Name, admits to despair but still lists sweetness after sweetness: “two million naturally occurring sweet things… agave, persimmon… my niece is running through a field calling my name… my neighbor sings like an angel.”
In less careful hands, such a catalog might feel sentimental. But Gay insists on joy as a discipline not a confection. To say yes to life when everything is pulling you to the brink is an act of moral courage. Leadership, too, is often about resisting despair, finding instead a way to name the sweetness, even when the data (or the dashboard) is grim.
Precarious Beauty, Unscripted and Wild
Poetry also reminds us that beauty can be precarious. Tony Hoagland’s How It Adds Up offers a metaphor for happiness that is vivid, erratic, unforgettable:
Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower
plucked from a river of lava
and held aloft on a tightrope
strung between two scrawny trees
above a canyon
in a manic-depressive windstorm.
Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it—,
Business rarely talks this way. AI often promises seamlessness and certainty. But leadership isn’t seamless, and it shouldn’t be. To lead is to stand in the wind, to hold the precarious flower without pretending it’s safe.
The Unexpected Voice
Leadership doesn’t always sound like a quarterly earnings report or the clipped precision of an AI-generated summary. Sometimes it sounds like Denise Levertov’s February Evening in New York. The poem drifts through a winter street: “stores close, winter light opens air… the bodies aren’t really there…” It feels detached, impersonal until an ordinary woman turns to her companion and says, “What I love best is life.”
That one unguarded sentence rewires the entire poem. The city shifts from gray background to charged, living space. Leaders can do this, too: catch and amplify the unpolished voices that remind everyone what’s worth caring about. An authentic, offhand remark can sometimes carry more weight than the most carefully engineered communication.
The Quiet Compass
Wisława Szymborska, in her poem Possibilities, never preaches. She simply catalogs her preferences: “I prefer cats. I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky. I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility that existence has its own reason for being.”
It’s deceptively simple, but it offers a different vision of values. Instead of bold declarations, we get texture. Instead of abstractions, we get choices. Over time, these preferences sketch a moral landscape.
Leadership works the same way. Organizations don’t live their values through posters on the wall. They live them through repeated, everyday decisions. In an age when AI can optimize for efficiency, we should be careful not to outsource the act of choosing. Meaning is not a task to hand off; it’s a practice we must inhabit ourselves.
Preferring the Possible
If you are still wondering how this shows up in practice, here are a few invitations:
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Widen your reading: Alongside leadership books, keep a poetry anthology within reach. Let language surprise you again.
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Listen for the ordinary epiphany: Leadership may begin in unguarded moments, like when someone says simply, “I love life.” Paying attention to those voices often matters more than the polished ones.
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Name one preference aloud: “I’d rather…” These small declarations reveal more about our compass than a laminated values statement ever could.
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Sit with a striking image: If Hoagland’s tightrope flower stays with you, do not brush it aside. Let it shape how you imagine holding something fragile and vital in precarious winds.
These are not add-ons. They are acts of possibility, acts of remembering that we are human and so are the people we work alongside.
If we begin here, preferring the possible over the certain, we may find ourselves returning again and again to the things we should never outsource.
Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it—, Hoagland writes.
The choice to hold on is ours.
