5 Poems for Product Designers to Read

Poetry often stands alone, an insular and insulated field of study. There are perhaps small trails that connect it to music and theatre. But I will say that my education in poetry has been a inexhaustible source of ideas, frameworks, guidance and groundwork for my career as a product designer and leader.

So here is a first small sampling of poems I refer to (sometimes even share) in my business of design. Some small bits of guidance around these poems:

1. Poems don’t exist on the page, they exist only in human speech, so find a quiet room, close the door and read them aloud.
2. Don’t look to unlock the meaning of the poem. It has as many meanings as you can find in it, each of them primary.

First

Mowing by Robert Frost

If for no other reason than the second-to-last line:

“The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.”

But further the connection between work and sensation is one known to any sort of worker, be it designer, bricklayer or mower. Work has its own lived experience.

POTD - Mowing by Robert Frost

Second

Corson’s Inlet by A.R. Ammons

This poem, with its long description of an ordinary walk through nature, breaks into meditation about the mind, meaning, understanding, in ways that are simultaneously vivid and crisply abstract.

the land falls from grassy dunes to creek
to undercreek: but there are no lines, though
change in that transition is clear
as any sharpness: but “sharpness” spread out

POTD - Corson's Inlet by A.R. Ammons

Third

Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke

Vision, fear, beauty, frustration and disappointment are all dimensions of the same thing. Completeness destroyed, or never achieved. Fully flowered into beauty, slowly decaying.

This tension between the full vision and the thing of it in the world is a tension known to designers too well.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star

POTD - Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke

Fourth

Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form by Matthea Harvey

The creator and the creation have an distinct and unbreakable relationship. You can read in the designed object the hope, fear, pain, desire and struggle of the designer.

he knows how to take something
Small and hard and hot and make room for
His breath quickens at night

POTD - Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form by Matthea Harvey

Fifth

Dire Wolf by Lucie Brock-Broido

Forms emerge from an unknown place.

the wild wolves roamed
In scattered sorrows over

Everywhere, prodigious in appetite, howling
At the hollow of

Everything empty like a throat coated
With the fabric of a bolt

Of red.

POTD - Dire Wolf by Lucie Brock Broido