Poetry for Lawyers: The Daily Practice That Transforms Legal Writing

For lawyers, poetry isn’t about flowery language or becoming more literate. Using poetry for professional development is the ultimate career hack. Here’s why.

This meeting could have been an emoji. Two hours with Marvin and Lorraine, the undynamic duo, and their grayscale slides — each one packed with more bullets than a Kentucky road sign. And just when you think it’s 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’re eyeing the seventh-floor window for possible self-defenestration when a gravelly voice cuts through the back-patting.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”

It’s MacEvoy, intoning in his best Logan Roy. The room falls quiet. “But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep … and miles to go before I sleep.”

Then he walks out.

MacEvoy’s 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 “The Ode Less Travelled,” Stephen Fry’s remarkable argument for poetry, off his shelf and hands it to you.

Reading it, you realize something: Poetry for lawyers isn’t about becoming literary.

Poetry: The Analog Practice That Built the Greatest Legal Minds

Yes, I am serious. Do you wonder sometimes why your briefs don’t persuade? Why negotiations stall? Why client relationships are stale? You’re 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?

MacEvoy has a point. There is science behind how poetry improves professional communication skills.

There Is a Real, Tangible Connection Between Creative Writing and Workplace Success

Creative writing is not about flowery prose. Successful prosody, memorable essays and stories that stay with you for years are built on the author’s precision with words. Writing good poetry, considered by most writers the most estimable use of one’s talent and skill as a scribe, is transformative.

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. Besides the obvious constraint of time, they’re 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’s a good thing. The struggle is the point. The difficulty level develops writing chops that brief writing can’t reach. In a very real way, you will light up new avenues of creative force in that part of your mind that controls language.

Your Technical Skills as a Writer Will Blossom, But There Are Even Greater Rewards

According to Harvard Business School, 71% of employers are looking at emotional intelligence 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.

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.

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 — or burst out of your mouth during a tense meeting.

Three Legal Luminaries Who Were Poets

Wallace Stevens (1879-1955): The Insurance Executive Poet

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.

Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982): From Partner to Poet Laureate

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 “A poem should not mean/but be.”

Monica Youn (1971- ): The Election Law Poet

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.

These Attorneys Understood Something Most Miss

Poetry isn’t a distraction from legal work — it’s training for it. But let’s list those rewards here to drive the point home. Remember, though, creative writing of any kind involves stretching your language faculties beyond what they’re 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’re turning out passable verse. This will develop those linguistic tendencies and deliver tangible, measurable results:

• Enhanced communication skills.
• Emotional intelligence.
• Critical thinking skills.

Enhanced Communication and Improved Legal Writing Skills

• Memory and Presence: Memorizing poetry improves delivery, which may help in the courtroom as much as in client meetings.
• Metaphor and Analogy: Poetry helps lawyers practice the requisite art of explaining complex concepts through vivid imagery.
• Rhythm and Pacing: Understanding poetic meter improves oral argument timing.

Emotional Intelligence: A Lawyer’s Competitive Advantage

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.

Take Wallace Stevens. Reading his poetry will help you perceive the space between what’s stated and what’s implied. Elizabeth Bishop’s careful observations 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’s hesitation, to sense a colleague’s unstated concern, to recognize when someone’s saying one thing but feeling something else entirely.

Poetry teaches professionals to think in layers, understanding that meaning exists beneath surface statements — a gold-plated skill for negotiations, management and any work requiring insight.

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.

Reading a poem daily builds emotional patience. When a professional reads Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and sits with its melancholy beauty, they’re practicing the same attention they’ll need when a team member struggles to articulate a concern, or when they must navigate their own disappointment after a setback.

Poetry normalizes complexity, teaching that not every emotional experience resolves neatly or quickly.

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 Martín Espada’s tenant advocacy poems encounters the lived reality of housing insecurity. A tech executive engaging with Louise Glück’s stark examinations of family pain develops vocabulary for loss they may have never personally experienced. This expansion of emotional range — understanding grief in cultures different from your own, recognizing joy expressed in unfamiliar ways, feeling the particular frustration of injustice you’ve never faced — creates professionals who can work effectively across difference. They’ve practiced inhabiting other perspectives through verse, making them more attuned to the diverse emotional landscapes of colleagues, clients, and stakeholders they encounter daily.

Critical Thinking and Analysis: The Logic of Poetry

Poetry’s heavy. Reading every day is actual mental calisthenics. It’s 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’s weird. More art than science.

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’s 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?

Now imagine you’ve been reading the works of Anne Carson or Olivia Cronk. Then you’ve been in the ambiguous trenches. You’re used to wondering what the poets were thinking when they put a particular string of words in a particular order. You’ve been practicing reverse-engineering their thought process, which is preparing you for your senior counsel’s strange utterances.

Poetry trains you to ask: What’s actually being said here, and what’s the subtext, and what am I missing? 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 — the actual insights that separate you from every other schmuck with an MBA — lives in the ambiguity.

When you read a poem every morning, you’re practicing holding multiple interpretations in your head simultaneously without freaking out that you don’t have THE answer.

That metaphor could mean three different things, and maybe all of them are true. Sitting with that discomfort daily means that when you’re in a meeting and the data points are contradictory, you don’t panic and force a premature conclusion. You’ve got the intellectual flexibility to say, “Hold on, let’s look at this from another angle.”

And here’s where it gets professionally lethal: Poetry teaches you to spot bullshit. Because a poem uses precise language — every word is load-bearing — you develop an eye for when people are hiding behind jargon, when they’re using five words because they don’t 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’s 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.

The lawyers who read poetry daily aren’t just thinking better — they’re thinking differently. They’re making connections nobody else sees because they’ve 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’s 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.

Anti-AI Creativity Value

Reading poetry daily is basically cross-training for your brain, except instead of building muscle, you’re building the capacity to make completely unhinged connections that turn out to be brilliant.

Most professionals think in templates — the five-year plan, the proven framework, the way we’ve 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.

This matters professionally because the obvious path is where everyone already is. If you’ve 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’t. You walk into that problem-solving session with connections nobody else can see because you’ve been training in lateral thinking.

Poetry also gives you permission to be deliberately strange, which is an underrated professional superpower. Most people are terrified of sounding stupid, so they self-edit into oblivion, pitching only the safe ideas. But you’ve 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’t land, but the other half? That’s where the breakthroughs live. You’ve trained yourself to access weird on demand because you’ve normalized it as part of how sharp people think.

And here’s the advantage nobody talks about: Poetry teaches you to remix. Every poet is stealing — taking the language of medicine, architecture, pop music, legal documents — and reassembling it into something new. You read enough and you start doing it instinctively. You’re a tax lawyer, but you start thinking like a designer. You’re in corporate law, but you borrow frameworks from ecology. The innovation everyone’s desperate for? It’s usually just combining two things that don’t typically go together. The truly dangerous professionals aren’t just smart, they’re dimensionally weird. They can hold a normal conversation and then suddenly suggest something absolutely unhinged that somehow works.

That’s not a personality trait you’re born with. It’s a muscle you build, one strange association at a time.

Developing a Poetry Practice for Your Professional Development

Before I launch into prescriptive poetics, let’s set some goals. You’re already busy. Permanently weeded. You work 83-hour days, 45 days a week. I know. I’m 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’s 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 — and that you have a life outside of law.

Here’s what you do.

First, Coffee and Couplets

Habit chains are a thing, 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.

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’t worry that cracking open that book is too much of a commitment. You’re not going back to school here. This is poetry for fun. It’s your antidote to the steppy-steppy morbidly sober factotum you’ll spend the rest of your day with.

Make it fun. Make it stupid. Read poems about puppies or football or whatever you want. That’s just fine. There’s a collection out there somewhere that meets you at the edge of your interest.

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.

Then Maybe Write Some?

One of the best books on poetry as a practice is “The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within” by Stephen Fry. It’s good because Fry makes you realize writing poetry can be something you do just for fun. A hobby. You don’t 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.

One of Fry’s useful admonitions is to carry a notebook. That way, when you find yourself in one of those rare, spare moments, or when you’re inspired, you can easily open to a page and drop a few artful lines.

When you commit to writing a small poem every day, you develop the habit of a poetic mind. 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’t have to; you can write about ridiculous things, as many great poets do).

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.

Poetry isn’t easy. By writing regularly, you’ll “fail up” to a new level as a writer. Because expressing yourself effortlessly only comes after endless effort. But if you do it — if you write every day, express yourself poetically — mastery will come.

The Last Practice of Poetry Is to Memorize It

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’s always there, ready for you to recall it and feel the words.

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.

Great Lawyers Become Great Because They Do the Work

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’s not hard. It’s 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’s the practice. That’s how you stop being another beige associate and start being the lawyer everyone wants to sit next to.

Recommended Reading for Poetry Practice

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.

• 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day by Billy Collins. The former U.S. Poet Laureate curates accessible, brief poems ideal for daily reading.
• The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux. It includes many short sample poems alongside writing exercises.
• Good Poems edited by Garrison Keillor. Curated collection of readable, memorable short poems.
• Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver. Accessible nature poetry, most poems under one page, clear imagery.
• The Sun and Her Flowers by Rupi Kaur. Very short, Instagram-style poems with simple language and visual elements.
• The Princess Saves Herself in This One by Amanda Lovelace. Short, accessible poems in a fairy-tale framework.
• The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
• Selected Poems of E.E. Cummings
• A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
• Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
• I Could Pee on This: And Other Poems by Cats by Francesco Marciuliano
• The Poet’s Year: 365 Poems and How to Read Them by Kelvin Corcoran
• Poem-a-Day
• A Year with Rilke: Daily Readings from the Best of Rainer Maria Rilke edited by
• Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows
• The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within by Stephen Fry
• Collected Poems 1917 to 1982 by Archibald MacLeish 
• The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens: The Corrected Edition by Wallace Stevens
• From From by Monica Youn
• Poems by Elizabeth Bishop
• New Hampshire by Robert Frost
• The Wild Iris Louise Glück
• Wrong Norma by Anne Carson (a 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award winner)

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