 Hi everyone, I'm Lauren. You can find me all over the internet as Dev Dame. I am a full-stack developer at a place called Brad's Deals in Chicago, community organizer, and also a poet. So I left home when I was 15 years old to go to boarding school for poetry. I studied it for about eight years, got my BA in poetry, and then I worked retail. Because it turns out, poet isn't a job. Nobody really told me this before. But I found it out the hard way, and I had to find something else. So I decided to give programming a try. I fell in love. I loved it. But when I was starting to learn programming, I realized that there are so many similarities between writing code and writing poetry. So I want to talk to you guys about them today. And I know you guys have probably been wondering, this whole conference, when is somebody going to read a poem? Well, now. OK, I have some questions for you. So I want to see some hands here. How many of you guys, how many of you have just read any poetry? All right, yeah, most of you. Cool. How many of you would say that you like poetry? All right. OK, we're going to convert the rest to you today. It's going to be great. How many of you have read any poetry outside of a mandatory class? OK, not bad. All right. And oh, hold on. Oh, notes are going down. All right. And how many of you have written any poetry? Excellent. Good. Good on you. Cool. Well, for the rest of you, we're going to go through some poetry terms so that we all have kind of a common vocabulary for the talk. So it's time for a poetry rundown. This is a short poem. It's called The Poem by George Oppen. A poetry of the meaning of words and a bond with the universe. I think there is no light in the world but the world. And I think there is light. So I started easy for you guys. This is a poem, right? OK, but now we're going to get a little bit further down into there. So then we have a line. And a line is the basic building block of a poem. So when we're writing prose, a sentence is sort of the unit that you think about it being composed out of, but poetry is all about lines. And then there's the line break. So you can think of this kind of like the BR tag or the backslash N. It's just the moment at which you decide to break down to the next line. And then there's a stanza. And a stanza is the little nugget of poetry there in between the space on the top and the bottom. OK, now we're going to talk about form poetry versus free verse. And so this is the distinction just sort of putting these into two categories. All poems will really fit into one of these categories. Now, form poems, they have a set structure, a set pattern. They have a lot of constraints that you have to work within. So you guys might know sonnets, limericks, haikus. Sometimes they have a rhyme scheme. Sometimes they don't. But they all have certain constraints. But then there's free verse. And free verse is most of the poetry that's written today. There are no constraints on it. You can still have rhyme. You can still have special meters or pay attention to these things, but it's not required. And poetry isn't as stuffy as you'd think. Now, those of you who have read poetry in school or whatnot, you're probably being shown a lot of, I think, really boring poems. So we're going to start out here by reading one that I think is a little bit less boring to get us all in the mood. It's called Heat by Dennis Johnson. Here in the electric desk, your naked lover tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth. It's beautiful, Susan. Her hair sticky with gin. Our lady of wet glass rings on the album cover streaming with hatred in the heat as the record falls and the snake band cords begin to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones. And such a last light full of spheres and zones. August, you're just an erotic hallucination. Just so much feverishly produced kazoo music. Are you serious? This large oven impersonating night, this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion, the bogus moon of tenderness and magic. You hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light. So less boring than some of the stuff you probably read. So what about programming, though? Let's jump into some of the connections between the two fields. The first one is the big one. You've all probably been thinking about this already, language. So both poetry and programming are ways of creating meaning from language out of language. But, of course, with language comes things like syntax. So there's this quote by Oscar Wilde. I've spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out. Which I'm sure a lot of you guys can relate to, right? I feel like these are two of the only fields where a semicolon can completely change what you do. So there's always this huge attention to detail and making sure that you're looking at everything as small as the tiniest bit of punctuation or the smallest word. And then there's white space. So white space is this concept in poetry of the negative space that surrounds your words. And it can have a really big effect on your poetry. So you can have two poems that are the exact same words, but the way that the white space works with them on the page will kind of make them mean different things. So one of the first things you learn when you're learning how to program, right, is how to properly indent things. I'm sure we've all had a moment of working with somebody who's like, just learning HTML and all of their tags are on the left side of the page. And they're like, something's broken. They're like, I have no idea because this looks like nonsense. So you start to get this gut response, right? So how the white space in your work looks. So here's an example, some blurred out stuff so we're not just trying to read it. So here on the left side of the screen, this is some code from Rails, and on the right side of the screen is a Sylvia Plath poem. You can see they really mirror each other visually, right? So a lot like the methods, those stanzas are made, they're broken up to kind of separate thought. But you can tell here, looking at this EE Cummings poem, I mean, it's probably a pretty different poem, right, than like that business right there. You get a feeling immediately from the white space and it really affects you. So in both of these forms, what you're really trying to do is communicate with the reader through language, whether that reader is a human or a computer. And so a poem has an expected output, just like a program does. So it's aiming for something, whether that thing is conveying an emotion or making the reader feel something or conveying a certain idea. And the reader is kind of like the input into the poem, right? You want your poem to be a destructive method. You want the reader to come out of it changed. And these things really start boiling down to a lot of creativity within constraints. And when we talk about constraints and we talk about poetry, one of the biggest types of constraints in poetry, when you choose to use it, which, you know, is form poetry. So we're gonna talk a little bit about sonnets. For those of you who care, we are going over Elizabethan sonnets today, not Petrarchan sonnets, big difference. But I'm gonna go over some of the constraints that come along with sonnets. So first off, a sonnet, Elizabethan, Petrarchan, whatever you have, they're all gonna be 14 lines long. It's our first constraint. But further than that, it kind of comes in these specific parts. So it's gonna start out with three quatrains. Now what a quatrain is, it's a stanza. You guys know that now, stanzas, right? That's composed of four lines. So you've got three of these four line stanzas. And they're kind of building up this argument. They're working towards a specific point. And then there's something called the volta. Now the volta is a logical turn. And this means whatever that is that you're building up to in your poem, after those three quatrains, the volta kind of comes in and it turns it on its head. So this isn't like a physical thing that's in the poem, but this is sort of what happens when you're at that point. It's part of the logical structure. And then, after you've kind of turned your concept on your head, or maybe in the process of turning your concept on your head, you have a couplet at the end. And a couplet is a two line stanza. Now all of this is an iambic pentameter. And what that means is, so a iambic pentameter is a part of, it's a term from prosody, which is talking about the meter of your poem and how it sounds musically. So an iamb is a metrical unit or a foot that goes da-dum. Now pentameter, you might have figured out, pentmeter, right? So it's five of these units in the meter of the line. So you guys have probably heard a lot of iambic pentameter. I mean, Shakespeare is like a lot of iambic pentameter. And it's used in a lot of different things. I think a really good example, because with those five iamb's, it's gonna go da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum. But soft, what light through yonder window breaks? It's a good classic iambic pentameter line. So on top of all this, we got a rhyme scheme. We're gonna take a look at the poem that these words are from in a minute. But you can see each quatrain. We've got these letters here, right? So where it says A, B, A, B, you can see that the A lines rhyme with each other, but then the B lines also rhyme with each other. And then you bring in a new rhyme for the C's, and then for the D's, and the E's, and the F's. And then that last couplet, G, G rhymes with itself. So we've talked a lot about sonnets. Let's take a look at a sonnet. See if we can pick out these constraints from the sonnet. And because Shakespeare is like the total OG of iambic pentameter and sonnets, we are going to read Shakespeare's sonnet number 130. My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun. Coral is far more red than her lips red. If snows be white, why then her breasts are done? If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I've seen roses demasked, red and white, but no such roses see I in her cheeks. And in some perfumes, is there more delight than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know that music has a far more pleasing sound. I grant I never saw a goddess go. My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven I think my love is rare as any. She belied with false compare. So you can see how this form is working for him here. These first three stanzas, he's telling us all the ways in which his mistress is like not perfect. He's sort of riffing here on the flowery love poems that were really popular at the time that would like idolize the lover. Like my lover is like goddess. He's like no, no, she's not a goddess. Like she's fine. She's got like wiry hair and like really bad breath. But then, so you're reading this and you're like wow, this is kind of rude. But then that last couplet, you can see where that volta is, right? That last couplet he takes and he uses it to flip the arguments that he's been making. And he shows us that loving those imperfections is more honest than idealizing her and idolizing her. So okay, you can see a lot goes into the sonnet, right? Like a lot of things go into it and it's still gotta be good, which is crazy. It is really hard trying to fit what you wanna say into this form. And if you think that this is hard, a sonnet is like a really relatively simple form. There are tons and tons of different forms and they get a lot more challenging. One of my favorites is a heroic crown of sonnets. It's a poem comprised of 15 sonnets. So there are 14 sonnets and then the last sonnet in the poem is the first lines of the first 14 sonnets in order. So like you have to make that make sense, that's insane. It can be really frustrating and it can be really easy to like hate the form for keeping you back and be like I wanna do me. But the thing is that there is a reason for these forms, right? So they were developed and they've stuck around for a really long time, but they give really helpful guidelines and they set you up with a structure that works. So forms can help you do things like organized thought, right? Pay attention to the sound in your poem. They can help you develop patterns, develop rhythms, plain old just get started. Sometimes when you just don't know how to start, it's a good place. And they're really there to help you, right? So I mean, each form brings a very different set of tools to the table that will help you do all kinds of different things with your poem. And like challenges are fun. I love by the way how much this meme has come up, the conference slides. But I thought it was particularly applicable because when I started writing sonnets, I like did this. I really was. It was like every single thing is going to be a sonnet. And I wrote a lot of sonnets that made no sense because they shouldn't have been sonnets. You guys, I wrote my college entrance essays in Iambic pentameter and quadrenes with End Rhyme. Like it was bad. But it's one of those things where puzzles and challenges, those are addictive, right? We all know that. Everybody here knows how satisfying it is when you kind of solve a puzzle and when you make things fit, you manipulate them to do that. So the danger in this is one of those things, you know, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? So it's really easy to get caught up in these low level challenges. Like trying to make some stupid idea turn into a sonnet, making a thought that you have fit this meter and this rhyme scheme. So much so that you kind of forget the high level challenges. Like, should I be using this particular form? And does it help this particular Palmer idea? Okay, by now you guys are like, you totally know what's coming. Yeah, super familiar, right? Because form poetry, it's really similar to a lot of our tools in programming. So, like frameworks, languages, design patterns. A, B, A, B, M, B, C, C. So these are all things that we've created to give ourselves these really helpful guidelines and to make our code a little bit easier to write. But like I'm sure we've all had these times where we find ourselves really, really struggling against the form that we've chosen to write in. So you gotta start asking yourself some questions. Because you might start getting so tempted to like change all of these low level things, trying to get the ding ding thing to fit in there. But that you start to lose all of these positive things that the form is supposed to be providing for you. And that's when you have to ask yourself, is this the right form? So it's totally okay to break conventions every now and then. You don't have to follow every rule strictly. But if you find that you wanna change everything, like every little thing, then especially things that are more on the high level, right? You're changing the way that you're structuring the high level thought structures of the poem. Or you find that you're really, really struggling against MVC. You know, you have to ask yourself, what good is that form, or that framework, or language, or pattern? What good is it doing for you? And would a different form be better? You have to trust yourself, right? You have to trust yourself to be able to make a few of those little changes. But also you have to trust yourself to recognize the red flags. And recognize those moments where you're really struggling against that. So I think it's good to get yourself into a routine of asking, why am I using this form? And if you can't answer that question, it might be time to evaluate, think about maybe using a new form. It's all right. Then what? Oh no, my rule, it's not show, oh, there we go. Yeah. I couldn't help myself with this one, I love data. All right, so let's say you've picked your form where you go free verse, or you pick your language, or your framework, or what not, and you start getting to writing. But what then, right? What do you do then? Then comes the question, what makes code and poetry good? See guys, this is like a really hard question. And I mean, obviously none of us really have the answer to this all of the time. But we might think we do, because these things are subjective, right? So I'm sure we've all had moments where we think we objectively know the right way to do something, but really it comes down to personal opinion, right? And people have so many opinions about this. I'm sure you guys have disagreements with your coworkers about code. If you go on the internet, I mean, there's that. But so when it comes down to it, it's really hard to teach and learn something that's so based off of the context, whether it's the context of the poem or the context of like the controller in your app, right? But we have all these guidelines. We have guidelines that help us along the way. And one of the main guidelines that we have that applies to both, oh gosh, I'm sorry, bullets. It's to say a lot with a little. So you wanna use just enough language to make yourself clear. You wanna make sure that every word is necessary. So in both of these fields, people really like it when you're concise. So one thing that I ask myself a lot when I'm writing poetry is, is this word necessary to the poem? Will I lose something if I take it out? And what if I gained by putting it in? That's a really good question. It's a good question to ask yourself anytime that you're creating something. But in order to answer it, we need to figure out one thing. And that thing is, what do we mean by necessary? So I like to think of it as a balance of two different factors. There's fact and then there's beauty. So fact. By fact, I mean functionality when we're talking about code. The sort of message or the narrative of the poem. So this sort of means what the code does and what the poetry means. It's what you say. But then there's beauty. And beauty, I think of as readability in code and an imagery in poetry. So it's how clear your code is. The human consumption friendliness of it. And then like the, the Poemi parts of your poem. So this is how you say things as opposed to what you say. So we're gonna take a look at a really short poem. It's really famous for saying a lot with a little in a station of the metro by Ezra Pound. The apparition of these faces in the crowd pedals on a wet black bow. Now Pound is able to convey this huge amount of feeling in just two lines. And this is like every English major's favorite small poem. People go crazy over this thing. And I think that's a lot of that is because of that balance. So why is that balance so important in here? Well without beauty fact can be irrelevant. So a poem that tells you exactly what it's about with no embellishment, with no imagery, with no beauty in it. It could be clear, but it kind of loses its magic, right? Kind of like when you've got like a method that you've turned into some like 15, 15 method call long chained thing. You're like, I fit it on one line. But it can not only be difficult for others to read, but it can be painful, much like bad poetry. So what if Pound had gone too far sort of stripping down that essence of his poem? We've got, I was in the Metro by Ezra, just the fax pound. I saw faces in the crowd, they were beautiful. Okay, so not like a particularly moving poem, right? And it's also losing some of that meaning that it had before. So we don't get that full richness of the poem. We don't get those extra things that are conveyed with that beauty and conveyed with the imagery. And I like to think of imagery and metaphor in poetry a little bit like variables or methods, right? So you're referencing one thing, but in doing so you have access to all of this other information sort of encoded like that. So by itself, a method might not tell that much of a story, but in the context of your code, that's where it makes sense, that's where it comes alive. But okay, on the other hand you guys, too much elaboration loses focus. So if you just kind of go on and on with your imagery and flowery words, you start diluting the message that your poem has, you know, just like adding unnecessary comments and like breaking your code up too much in the name of readability can really be harmful to the quality of your code. So if Pound hadn't only said what he needed to, we might have ended up with this. In a dreary station of the metro by Ezra, pilot on Pound. I was deep down in the metro looking at the crowd and these faces appeared almost as if they were ghosts. The metro was a dark cavern, the crowd a solid mass, but the faces were clear, delicate, fleeting, a brief moment of beauty in the otherwise dark world, like flower petals stuck to a slick black bow wet with rain. Okay, like we all hate this guy, right? It's a lot less impactful. So poetry also follows the principle of dry. So you wanna say something once, you wanna say it well and you do not wanna say it again. The ways you were gonna bore the heck out of your readers were like, oh my God, I got it like 15 lines ago, like just stop talking. So Pound, he didn't need to go on and on like this about the faces he saw in the metro, right? So, okay, you guys, this is what I wrote in my speaker's notes. I wrote, he called on the included library of human experience and told us it was like petals on a wet black bow, which held the rest of the information he needed. All right, so we really just need to remember the human aspect. So ultimately, if you're working with other developers, your code isn't just gonna be consumed by the computer, it's also consumed by other people. And by foregoing readability, you just cut those other people out of the equation. You're not writing poems, you're journaling. So maybe try approaching your code with that question that I asked about my poetry, right? So it's each word necessary, and is there anything that's not being said? And remember that readability can be just as necessary as function. But then we've got this question. How do we teach the contextual? I mean, a lot of these guidelines that we're talking about are fairly dependent on making these gut decisions. And it can be really, really hard to teach people how to make those decisions based off of the context that they're in, or even to agree on the best decisions once you know the context. So for this, we can take a lot from the way that poetry is taught. So the vast majority of a poet or a writer's education is spent in writing workshops. So if you go through a college program in poetry, you're taking at least one of these at all times. And the classes usually have a small amount of students, maybe like eight, and they're all about giving feedback to each other. So I don't know if you guys know about this process, but it's frigging terrifying. So when it's your turn to be workshopped, you write your poem or poems and you print them off and you hand them out to everybody a week before. And then everybody takes them home. And they all read your poetry and then they just like cover the whole page in notes and things that they think about your poem and things that they assume about your poetry. And they're making line edits, they're writing stuff at the bottom of the page. And then you reconvene, you read your poem out loud to the class and then everybody discusses it. But this is a really terrifying part. So for the first part of the discussion, you're not allowed to talk. And by the first part, I mean that's like the whole discussion. So you sit there with your classmates and your classmates just critique your poem. And you're not allowed to jump in, you can't correct them about something, you can't answer questions, you can't do anything until people feel like they've discussed it enough. And then there's a little bit at the end where you get to talk with people. But really not that much. And so it is really hard to sit there when people get it wrong and they like get it wrong all the time. And it can be so painful when you're sitting there with like this thing that you've created, you're like, this is an amazing poem. And then everybody like assumes it's about something completely different. And they all discuss it and critique it in that way for like 20 minutes while you sit there and you're just like dying. But because you're not able to reply, you get this gift and that gift is silence. That gift is that you know what your poem says when it speaks for itself, not when you're speaking for it. Because you won't always be there, right? When your poem's out in a literary journal or a book, you will not be there to defend it. You can't give your readers some extra piece of information that's like gonna have it all make sense and they'll be like, oh, I get it now. Like you won't be there to be able to do that. So even if you don't agree with the critique, which you usually won't, often won't, you still get this really valuable information. And it's how people are reacting to your work as it stands by itself, not explained by you. So with programming, we all know if a bug comes up, you might be moved on to your next job, you might be out on vacation, somebody's having to deal with this code that you wrote, right? And you can't rely on being there to explain it. So in order to be better at dealing with feedback, to be better at taking feedback and really understanding it, I suggest to try being silent. And I know that this is a really difficult discussion, or suggestion, right? I mean, it's really difficult for me. I want to explain my decisions all the time. And I'm not always good at being silent when I should be. And I think a lot of this fear of being silent, I think it comes out of a fear that somebody's gonna misunderstand you, right? They'll think you don't know the things that you do. They'll think that you're standing for something else. But if your code isn't speaking for itself, if your code isn't saying what you want it to say, it's really valuable to stay silent and to listen and to see if the way that you're writing it is unclear to the people around you. So you can explain yourself later, and often you'll need to, you don't have to be silent the whole time, but allow yourself a minute to get that raw feedback. And you can end up with really actionable pieces of information that you might not have otherwise heard. Thank you guys so much. That's my talk.