It is National Poetry Month, and I am a poet.
I have been one since I was a little girl — long before I knew what to call it. Before the English Literature degree at the University of Toronto; before the blog I ran, quietly, for a few years; before I learned the names for the things I had always instinctively done, the slowing down, the looking twice, the refusal to accept the first available meaning of anything.
For most of my professional life, I kept that part of myself entirely separate from this one. It felt like the right thing to do — to leave the poet at the door when I walked into the boardroom. Two different worlds, I told myself — unrelated.
I no longer believe that.
Something shifted when AI entered the room — not because it threatened the work, but because of what it revealed about the work: the difference between processing information and actually thinking, what it means to notice something that isn't obvious, to ask a question that wasn't on the agenda, to see what everyone else in the room had already agreed to walk past.
I started to recognize that way of seeing. It was familiar. It was the same thing I had been doing with poems and poetry since I was a child.
Anthony Bourdain once wrote that you can always tell when someone has worked in a restaurant — not because they say so, but because of how they move, how they read a room, how they understand without being told what someone actually needs. He wasn't romanticizing the work. He was making a case for a kind of intelligence that no curriculum names but that shapes everything once you have it.
I think poetry does the same thing.
Not poetry as art form, and not poetry as something you appreciate from a comfortable distance, but poetry as a practice — a discipline of attention that trains specific, transferable capacities that are increasingly hard to find and increasingly difficult to replicate.
It trains you to notice what is missing, to resist the obvious interpretation, and to hold complexity without collapsing it into something easier. And perhaps most pressingly right now: it trains you to slow down on purpose, and to know when that matters.
In a world where speed is assumed to be the goal, the capacity to recognize which moments deserve stillness — which problems need to be sat with before they are solved — is genuinely rare. Percy B. Shelley wrote that poetry lifts the film of familiarity from the world, making us see what we had learned to walk past. That is not a literary idea. That is a business one.
We talk a great deal about the skills AI cannot replicate — empathy, judgment, creativity — but underneath all of those words, I think what we are really describing is a quality of attention — a trained capacity to see what isn't obvious, ask what isn't being asked, and notice what the room has already decided to skip over.
When you are building a team, or hiring for a role that requires real thinking — not the performance of thinking, but the actual thing — it might be worth asking not just what someone knows, but how they have learned to look.
The world would be better served by more poetry-minded people in business.
And this is a good month to start thinking about why.
Roberta Natale is the COO of Industria Innovations Inc., a Canadian private label home furnishings manufacturer based in North York, Ontario. It is National Poetry Month.
