Poetry for Engineers: Of Code and Shortleaf Pine

Ralph Earle joined the IBM Software Lab in Raleigh, N.C., in 1990 as a technical editor and retired as a senior software engineer in 2017. While at IBM, he coauthored Enterprise Computing with Objects: From Client/Server Environments to the Internet for Addison-Wesley’s Bloch-Jacobson-Rumbaugh Object Technology Series, and he published articles in technical journals, including IEEE Computer Magazine, IBM Systems Journal, Distributed Computing, Management Directions, and Object Magazine.

In retirement, Earle has flourished in a second career as a poet. His poetry collections are Everything You Love Is New (Redhawk Publications, 2024) and The Way the Rain Works (Sable Books, 2015). He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times and comanages a monthly poetry series at a Chapel Hill, N.C., bookstore. His poems have appeared in many print and online outlets, including The Sun, Carolina Quarterly, and Sufi Journal.