A poem is a machine for controlling attention. Where the line breaks, what waits at the top of the next stanza, how much white space you leave around a hard word — these aren’t decoration. They tell the reader where to slow down and what to carry forward.
Information architecture is the same craft wearing a suit. A help center is a structure for attention too: what belongs on the landing page, what hides one click deeper, which sentence a panicked user reads first. Get the hierarchy wrong and the content is technically all there and functionally useless — like a poem with every image in the wrong order.
Both disciplines taught me the same discipline: cut. The strongest poem and the clearest procedure share a quality — nothing in them is load-bearing that doesn’t need to be. You earn a reader’s attention by refusing to waste it.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the writers I trust most with a documentation set are often the ones who read poetry. They already know that structure is meaning.