Georgia Tech Poet Reconciles Art and Science
By Jamie Woodhead / STAFF
 Thomas Lux, poetry director at the Georgia Institute of Technology |
The Washington Post called him, “One of the this generation’s most gifted poets.” He has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is also the poetry chair and director of poetry at a local university, but this is no Ivy League university or any other school where you might expect to find a nationally recognized poet.
Thomas Lux is the poetry director at the Georgia Institute of Technology. And he shared some of his innermost thoughts on the importance of poetry, especially in a technological environment, at the Rotary Club of North Fulton meeting last week at the Doubletree Hotel in Roswell.
Lux came to Georgia Tech as a visiting professor in the spring of 2001 and he expected to stay for only one semester. He already had a permanent job teaching at Bronxville, N.Y.’s Sarah Lawrence College, but he quickly fell in love with both Atlanta and Tech. Lux is currently the holder of the Bourne Chair of Poetry and the director of the Poetry at Tech program.
Lux often writes about the common things in life because he believes that they are what people need to pay attention to the most. For instance, in his poem “Refrigerator, 1957” he writes, “This is not a place to go in hope or hunger. But, just to the right of the middle of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red, heart red, sexual red, wet neon red, shining red in their liquid, exotic, aloof, slumming in such company: a jar of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters full, fiery globes, like strippers at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino, the only foreign word I knew.”
Although many people do not think of poetry when they think of Georgia Tech, Lux had no trouble explaining the way poetry fits in with science and technology. He described poetry writing as a science, one that requires many drafts, reworks, and strict rules to follow.
“Poems are made things,” Lux said. “They require construction and engineering like bridges. Both are made to last and be beautiful. Most people who read a poem don’t think of the intricate work that goes on to create a poem, and most people who cross a bridge never think about how it got there.”
He also stressed that Georgia Tech is not just a technical school. “I teach in the Liberal Arts School,” he explained, “and it is an important school in a major public university.”