blueprints

120 | thomas lux
Arts, the largest amphitheater on the Tech campus. A few hundred more
people, we learned later, had been turned around by fierce thunderstorms
in the area. We’ve never had a reading with that many people since—though
Billy Collins alone drew nearly one thousand in April 2004.
Wayne and Ann Clough became important supporters of Poetry@
Tech when we started up again in 2002. In 2003, after a reading by Mary
Karr and Gerald Stern, I heard two people behind me singing the Georgia
Tech fight song: “I’m a rambling wreck from Georgia Tech. . . .” I turned
around to see Gerry Stern and Wayne Clough, arms around each other’s
shoulders, singing “and a hell of an engineer. . . .” The Cloughs came to
readings whenever they could. They, and I, are baseball nuts, and we sometimes
ran into each other at Tech baseball games. One time in particular
was just after the terrible tragedy at Virginia Tech (where Dr. Clough had
been a professor and a dean; he was also a friend of Virginia’s Tech’s president).
Among other things, one of us said, there but for fortune. Every college
and university administrator, I bet, was saying or thinking the same
thing—or should have been. Another time at a Georgia Tech function, Mrs.
Clough was following a Tech baseball game on a BlackBerry or something
(it was a big game!) and signaling the score to me across a few tables while
someone, quite possibly her husband, was speaking at the podium. Once,
Dr. Clough hosted a gathering of Georgia college and university presidents,
provosts, etc. For a speaker, he didn’t want an educator or a scientist
or an engineer. He wanted a poet: Billy Collins. Billy gave a brilliant reading.
On another night, Dr. and Mrs. Clough and Billy and I went out to
dinner. Dr. Clough grabbed the check. I referred to him as the “President
Who Loved Poetry.”
Why did he love poetry? Maybe because of the way it can transform
lives. It did transform lives at Georgia Tech—the lives of our audience
members and of our students. I worked with one, an undergraduate aeronautical
engineering student, officially in class and when he was no longer
in class. Most Tech people (with the exception of the physics people) will
say that aeronautical engineering is the hardest major. When he was taking
final exams his senior year, he wore an old-fashioned alarm clock around
his neck and set it to go off every fifteen minutes so he wouldn’t fall asleep.
This particular kid had a 3.99 GPA and several job offers right out of Tech,
including one from NASA. He could have walked into a job making about
a hundred grand a year. What did he want to do? Write poetry. He spoke to
his father. His father said something like “You know what, son? I’ve been