blueprints

The Poem Is a Bridge | 121
doing something for the past twenty-five years that I don’t really like that
much, so go for the poetry thing!” The kid finished his MFA at UNC
Greensboro. Broke, as a young poet should be, he’s still in Greensboro, writing
poems and working for his landlord to cover his rent.
Another undergraduate student, a young Indian woman, a biology
major and brilliant, with another great GPA, decided to give up her parents’
dream, and her own, that she become a doctor. You guessed it; she had
decided to be a poet. I don’t think her parents were ecstatic about this decision.
I am not even certain it’s what Georgia Tech has in mind for its students.
But she got an MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and is now
back in Georgia, writing and teaching writing and literature in the university
system. She is happy, doing what she wants to do.
if the poetry project one is trying to do is at a university
and the president of that university—by his or her occasional
presence alone—is a supporter of that program,
well, that’s very lucky. no way to plan that. lucky.
One of the last times I saw Dr. Clough was after a reading a few years
ago. He came up to me and said, “You guys got me my new job.” He had
recently been appointed secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. By “you
guys,” he meant Poetry@Tech. He said, “They asked me what I knew about
the humanities, and I said, ‘Well, I started this poetry program at Georgia
Tech,’ and they hired me!” He was being kind, of course. They hired him
because they knew he could get the Smithsonian, the most important
repository of American culture and history, back on track. People at Tech
knew he was leaving. He’d been a great president at Tech for thirteen years.
He was ready for another challenge. I get to say it right here, in print,
whether you ever read it or not: Wayne and Anne Clough, we miss you
both. And we’re grateful to you both. (Note: the point of these anecdotes
regarding Dr. and Mrs. Clough, I assume, is obvious: if the poetry project
one is trying to do is at a university and the president of that university—
by his or her occasional presence alone—is a supporter of that program,
well, that’s very lucky. It was, for Poetry@Tech, very lucky. No way to plan
that. Lucky.)