November 2013

VARIABLES
Poetry for Engineers

While it may be uncommon for an engineer to be a poet, Clayton Grow, P.E., is not the first engineer to work with words beyond e-mail and engineering reports. In fact, renowned bridge engineer and NSPE Founder David Steinman was a published poet himself, and just this year Richard Blanco, P.E., became the first licensed civil engineer to perform the duties of inaugural poet at the second-term swearing-in of President Barack Obama.

Grow may be the first, however, to write a book of poetry aimed specifically at engineers. Published in 2012, Poetry for Engineers or Engineering for Poets is Grow's way of sharing what he calls in the book's forward his "socially scientific perspective," and of hopefully grabbing the attention of readers.

"I also knew the idea of poetry about engineering or poetry for engineers might be unique enough to actually catch people's attention," he says. "It's something maybe unique enough for people to take notice."

Grow's work is also unique for its visual component. Each of the poems in the book was composed on a 1930s' Remington Noiseless 7 typewriter and the book features scans of those original pages, white out and all, rather than pristine, error-free text. By making the imperfections of the typewriter and his own mistakes part of his poems, Grow hoped to further combine humanity with both science and engineering to add to the book's socially scientific perspective.

If readers take one thing away from his work, Grow hopes it is an appreciation for imperfections. "No matter how polished or systematic something appears, it has flaws," he says. "These flaws are what make scientific concepts so difficult to implement in the real world. Things like friction, gravity, asymmetry, and uncertainty are elusive grains of sand in the otherwise homogeneous flow of ideal mathematical scenarios."