Hello and welcome back to the Daily Poem, the podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson,

and today is Thursday, June 29, 2003. Today's poem is by American poet Thomas Lux, and it's called

Refrigerator, 1957. I want to make a note here about some of the language in this poem. I know a number of our listeners like to listen as families or with children in the room.

This is a practice that I applaud and I hope you will continue it.

To that end, I wanted to warn you that there is a word in this poem I would describe as a PG-13 word. Unless you want to have some awkward conversations

you weren't preparing for today, you may want to give the poem a pre-listen before you share it

with everybody. That said, I assure you it's a great poem and it is worth the trouble.

Our poet, Thomas Lux, was born, 1946, died not too long ago.

2017, he published 14 collections of poetry over the course of his long career.

He spent almost three decades as a member of the writing faculty of Sarah Lawrence College.

And at the end of his career, he took up the chair of poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia Tech, where he ran a popular poetry reading program.

I may not have to tell you that teaching poetry to a bunch of engineers

is a much-needed public service.

If I do need to tell you, it's because you're probably an engineer.

But anyway, moving on, I'm grateful to all of our engineer listeners, by the way.

I love you.

Never stopped.

Please forgive me.

Lux began his career in the 70s writing what he called surrealist poetry.

And to be frank, it was a little bizarre, a little difficult. It was very personal,

very raw, very emotional, very subjective. There were some poetry types out there who liked it anyway, though.

I suppose it's a good thing because it gave him the springboard he needed to continue writing

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