Lewis Corry: poetry & engineering

"In DICE creativity is everything; it’s what sets the course apart from more traditional engineering disciplines, and what keeps projects feeling vibrant and exciting."

A first-year undergraduate student studying Design Innovation and Creative Engineering (DICE), Lewis Corry is also an accomplished poet, and was one of the featured poets invited to celebrate 40 years of Poems on the Underground recently. We spoke to him after the ceremony about his practice as a creative and an engineer.

How did your poem come to be displayed on the London Underground?

The opportunity to be published with Poems on the Underground came through my involvement with The Young Poets Network.  Last year they had a push to get more young voices represented among the underground cohort, and I was contacted to ask if I wanted to make a submission. My poem ‘2013 and Daedalus never moved away for work’ was selected to be shown over the Summer. 

How did you become a Foyle young poet?

Foyle’s is an open-submission competition for anyone under the age of 18. It’s a really amazing opportunity which opens a lot of doors in the poetry world, a world which can feel very unwelcoming at first glance. Foyles gave me the kickstart to build a really amazing network of other young creatives.

How do you balance being a poet with being a full-time student?

Poetry and creative work is something I tend to do in the small hours of the morning, but if any of my engineering work, however, creeps past 9pm I consider it a very bad day and an organisational catastrophe.

That being said, I’ve recently been trying to take on more responsibility within the poetry scene. Me and several others are working on launching a new poetry zine (watch this space!) and the mundanity of print formatting and submission management has definitely become a bit more of a juggling act alongside my studies. So far I’m managing to keep all the balls in the air!

 

Do you think there are any similarities between poetry and engineering?

In my mind, they’re two sides of the same coin. The way I approach writing relies very heavily on observation and pattern recognition.

A good engineering solution solves a problem as efficiently and as elegantly as is possible, while I think often a good poem does the same thing to a complex emotion or experience.

How does your creativity feed into your work on the DICE course?