Christos: The Engineer & The Poet

My name is Christos. I am a practicing chemical engineer and I also write and publish literature, mainly poetry and essays.  These two activities from the outside might look very different and incompatible.  However, in me, they have grown together and they have ended up having a symbiotic life that benefits both of them.

I started writing poetry in earnest at the age of 15.  Two years later, I would have to select a field of study for taking the entrance examinations in Greece for the University.  So, around the same time, I made the decision to study Chemical Engineering.  In both cases, my initial interest and enthusiasm for the subject was kindled by two excellent teachers.  One, a literature teacher, and an innovative poet himself, at the public school I attended.  The other, a practicing chemist, who tutored a small group of us, for about two years, for the grueling university entrance exams.

I ended up studying chemical engineering in the US, through a scholarship, and I have been working as a chemical and environmental engineer following my graduation.  I initially worked in research and development, figuring out processes that could be used to cover plastic materials with metal coatings, mainly for applications in the personal computer industry at its beginnings. After that, and until today, I have worked in the environmental field, managing the cleanup of heavily polluted sites. My work consists of organizing environmental investigations to determine how extensive the pollution is at a given site, coming up with an effective plan to clean up the site, and managing the teams that perform the clean up in an organized manner.  

In literature,  I am self taught.  Although I took a few literature electives in college, the bulk of my education came from my own incessant reading which continues, with the same appettite, today, and by my initial emulation of the work of great poets until, eventually, I found my own voice.  I write poetry in Greek and, over the years, I have published 7 collections of poetry in Greece.  One of them was short-listed for the critics award in 2014.

As I mentioned at the beginning, althoug not apparent at first look, there seems to be a compatability between these two activities of mine, poetry and engineering, in the way I function as a thinking person. It seems that, in the process of employing them, they feed off each other:  First there is the curiosity, the enthusiasm, and the laser-like focus on the subject.  Then there are the free associations of the mind that creatively combine all previous knowledge and observations.  At some point there has to be a leap, or several leaps, of the imagination.  And finally, there is the discipline of organizing the material in the most effective way and putting it to work either as a poem or as a finished engineering project.

Here, through the good services of Demi’s site, I offer you a sampling of my undertakings in the arts, that I hope you will enjoy.  And while, for now, the challenges of my engineering work seem to dominate the symbiotic relationship with poetry, in the end, it is poetry that defines that life: elegance in engineering solutions, as is elegance in language.