Bio

I began scribbling poems on shirt cardboard at age nine.  All of those early poems rhymed.  (Yertle the Turtle by Dr. Seuss was a huge influence!).  My interest in writing intensified at Amherst College where I took several courses in modern and contemporary poetry.  I also penned a long metaphysical poem during my final semester and received the Rolfe Humphries Poetry Prize, an honor awarded to “that member of the senior class who, among his classmates, has achieved the greatest sense of poetic form in his undergraduate writing.”

Trained as a physician, eye surgeon, and neuro-ophthalmologist, I was recruited to Duke University as Chief of Neuro-Ophthalmology in 1987.  I ultimately achieved a rank of Associate Professor with tenure.  My clinical practice consisted of evaluating and caring for patients with complex ocular manifestations of neurologic diseases.  I also trained ophthalmology residents and fellows, and I published 30 scholarly papers and book chapters in the medical literature.

After seventeen years in academic medicine, I left Duke to become chief executive of CEC, a nationwide company that provides vision benefits to individuals and their family members.  Following the sale of CEC in 2019, I retired from the company.

Though not an engineer, I’ve always had a penchant for designing novel devices.  During my third year of medical school, I collaborated with another student in the development of a unique variable-focus lens.  I drafted the patent and the associated illustrations.  In 1984, the Patent Office granted U.S. Patent 4,477,158, Lens System for Variable Refraction.  Later in my medical career, I designed an instrument used to biopsy inaccessible tumors in the brain and behind the eye.

For the last twenty-six years, I’ve struggled with the spinal cord variant of multiple sclerosis (MS).  The disease has resulted in partial paralysis of both legs, and it has made it necessary to use a rolling walker in order to ambulate.

Exits is my debut poetry collection.  The twenty-two poems in the book were written and edited over a period of twenty-two years.  Designing and formatting the book required an additional two years.

The gratification I derive from writing poetry springs from a variety of sources:  fascination with language; the whimsy of wordplay; the intimate marriage of sound and sense; the power of metaphor; the thrill of creating art that’s utterly new; and awe at the infinite ways in which words, well chosen, can capture and intensify human experience.

   Steve

Stephen C. Pollock