Thomas Stearns: Poet in Glass Susan Sacks Writer © Susan Sacks, 2003. All rights reserved Thomas Stearns is a poet. He's also a teacher. A sculptor. A physicist. An engineer. A chemist. A philosopher. And a humanist. His chosen form of expression happens to be light. And he teases it, captures it, and forces it to talk to us in a language we all understand. He makes it speak to us, thankfully, in glass. His fascination with light led him to Murano, the sacred space of all glassblowers, where he was one of the first Americans to have his designs incorporated into the Venini line. He was chosen by Paolo Venini himself, months before his death, on the basis of flatwork designs Stearns had created for windows while attending the Cranbrook Academy of Art (1957-1959). Stearns was enraptured by windows–the way light would stream through them, how the intensity of light could change. His designs, inspired by pictures in magazines Stearns had seen when he was in college, would earn him coveted passage across the vast psychological ocean separating his hometown of Oklahoma City from Murano. He arrived in Venice in October 1959. Unfortunately, he was never to meet the founder of Venini & C., the man who changed the course of his life and the history of modern glass.
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