"The diamond that cuts through illusion."

On Timelessness, Szymborska, and UVA

I have the good fortune of tutoring at the Rutgers-Newark Writing Center this semester, and every student I work with is amazing. One of them, an adult student originally from Liberia, has been laboring over an essay for his English 101 class on the timeless themes of two Wislawa Szymborska poems. One is "The Century's Decline", from the great Polish poet's 1986 volume The People on the Bridge. The other is "Could Have", from her 1972 collection of the same name.

I was thinking about timelessness today while reading in a brick-walled garden along one side of Thomas Jefferson's famed Lawn at the University of Virginia, my alma mater. I'm here this weekend for Young Alumni Council meetings, and whenever I come, I seek out the gardens, which, despite restoration, largely resemble their original early-19th-century designs. For good or bad, that's what resonates with me the most when I return to the "academical village": history both "nearer" and "farther off," as Szymborska writes in "Could Have." "Listen, / how your heart pounds inside of me."

Literariness: 'Cane' by Jean Toomer

I recently began my MFA studies in fiction writing at Rutgers, and for my literature course this semester on what's now known as the Harlem Renaissance, I read this genuine masterpiece of a book. Toomer was born into a black family but he later eschewed race as such, proclaiming himself to be neither black nor white but a member of the new "American" race. Nevertheless, Cane, based on the author's three-month stint as a temporary high-school principal in Sparta, Georgia, is widely regarded as the first literary classic of the "New Negro" movement that was taking shape at the book's publication in 1923. It's a zinging modernist text, split between narrative, poetry, and drama conveyed in sharply etched images, realistic dialogue, and potent symbols. Toomer's subject? The history and present of black life in the South during Jim Crow, counterposed and related to life up north as the Great Migration took off. A must-read for anyone concerned with canons or art.