Men of Letters

I now realize both weeks were unseasonably warm.

November. Having just consumed his novel City of Glass, I thought I was prepared to meet Paul Auster, the English Department's visiting Blackburn professor--an author who visits for a workshop-packed week--for the fall semester. We would have something to talk about--something properly literary--something on which I could hold my own--and what better than his own work? That Monday night, as a friend and I hurried to the Washington Duke Inn to pick Auster up for dinner, we speculated as to what he'd be like--rumors were tall, dark and handsome. Austere, assuredly, to match his name.

If you spent any time with him that week, you know. He could talk about anything. Over dinner--catfish farms in Mississippi and refugee children in Sarajevo. When he came back from the bar (George's didn't allow smoking at the dinner tables), we jumped right into baseball. Reliving the Subway Series with this world-class novelist didn't seem like what we were supposed to be doing, but then again, strangely, it did. And that was what we did for the rest of the week--talk--and at length, too, under the sharp lines of falling light on the Chapel, over hummus and smoke at International Delights, in a borrowed office guarded by the Bard; about the neuroses of translation, about Sept. 11 and a changed world and about young poets who live in the future--perhaps errantly, perhaps not.

February. I sometimes try to determine in what literary context my generation is currently or will become when viewed in retrospect. The Romantics led to the Victorians to the Modernists--so what are we? What is 'now?' Will it--will we--even be remembered? Seeking some solace I asked the poet Li-Young Lee, visiting Blackburn professor for the spring semester, what he thought the future of poetry would be, expecting the answer of a particular school or genre of poets or poetry. Yet his response, contemplative and sanguine--so characteristic of the man himself--threw me. On that quiet bench behind the Social Sciences building, Li-Young mused, "I think poetry... is going to be OK."

If any doubts lingered about the future of poetry, what happened at Li-Young's reading sped them all to colder climes. Two lines into his next-to-last poem of the evening, "Praise Them," the caterer's equipment set off the fire alarm, driving everyone out of the library with a shriek the Harpies themselves would have envied. As we stood outside in the chill, waiting for the alarm to click off and paying our respects to the trays of smoked salmon and chocolate pecans that certain English faculty had liberated during the emigration, I noticed people checking their watches and exchanging glances. Yet when the threat subsided and we reconvened in the Rare Book Room, there seemed to be more people present than when we began! Lee gently concluded his reading with the haunting and beautiful "Black Petal," and I knew--looking out over the crowd quivering with applause--that, yes, despite any labels affixed by critics or literary historians, and just as Lee had prophesied, poetry was indeed going to be just fine.

A friend of mine who I met only a short time ago asked me recently, why literature, why writing? Naturally, the instant she posed the question all answers I might have given her scattered, leaving me empty-mouthed and scrambling for words. The truth of what I told her on that noisy bus ride stands--one import for me of studying literature is seeing the world from a different perspective, from eyes not one's own. Yet perhaps the experiences I've had with these two unforgettable men during these two unforgettable weeks add the dimension of time--interacting with those who have given their entire lives to what John Gardner calls a, "vivid and continuous dream," reinforces for me that every paragraph, every poem, every line, every word matters. Now and forever.