Not that I’m trawling for gifts here, but the best present I have received as a teacher came from Helena Clauss back in 2000 when she gave me a book of Borges’ Collected Fictions. I found the word choice – fictions – intriguing, because I’m used to untrue brief narratives being referred to as short stories. But the imagination that characterizes Borges’ writing defies such easy characterization. I immediately fell in love with his character sketches – The Disinterested Killer Bill Harrigan, The Uncivil Teacher of Etiquette Kotsuke na Suke – and then the one-page ruminations such as In Memoriam JFK; Borges and I; and Inferno, V, 32.

Then, the same way that you start to notice something you’ve never seen before after you find out what it’s called, I started to see Borges’ poems in anthologies. Pretty soon, I had bought his Collected Poems, Collected Non-fictions, his lecture series This Craft of Verse and a book of Conversations.

Originally, I was drawn to the way Borges asks me to reconsider notions of time and space. So many of his stories deviate from the normal rules of linear time that you can’t possibly believe them to be true, but you then – okay, maybe not you, but I then – think, maybe things can work that way. So much that we chalk up to coincidence may be caused by something we don’t understand, so many times we refer to the idea of déjà vu when we are possibly talking about actual experience that defies the physical rules of time. Read the passage through the worlds of Tlon, Uqbar and Urbis Terris, or about the Kings and their Labyrinths, and you’ll rethink the nature of causation. Read The Encounter (or The Meeting, depending on the translation) and you’ll rethink the old saying, Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.

A few years ago, I picked up This Craft of Verse, and it was so damn…satisfying. Maybe comforting. This man, who I (for what it’s worth) would consider one of the true geniuses of the twentieth century, talks about poetry, about himself, about writing, with such humility and grace that I don’t even want to question what he says. He doesn’t take the mystery out of poetry; instead, he makes you want to embrace it. Rather than asking you to figure out the poems you like and then express your figuring in a way that might make another person understand their meaning or their beauty, he asks you to experience a poem, to feel it… no, to know it in a way that maybe you can’t explain, but in a way that is uniquely yours. I’ll give the first lecture, The Riddle of Poetry, to my seniors, but you have to know Borges’ work to have a true appreciation for the precision and, here’s that word again, grace of his words.

At the end of each year, my seniors have done an author study project, and each year, those who choose Borges (and Wislawa Szymborska, for that matter) develop a felt sense for the possibilities of the imagination and the written word.

Read your Borges.