1/1 - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University
1/1 - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University
1/1 - eCommons@Cornell - Cornell University
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FACULTY<br />
place of indescribable contrast to<br />
127th Street. While still in Harlem,<br />
he was angry and arrogant and anxious<br />
to get out, to get away from the<br />
pimps and the numbers runners, the<br />
streets of broken glass and the<br />
"hopeless playgrounds," as he writes<br />
in an essay, "From a Higher Bush."<br />
"Knowing little, but intuiting<br />
much, I knew I needed to get out of<br />
the city," he writes. "Harlem was<br />
killing me—it was killing others, too,<br />
but I was not being generous. . . /<br />
didn't want to die. I wasn't thinking,<br />
I was running. And so I left Harlem—<br />
at the earliest chance—to go on to<br />
college, where I would understand—<br />
albeit painfully—what I had truly left<br />
behind." That is, he saw the light<br />
back there in the ghetto, in the acts<br />
of love and the gestures of hope.<br />
It was 1969 when McClane came<br />
to <strong>Cornell</strong> as a student, attracted<br />
by the takeover of Willard<br />
Straight Hall by black student activists<br />
a few<br />
months earlier. "This<br />
was a place that was "I AM HERE<br />
painfully understanding<br />
how truly great BECAUSE OTHERS<br />
the gulf was between<br />
blacks and whites; it CARED; THEY LOVED<br />
was in the middle of<br />
ME. YOU ARE HERE<br />
it," he says.<br />
Still, it was a BECAUSE OTHERS<br />
"middle of it" that<br />
was safer than the LOVED YOU: THEY<br />
middle of it he had<br />
been in. And <strong>Cornell</strong> KEPT YOU WHOLE,<br />
proved fertile ground NO ONE CAN LIVE<br />
for him. As a professor,<br />
he has been on WITHOUT OTHERS;<br />
the fast track: He<br />
joined the faculty as WE ARE, BY FATE<br />
an assistant profes- AND INSTINCT,<br />
sor when he earned<br />
the MFA in 1976, be- INTERCONNECTED."<br />
came an associate<br />
professor in 1983, a<br />
full professor in 1989 and was named<br />
to an endowed professorship in 1992.<br />
As a writer, he has been steadily publishing<br />
new works: His first collection<br />
of poetry, Running Before the<br />
Winds, came out while he was still<br />
an undergraduate. After this followed<br />
Out Beyond the Bay, Moons and Low<br />
Times, To Hear the River, At Winter's<br />
End, These Halves are Whole and Take ing."<br />
Five: Collected Poems, 1971-1986, the<br />
CORNELL MAGAZINE<br />
16<br />
first in a series on contemporary<br />
black poets edited by Henry Louis<br />
Gates Jr., the former W. E. B. DuBois<br />
professor of literature at <strong>Cornell</strong>, who<br />
is now at Harvard.<br />
Then McClane opened a new<br />
chapter in his writing life. Prompted<br />
by a need to understand the death of<br />
his brother, he turned to essays as a<br />
form that would allow him to ask,<br />
Why? and try to answer it. The essay,<br />
"Walls," which became the title<br />
of his collection, was selected for inclusion<br />
in The Best American Essays<br />
1988.<br />
He thought he would return to<br />
poetry after that. But the autobiographical<br />
urge has continued, and<br />
he's now working on a second collection<br />
of essays. In this book, he<br />
writes of his sister's handicap, his<br />
parents' suffering from Alzheimer's<br />
disease, the racism his family encountered,<br />
a meeting with Martin<br />
Luther King Jr. and a visit to an upstate<br />
prison, where he was invited to<br />
give a commence-<br />
ment talk to inmates<br />
in a college<br />
degree program.<br />
Like so many writers,<br />
McClane says<br />
he does what he<br />
does to better understand<br />
life, to reveal<br />
again what is<br />
often taken for<br />
granted. And it is in<br />
this process, too,<br />
that he always<br />
comes around again<br />
to his trademark<br />
topic.<br />
"For if I have<br />
learned anything—<br />
in the death of my<br />
brother and in the<br />
recent decline in<br />
both my mother<br />
and father—it is<br />
that we are each other's witness," he<br />
writes in the introduction to the new<br />
collection. "I am here because others<br />
cared; they loved me. You are<br />
here because others loved you: they<br />
kept you whole. No one can live without<br />
others; we are, by fate and instinct,<br />
interconnected. . . And it is<br />
love, which is really life's only mean-<br />
—Lisa Bennett