"Her poetry first fell on me, as it did on so many others, like an anvil made of feathers-striking but soft-after she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1996. There was no literary shrine I wanted to go to more, to doff my spiritual hat and drink in the surroundings of the poet, who is beloved by readers for her unique mix of humor, more even than wit, beautifully amalgamated with sudden turns of pensive reflection."
"What's more, I got to go there in the company of her former amanuensis, Michał Rusinek, and Michał Choiński, a poet and scholar. Both men teach at the ancient and hallowed Jagiellonian University (where Szymborska herself studied) and Choiński is also the author, as improbable as it sounds, of a long, original, ambitious history of The New Yorker, recently published in Polish for a Polish audience."
"It seemed to me extremely modest, not to say student-like, though my Polish friends' slightly censorious frowns when I volunteered this thought made me realize that, in the Kraków of the Communist era, it would have actually been considered rather grand. But certainly the room where it happened, where the poetry got written, was as modest as any college dorm room, with a small single bed next to the small desk where she wrote."
A visit to Wisława Szymborska's Kraków apartment highlights the modest surroundings in which influential poetry was composed. Szymborska combined humor and pensive reflection in work that reached wide audiences and earned a Nobel Prize in 1996. The visit included her former amanuensis Michał Rusinek and poet-scholar Michał Choiński, both affiliated with Jagiellonian University, with Choiński noted for a Polish history of The New Yorker. Szymborska lived alone in a three-room flat for fourteen years; the small room with a single bed beside a tiny desk served as the space where many poems were written.
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