Where to even begin? The generosity of the title, perhaps. That being said, it is still a joy to encounter work as if it was buoyed up to you invisibly from the visible past, and Mörling's Astoria feels that way to me. I think of Levis writing : “That moment of light is already this one - / Sweet, fickle, oblivious, & gone…” What is the shelf life of a book these days? Why must a book feel so immediate when, in reality, it is an acknowledgement of the long labor of witnessing a world, and the just-as-long labor of crafting a response to such witness? When I fall in love with a writer, they have the ability to change the way light lights up the world, and the way I move through and see both the light and what it touches. The wonderful poet and critic Claire Schwartz had a thread on twitter, if I recall correctly, that discussed this - the way a book published even three or four years ago feels no longer immediate, that, when picked up again, it feels almost like something rescued, or worse: forgotten. Mörling's book, Astoria, published in 2006, is an example of that, but, because of the demands of consumption and production ushered forward by a publishing world steeped in the confines of late capitalism, I think this middle distance also begins sooner than we think. Aside from the fact that that’s an absolutely boring generalization, and denies readers the complexity of being, well, readers, readers who read with deep interest and engagement - aside from all that, what I think such a generalization ignores is the work of what I might call the middle distance, that work that falls just outside the contemporary moment and not far enough away from it to be considered the stuff of some nostalgic past. You either read the work published in the current moment, or you reify yourself as a student of the past, which is usually depicted as canonical work, as the stuff from some way old back then. People often paint the picture as one of opposing dualities. I often think about what it means and feels like to be a contemporary reader. If it’s okay, I’m going to make a quick aside to talk about that briefly, before I return to the poem. It’s a beautiful thing, to encounter work, especially poetry, that has been sitting just outside of your purview, for whatever reason. Yes, it’s always difficult to celebrate the loss of life, but I gained a new understanding. From now on, I’m solely concentrating on my dash.I realize the timing of this makes it seem like I’m trying to put a poem of thanks in front of you, but it’s mostly a coincidence - I was going through the Pitt Poetry Series back catalog not long ago, stumbled upon Mörling's book, purchased it, and have been wholly transfixed. Yes, I bolded three stanzas–in my opinion, those most important. “So, when your eulogy is being read, with your life’s actions to rehash….Would you be proud of the things they say about how you spent YOUR dash?” “If we treat each other with respect and more often a smile, remembering that this special dash might only last a little while. “And be less quick to anger and show appreciation more and love the people in our lives like we’ve never loved before. “If we could just slow down enough to consider what’s true and real, and always try to understand the way other people feel Are there things you’d like to change? For you never know how much time that is left that can still be rearranged. The length of our lives is not important, according to Ellis how we spent our lives is. In essence, the dash asks us to consider what kind of life we spent in the middle? Were we here briefly and succumbed to cholera or the bubonic plague? Were we teenagers who drove too fast into a tree or a concrete wall? Were we athletes who suffered a heart attack on a playing field? Or were we those who managed to survive for 70+ years? The poem explains that parallel line on one’s tombstone between birth date and death date. However, at yesterday’s service one speaker read several stanzas from “The Dash,” written by Linda Ellis in 1996. Unfortunately, I’ve spent the last two Saturdays at memorial services. While both were uplifting celebrations of life, the underlying reason for them is sad and a foreboding for each of our finalities.
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