from Astoria (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006)
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. It’s a beautiful thing, to encounter work, especially poetry, that has been sitting just outside of your purview, for whatever reason. If it’s okay, I’m going to make a quick aside to talk about that briefly, before I return to the poem.
I often think about what it means and feels like to be a contemporary reader. People often paint the picture as one of opposing dualities. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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. I think of Levis writing: “That moment of light is already this one — / Sweet, fickle, oblivious, & gone…”
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. Today’s poem makes such a feeling clear. Where to even begin? The generosity of the title, perhaps. “An Entrance” — it both signals and enacts the openness of the poem, a poem that embodies that generosity throughout. Notice the prodigious use of em-dashes — these refusals to come to an ending — until the final period, just the second in the poem, which signals the way that final thought is “connected” to all the thoughts that came before.
I often think of the act of writing — whether a poem or an essay — as an act of building. Doors. Rooms. To read a poem is to walk through it, to open doors the writer has placed there, to enter rooms the writer has made out of their life, and to notice the way the light plays or does not play on the walls, to notice who is sitting, or if anyone is, or if there is a bed, or a painting above it. But the act of writing a poem is the act of building those rooms. And perhaps the most difficult poems to write are the ones where, upon writing, each room already feels made. It’s down that hallway there, you say to yourself. It must look like this, you say. And then you arrive, and it does not look the way you want it to. And you try again, and it still doesn’t. And maybe you never arrive in the first place. This happens to me all the time. And I think it happens because I fail to be generous with myself, because I fail to acknowledge that what I am working on might be different than what I think it must be. When this happens, I breathe, and then I write a door into my poem. That door can look like anything. It can be the sound of something outside. It could be my mother, walking into the room. And then I walk through that door with the sound, or with my mother, and I see what’s on the other side. I offer myself that permission.
And so I read today’s poem fully enamored by the way it leans so deeply into that kind of vision of the world. It eschews a definition of the world that is based so strikingly on what must be. It does this immediately, when Mörling writes:
If you want to give thanks
but this time not to the labyrinth
of cause and effect —
Just afterwards, Mörling writes of the “plain sweetness of a day…When it’s as if even the air is a door —”
I love this juxtaposition of “cause and effect” with “plain sweetness,” this notion that the acknowledgment of the latter can lead to a kind of generosity that allows you to see a door in everything, to feel a door even in what you breathe. Mörling positions this as act of openness. You “turn,” and the door is there. Turn again, and there is probably a door there too.
In a 2009 interview, Mörling states, of another poem:
Pretty much the whole thing was a gift, it just took some time to hear and know what was to be the length of the poem.
I love that. This idea that the act of writing can be an act of reception, of active listening. The way that, even in our most seemingly passive moments — sitting, waiting for something — there is a way to be tuned to the “plain sweetness” of the poem, or the world, until, as Mörling writes in today’s poem, “you suddenly see” whatever it is you suddenly see.
I notice Mörling enacting that kind of active listening by refusing so often to place a period where a period could be. The use of the em-dash as the dominating method of punctuation in this poem is such an intentional way to extend the patience of the speaker, to connect one waiting pause to the next the same way “everyone is connected / to everyone else by breathing.” In the em-dash is that breath, that silence filled up with life. I feel a deep connection between this poem and a poem I wrote about a little while ago, Alicia Mountain’s “A Deer Mistaken for a Statue of a Deer.” In that poem, Mountain writes:
we get still and wait for
a change or an end —
The em-dash used there is, I think, both the stillness and the waiting. The openness to what might come after.
I think, though, that what I love most about this poem is that its revelation is stemmed from the thought of a child. “The world is a house,” the child says. It’s a beautiful and generous thought, but what is perhaps equally as generous is the way in which it is allowed to have meaning. It is not dismissed. In fact, it is “a clue,” a clue that breaks open the ordinary world into something miraculous.
If you are not being patronizing in your use of it, then the phrase child’s play is a kind of definition of poetry. Because what is child’s play? It is a play of deep construction, surprise, and openness. It is what happens, I think, before the constrictive nature of ideology takes root, and limits not our expansiveness, but our ability to allow ourselves to think in and engage with expansive forms. We are as expansive as we allow ourselves to be. And, speaking personally, I know that I nearly always think I am being more expansive than I am. Sometimes poetry reminds me that I don’t always know better, that there is a plain sweetness I am living within, full of doors I have not seen, opening to rooms I have never considered.