Professor Mark Bruhn of Regis University in Denver; graduate of University of Southern Maine. Contributed photo.

Some people leave the world a better place than they came into, and some of those seem to deserve a few extra words. Where this “deserving” comes from is an interesting question. And the deserving gives rise to responsibility, complicating everything including your grief. This is how karma works — one thing rippling forward on the momentum of another, and leaving traces.

If you’re still with me, you’ve guessed that I’ve been wondering what to say about the passing of a friend. Who, it so happens, made meaningful contributions to literary studies and is remembered by some in Maine’s literary world.

The friend is Mark Bruhn, who died in July at age 60. He’d lived the last 25 years or so with his wife, Augusta native Kelley Young, and their two kids Maury and Abe, in Colorado, where he was a professor at Regis University. He is remembered hereabouts as an English major in the 1980s at the University of Maine at Augusta and then the University of Southern Maine, where he graduated. He spent several years as managing editor of Tower Publishing Co. in Portland, where his duties included preparing tomes on Maine law written by local judges and attorneys. He went on to receive a PhD from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and made his way to Denver.

I met Mark in Portland, and we became lifelong friends, though we’d not been in frequent touch in recent years. He spent his literary life investigating ways cognitive studies help illuminate poetry. Arcane stuff that he delighted in. In fact, his whole disposition to literature and life could be described as delighted. He found everything funny. His raucous irreverence for practically everything forged his affinity for British Romantic poetry. He could make you laugh about the most ponderous passages in Wordsworth, his specialty.

When we first met, his sense of humor, the copious diversity of his knowledge, and his enthusiasm for poetry made me imagine I had met young Chaucer. We bonded as fellow alumni of USM, and though eight years apart shared a reverence for the same teachers: professors Lee Baier, who “taught me to read,” as a classmate put it (Mark concurred); L. Morrill Burke, a well of literary passion and understanding if you could take his beatings (Mark concurred); and Kathleen Ashley, who opened doors to our graduate studies. All belatedly, deservedly remembered here as giving rise to a whole disposition to literature. A whole karmic ripple flowing forward.

Once, an anthropologist was observing an indigenous village’s funeral ritual, in which the deceased’s ashes were interred in a special pit containing the ashes of ancestors going back generations upon generations. She asked one of the participants if the deceased still lived in spirit. The participant said, well obviously yes, he’s with the ancestors. How long will his spirit remain alive, the anthropologist asked. As long as there’s someone to remember him, was the reply.

“Who is there now for me to share a joke with?” our literary grandfather Ezra Pound wrote after the death of his friend T.S. Eliot in 1965. The same words ripple forward for my friend Mark in 2022. Words like ashes, in memory.

Off Radar takes note of poetry and books with Maine connections the first and third Fridays of each month. Dana Wilde is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Contact him at dwilde.offradar@gmail.com.