Matt Hart
A MESSAGE TO A FEW INHABITANTS OF THIS EARTH
Steve Healey. Earthling. Coffee House Press, 2005.
“We … say of some people that they are transparent to us. It is, however, important as regards this observation that one human being can be a complete enigma to another…. We cannot find our feet with them.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p.223
From word one of Steve Healey’s book of poems Earthling there is a pervasive sense of an alien and out-of-this world presence hovering near. A robot here to meet our leader. A squadron of bright lights spinning in the sky. In short, a whole new world—sci-fi and comically, terrifically frustrated to be so close to us, but obviously, also, incredibly far away. What’s really weird, however, is that these alien visitors—this voice—persists in trying to speak to us in English, to address us on our own turf about…well…our own turf and also what the late Kenneth Koch described as “the fix” we’re in, i.e. the human predicament. A predicament which is (even when one has all the practical sensible tools of the language in place) baffling, slippery, and heartbreaking. The big problem here, then—the book’s primary aesthetic and philosophical dilemma—is (in Wittgenstein’s terminology) the difficulty of finding one’s “feet” with the alien other. Or, put another way, it’s the problem of contemporary poetry generally—that is, the problem of addressing someone about something in a language which is not about, but rather (largely) a demonstration of aesthetic effects. Thus, these visitors—this visitor—this voice in Healey’s book addressing us diminutively as “earthling” is confused (although not about our diminution or inferiority; that’s pretty set by now). The speaker or speakers in Healey’s collection (that I can’t fathom one over the other is part of the poetry’s charm—though I would argue that the voice seems fairly unified throughout) are confused because they seem to have learned English not by studying the language, but by studying poetry (and contemporary American poetry at that)—a predicament if ever there was one, especially in the event that the speaker here is actually trying to say something.
With that in mind, the great achievement of Healey’s book is that the poeticization of communication here manages to remain largely urgent, earnest, and sincere in spite of all the figurative distortion and noise in the language. For example, consider the opening lines from Healey’s poem “my friends are on fire”:
Most of what happens to them doesn’t take up space
but is a kind of music that can be seen
and absorbs bubbles of silence
in greater or lesser quantity depending on
how sleepy they feel. Now they proliferate
like dandelions, now they are extinct—
is how the chorus might go. I am they
who often survive the invisible civil war
and celebrate by eating an animal
that’s been smoked for a full rotation of the Earth.
What creates the emotional resonance here is the (practical) dis/connection between the poem’s title and the soliloquy that follows—the meditation in the moment of emergency, the figurative synesthesia of sight, sound and mind into playful philosophizing and a fine rustic meal of—weirdly—a “friend” on fire, “smoked for a full rotation of the Earth.”
Of course, in another sense, the other emergency is that the speaker’s friends are on fire, and the speaker is not, “…what happens to them doesn’t take up space/ but is a kind music that can be seen…// …Now they proliferate/like dandelions, now they are extinct.” One can read the “friends on fire,” here, as friends getting famous, doing great things, flaming-on and flaming out (to borrow Human Torch lingo), but it’s ultimately the poem’s title that creates the context for analysis, interpretation and evaluation of the poem’s (dis)(mis)contents.
In fact, one might make a case that it’s the titles of Healey’s poems (as well, we have already seen, as the title of the book itself) that are most often the primary contextualizing devices in the book. Indeed, I would argue, it’s Healey’s able use of titles that allows us to find our feet with the speaker(s) and respond appropriately/in kind. For example, take these lines from “henry david thoreau junior high school”:
You can blend with air.
You can bend around the pond
or math teacher’s mouth.
The scar on your arm can whisper
the answer, yes be the answer,
and all the girls named Dawn
(with the Lord still in your good ear).
Like a pine grove, you can hear
fingers be counted, let lunchtime
come forever with its baloney
and noonlight sandwich. But the bell
doesn’t ring, it’s quiet here
on Earth, and taste, only
the caramelized valleys of your molars,
and smell, a house the size
of your smell…
How else to make sense of this poem’s acrobatics except in terms of a transcendent education, one where no child’s left standing on the ground, our minds awash in test answers and class bells and lunches of baloney sandwiches under the noontime pine trees with ever the good lord, Nature, speaking softly and low? Later, the poem continues developing this line of thought by dealing more with the teaching itself. By bending an eye/ear toward the goofiness, hypocrisy and legitimate possibility offered in the old middle class American mantra “you can be anything you want to be when you grow up,” the poem derails itself with a sort of joyful cynicism that would make Thoreau both mournful and proud:
The new yearbook is coming out
today, we can say I’m in there,
I’m wearing clothes, that’s what
I learned today: pants plus shirt
equals me. That’s how to please.
In America, you can please anything
you want to be, you can be a robot
leading a platoon of sticks
around the shoreline, you can be
the shoreline, see the fish flash,
the cannibal clouds. A lightning bolt
may have created the first amino acid,
then what? Then there was a pond
named Walden and a girl named Dawn,
a stone to skip the silver,
and a skinny ass to rise out
of her gym shorts by the power
of her own hands. You can be
frightened by the signals you receive.
Surfaces and depths, gravity and resilience, it’s all here for the reading and re-reading and re:. As Thoreau famously wrote in his essay “Walking,” “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” And these poems are wild, if anything, and in most cases, it seems, naturally so. Fantastic.
Of course with all the attempts at finding one’s feet here (both with the other and each other) there are bound to be some difficulties—some instances where the enigmatic, idiosyncratic utterance falls flat or simply buzzes out of control. Thus, there are in Earthling a few moments where Healey’s transmissions don’t work as well as they might or ought. And when they don’t, they wind up reading like slightly more interesting hipster rock lyrics—lyrics which are often poetic, but less substantial than full blown poems. Take, for instance, the opening lines from, “lungs, nougat, nothing”:
My last idea appeared
like an archipelago of clouds
It gathered amphibian flames
and lasted until just now.
Then a tiny storm arrived
without reason or charm,
asking only to be invited inside.
When I came to, the lesson ended.
Here, the title, which appears later in the poem (chorus-like?), does little to ground the poetic circumstances at hand. And the images themselves, while playful, are more coded and private than most of the work in this collection. Clearly, this poem presents a mind in flight, and definitely one worth watching, but it doesn’t have the grounded oomph of the vast majority of the other work in the collection, and thus, is from the get-go, more suspect in terms of its meaning. Nevertheless, “lungs, nougat, nothing” like all the poems here, deserves re-reading and re-reading, as (in poetry) even a failed transmission (however one defines it) says as much about the receiver as it does the sender. In short, for as figuratively weird as Earthling is there’s no room for faking anything. Everyone’s responsible for the “what” that comes next.
Thus, in Earthling what may seem on a first read like a sort of coded, remote-ist posturing, appears, upon further inspection, as an always earnest—I might argue 21st Century Romantic—attempt to make sense—to understand and feel (both real and terrific) in the face of the un-marvelous, the overwhelmingly ordinary, the difficult. In short, Healey’s best efforts here might be said to do what poetry does when it really works—namely, to expose the raw scaffolding of sense-making and belief by transmitting, and simultaneously translating, our predicament through the all too human, yet alien, device of consciousness (the mind, with its Kantian components of the imagination and the understanding). Earthling boldly and thoughtfully renders the grounds of our existence in the hyper-meaningful dialect of Alien-ese that we call Poetry. In the final analysis, what’s most alien about Earthling is not only how grounded it is in the ways we actually think and feel, but in the ways it makes us think twice about them.
The book reminds us with an odd acuity that (perhaps sadly) we might only expect from a visitor from another planet that: 1) we’re not as weird as we often feel— which is a relief, that 2) we’re actually brilliantly more weird in our bones than we give ourselves credit for in our practical, work-a-day lives, and 3) that in the final analysis, nothing is alien about poetry at all. It’s a natural and normal human activity, a subset of meaning-making in the vast, bizarre complex of language (what Wittgenstein would call a language-game inside the larger Language Game).
Clearly, in this day and age, we’re often at a loss—both when it comes to connecting significantly with others and also communicating the confusion and joy of what it’s like to be human in our time. Everything substantial, it seems, is out of this world with postmodern relativity and irony, well beyond the reaches of quick, practical, and readily apprehendable communication.
Luckily for us, there other means available.
Suddenly, an alien Poetry steps in, and addresses us to ourselves in our own strange tongue. Earthling, it says…
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