Contributor’s Marginalia: Bruce Beasley responding to Marcus Wicker’s “First Encounter: the ATLian Observes Love”

+ When as readers we make first contact with a poem, we don’t know its terms, how it speaks to us, what it wants of us. We’re alienated. We’re in a place where we don’t know yet whether or how we belong. We’re not so sure yet who’s the Alien here: the poem, or us.

+ Marcus Wicker puts us there, deliberately I think. Being disoriented, confused, startled, is part of its emotional/political mission of first contact.

+ I make bewildered and astonished first contact with this wildly dreamlike, punning, hyperallusive poem from the title on: part alien, part lost continent Atlantis, eventually portmanteau word made from alien and the airport code and nickname for Atlanta: ATL. ATLien as an alien in Atlanta? or alienated in Atlanta? Or treated as Other in Atlanta?

+ “First contact” means, in anthropology, an encounter between members of two cultures who had never met before, a contact that has historically quickly disintegrated into colonization, genocide, mass extinction through first contact with unencountered pathogens. First contact where one side constructs itself as discoverer and explorer and becomes in its own eyes conquistador, civilizer, savior, enslaver. And “first contact” is also the invasion of aliens, where Alien is identified as extraterrestrial civilization, or where Alien is identified as asylum-seeker at the southern border. Star Trek: First Contact (1996), with its time-traveling Borg. In Wickerian fashion the historical and deadly serious make contact with pop culture, with wild and unpredictable veers of tone and register.

+ “First Contact: ATLien Observes Love” meditates on, mediates, and formally enacts an array of “first contacts”: between indigenous peoples and colonizers; between anthropologists and those whom they’d explore and quantify and in the process potentially alter forever; between space aliens and xenophobically encountered immigrants reconceived by Fox from asylees to invaders to be walled forever Out.

+ Fragmentation and form make first contact here. Though the sometimes-twenty-syllable lines riven by visual caesuras disguise it, this is, after all, a sonnet in seven off-rhymed couplets. Capacity/histories. Eardrums/arms. Brown/striation. The wonderfully invisible vowel-rhyme of HD and drinks.

+ And it’s a sonnet in couplets, so doubly formed to invoke the history of love poetry. The poem, like its narrator, the ATLien, “observes love”: the half-rhymes half-pulling line ends together in affirmation while half tearing-apart in the nightmares of colonial and enslavement histories, war, “bloodguilt,” gladiatorial slaughters-for-entertainment enacted in video games played on cellphones in Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport (ATL). Those histories are being “witnessed in tender palms // a square parable generator”: astonishingly odd, and apt, phrasing, the “alien” “ATLien” observer telling, like Jesus of Nazareth, parables of human love and atrocity.

+ The poem makes violence and love make contact; despair and hope collide. It goes in search of community, connection, “the healing nod of African Americans.” It goes to Chicken + Beer, the Atlanta rapper Ludacris’s soul food restaurant in Hartsfield Airport, named for Ludacris’s hit 2003 LP. “First Contact: ATLien Observes Love” is a love poem to Black music, food, community, among much else, even as it stares straight on at the histories of enslavement and of assassination of Black leaders. Its first line evokes the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” though not so self-evident as to grant those “certain unalienable rights” to millions of enslaved and disenfranchised Americans).

+ The unalienable was often alienable.

+ The poem’s first couplet evokes, too, Atlanta’s Martin Luther King Jr. in both his idealism (“man’s belief in dreams”) and his assassination, “sins” that are as “self-evident” as the “truths” enshrined in America’s declaration that “all Men are created equal” (depending, in the fine print, on who have been defined as “Men”).

+ Watch every phrase closely here: each contains multitudes. “Text histories” is, slyly, the whole history of History recounting what humans have done in the thousands of years in which written history has been recorded, in all its atrocity of massacres, enslavements, genocide, revolutions. It’s simultaneously way more intimate: the histories of betrayal contained in the record of text messages on each phone. “My existence here may be forgiven” (as if the very existence of one labeled Other/Alien, by way of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, citizenship) is a sin to be atoned in fear and trembling).

+ Biblical allusions proliferate here everywhere you look. The poem’s last phrase (“into whosoever drinks”) conjures John 4:14, Jesus’s promise to the Samaritan woman at the well (herself an “alien” religiously and culturally to the Jews of ancient Palestine): “Whosever drinketh of the water I give will never thirst.” The “tender palms” suggest Christ’s triumphant/maryr-making entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, as well as palms of the hands that have never known hand to hand battle except through video game gladiator contests in their palms. The poem’s diction is seeped in bloodguilt, sins, parable; even “a brown / girl grazes her elbow at my table’s ragged edge” evokes the moment where a woman in a crowd touches “the hem of the garment” of Christ, believing that alone will be enough to heal her of a decades-long hemorrhage. In Matthew 9:22, Jesus turns to answer her, “Daughter, be of good comfort; thy faith hath made thee whole. And the woman was made whole from that hour.”

+ So the poem pits alienation, xenophobia, racism, and othering against love, forgiveness, kinship (“infant kin kisses”: even the alliteration contains affiliation). It pits gladiatorial slaughter (both in the Roman Forum and in the “telegenic violence” of a video game) against healing; it pits first contact in its contexts of colonial imperialism and alien invasion against the surge of love for a “kin” child met for the first time (“first contact,” with this first contact’s fountains of sweetness pouring through ATL).

+ Fourteen lines. The histories of human violence, fear and extermination and enslavement of the Other. The terror of immigrants as invaders, aliens, criminals. The dream of the Declaration and of the nonviolent resistance of the Civil Rights movement and the disappointments of both. A celebration of forgiveness, redemption, and love (family love, divine love, the welcoming of the poor and outcast, the blamed, judged, and rejected). For context, look to Wicker’s “Dear Mothership” in Poetry magazine, the last line of which is the first line of this poem, suggesting a sonnet crown. The Alien enters, seen as infecting, contaminating, but the poem ends with its own form of familial love “infecting capillaries This saccharin contaminant… streaming”: streaming, like this poem, unto “whosoever drinks.”