The Poetry of Michael Easton

“Girl,” “Boy” and Intertextuality

Intertextuality

In literature, there is something called “intertextuality.” It happens when there are two or more works that stand alone but are connected to each other in some way. Stephen King fans have encountered intertexuality in several of his works. The most striking instance is the relationship between Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborn, which are completely separate stories of events that take place during an eclipse. While the stories are separate, the characters in each of them flash briefly on what is happening to each other. Another case of interxtuality in King appears in Tommyknockers when a character visits Derry, Maine, and passes a clown in a baggy white suit with orange buttons, a clown readers of It would instantly recognize.

In poetry collections, authors sometimes give us hints that works are related to each other in some way. One way they do it is by positioning the poems in the collection in a meaningful way. Another way is by giving the works titles that mirror or parallel each other. In the case of “Girl” and “Boy,” which appear opposite each other on pages 80 and 81 of Eighteen Straight Whiskeys, Easton gives us both hints.

In examining what these two poems tell us, we will look at them separately for their individual meanings and then see if we can determine what combining and comparing the two meanings tells us.

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“Girl”

The speaker in “Girl” is relating from a third-person perspective a woman’s experience with two initial sexual encounters, one of which takes place in the “present time” of the poem, and one of which takes place in the “past” of the poem. We can’t really know whether either of these encounters is followed by subsequent trysts with the same men. The focus of the poem is not on relationships, but on thoughts connected with the woman’s earliest encounters with the two men.

The first encounter introduced is the one that takes place in the poem’s “present.” The encounter is obviously meaningless to the woman on both an emotional and physical level. No emotional or truly human connection is made, as is evidenced by the fact that the man leaves without the woman knowing anything about him. Furthermore, the woman doesn’t even care that she knows nothing about him; instead of being distressed at the lack of connection, she is “impassive when he leaves.” Physically, the woman was not actually attracted to the man, as the first line clearly states. Alcohol leads to a kiss, a kiss leads to something more, but it is doubtful that the “more” it leads to is meaningful in any way because there is ambivalence as to whether is should be called making love, fucking, or “whatever.” The sex itself is nothing special. There is the general comfort of physical contact, but that contact is impersonal, which is contrary to the extremely personal connotations one would associate with sex. The man has the same physical presence as any other man or as all other men. The best the woman the poem describes can term it is “painless.”

Indeed, the encounter is so meaningless, ordinary, and detached that after the man leaves, the woman’s thoughts turn not to him or to their brief encounter, but to an earlier man, another chance encounter she had “brought in” several weeks before. This man had seemed different; his kiss and the way his mouth felt on her body were different and set him apart, made the encounter seem more personal. Because he seemed different, the woman felt there was more of a connection between them, and she told them about some of the most painful experiences in her life, thereby making herself human, personal, and vulnerable to him.

But after a few moments of reflecting somewhat wistfully about this encounter that hinted at the possibility of a personal connection, “SNAP:” she returns to the present and hopes she never sees the man again.

Why would she not want to see a man with whom she felt a connection more significant than fucking or whatever? There are two indicators of her motivation. One is revealed by what is said. While she was crying and telling him her most painful memories, his body was still. The other is revealed by what is not said. Since the woman is reflecting on the initial encounter of several weeks early, there is an implication that she had not seen or heard from him since. The stillness of his body and his failure to contact her after their night together indicate that he has rejected her, and the discussion of her sharing her past with him implies that the rejection was, at least in her mind, the result of her reaching out for an emotional connection.

Nothing is more painful than opening yourself up to someone and having them react by not reacting, but by withdrawing. It leaves you with the feeling that you have been rejected not just as a sexual object, but as a person. If someone rejects us after we open up to him or her, we feel that the person we truly are has been seen and deemed unworthy. That kind of rejection results in acute embarrassment, regret over opening up in the first place, deep-seated pain, and some anger. No wonder she never wants to see the man she met earlier again.

No wonder, either, that the encounter that just occurred lacked emotional connection. Suffering that kind of pain makes us leery of trying again, of opening ourselves up and making ourselves vulnerable to further rejection, further pain. The risk is simply too great.

But what does that leave us with? Our choice is celibacy or meaningless, shallow, unfulfilling encounters. Our choice is risking wounds to our inner most being or existing in emptiness.

Which is better?

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“Boy”

“Boy” also presents a third-person account, this time of the thoughts a man has as he initiates an encounter with a woman. With the innate kind of radar we sometimes have in such circumstances, he senses that the woman he has met wants to believe in him. Wanting to meet her desires and expectations, the man lies to the woman about relatively inconsequential things – whom he knows, where he’s been, and other details that confirm his manhood and, thereby, her ability to believe in him. At the end of the night, he pays the bill, another sign of his dependability.

The man tells these lies because he wants to have sex with the woman. But even at this early point, he can look down the road and see that the lies will continue, probably becoming more significant in nature. At this initial meeting, he is establishing himself as a certain kind of man, the kind of man he really is not or does not believe himself to be. Because the relationship is initiated through fraud, it is easy for the man to assume that the fraud will need to continue as long as the relationship does. “He knows/things are forged.” The use of the word “forge” is particularly appropriate because of its dual meaning. To forge in metallurgy is to create a form, often using heat. The shape of the relationship is, indeed, formed in heat – the heat of sexual attraction. The other meaning of “forge,” according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is “to make or imitate falsely, especially with intent to defraud.” Metal, once forged, is difficult to reshape, and false imitations with intent to commit fraud are difficult to retract. The man appears to believe that his role in the relationship has been rigidly and permanently formed based on falsehoods and a fraudulent front.

The man knows that the path this relationship will take has been mapped out. He will continue to lie until there are no lies left to tell, and eventually, she will catch him in a falsehood. Trust will be destroyed and, unable to lie his way back into her trust, he will move on because there will be no choice.

The obvious question is: If the man knows where this path will lead, why does he lie to begin with? We know the answer. It appears even before the question is created, at the very beginning of the poem. The man believes the woman wants to believe in him and that she can believe in him only if he meets what he assumes are her expectations. He does not see himself as a man the woman can believe in, so he creates the kind of man he thinks she wants and pretends to be that man.

But if we believe we must meet certain expectations and feel that we fall short of those expectations, what is left to us? Our choice is to be ourselves and fail those we want to please or to pretend to be someone we aren’t and become involved in a doomed, forged relationship. Of course, such relationships have to be meaningless, empty, and unfulfilling because we our true selves are totally absent from them. No relationship found on forgery can include a connection with our inner being because that being is never shown.

“Girl” and “Boy”

While there is nothing to indicate that “Girl” and “Boy” discuss the same people and the same encounters, the two poems are definitely connected. Easton has indicated as much by placing the poems together in his volume and by giving the two poems parallel titles.

In addition, both poems are written in the third person – using “she” and “he” – which is a marked departure from most of the poems in Eighteen Straight Whiskeys. Most of the poems in the collection employ the first-person “I,” indicating the speaker is revealing something about himself or herself, or the second-person “you,” which creates a direct connection between the reader and the speaker of the poem and draws the reader into the speaker’s mind. When a poet adopts a decidedly different writing style, he does so with a reason. Furthermore, the woman and man are identified only by pronouns. There is complete anonymity, and we know nothing about them other than the snapshots of their thoughts during initial sexual encounters. The use of third-person and the anonymity lead us to believe that the subjects of the poem could be Anywoman and Anyman, although not necessarily Everywoman and Everyman.

But the connections are not simply stylistic. Poets seldom create structural parallels unless they hope to imply parallel meanings. These two poems present very different views of relationships from very different perspectives. Yet the underlying meanings have one significant commonality. Both poems imply that relationships fail because of how we feel about our inner selves and the degree to which we are willing to invest and risk those selves.

In the encounter that takes place in the “present time” of “Girl,” the woman withholds herself and refuses to risk connection because she feels that her self has been rejected in the past. The pain of this rejection has caused her to retreat behind a wall of detachment. The man in “Boy,” on the other hand, withholds himself and refuses to risk true connection because he does not feel that his true self can meet the other’s needs and expectations. In both cases, the subjects of the poems are doomed to meaningless, empty, unfulfilling encounters – lasting or not – because they will not allow their true selves to participate. She fears rejection, and he fears failure. While their fears are different, they prevent them from creating a true connection with another human being. Without that connection, there can only be loneliness, regardless of how many people we bring to our beds or how long we allow them to stay there.

There is one more connection worth noting. I have referred to the subjects of the poem as “woman” and “man” for a reason. These people are too cynical about relationships to be under 21 years old. But the titles of the poem are not “Woman” and “Man” but “Girl” and “Boy.” The choice is significant because it tells us that the subjects’ views of relationships, while demonstrating a cynicism born of experience, are actually immature. In Freudian terms, the relationships are phallic. They are based on a drive for physical gratification. Freud’s phallic period ends in early childhood. But no matter how old we are, we still face the fears we had as children, fear of rejection and inadequacy. Like children, we run to safety, and just as scared children hide behind their mother’s skirts, we hide behind ineffectual defenses. Hiding behind its mother may make a child feel safe, but he or she cannot experience the world, cannot mature, as long as he or she hides. To learn and grow and relate to the world, a child must face his or her fears and conquer them. To have mature relationships which can grow, connect us to someone, and release us from isolation and loneliness, we must confront our fears of rejection and inadequacy and step out from behind our defenses. The child must take the risk. So must we.

- Deb Okey

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