Echo and Break

At the heart of Megan Fernandes’s third collection, I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House, 2023), lies a diasporic network of “beloveds” scattered across the globe: Dar es Salaam, Venice, Shanghai, Brooklyn, Zurich. Readers enter this network through a wry, vulnerable speaker who renders the many textures of love in villanelles, couplets, prose, fragments, and, at the book’s center, a decomposing crown of sonnets. Through the capacities and limitations of these forms, Fernandes thinks through distance enforced and distance chosen. But to imply that this is a Covid collection is only half the story. It’s also a drop-dead funny, queer-of-color testimony to the ecstasies and weltschmerz of a life lived in resistance to various restraints: “white girl gentrifiers” and their epiphanies, the doctrine of the hetero family, the equally clichéd joys of travel and settled life. It pours an early-middle-aged cri de coeur into the millennials’ deadpan armor. It wrestles in and through the sonnet, in particular, to ask how much love can survive love’s inherited forms.

This is not idle metaphysics. From the first sonnet, “Tired of Love Poems,” Fernandes links the instinct behind what some might lazily call love to the instinct that leads us to “offer a light to a stranger” or pulls us to “worship more than just each other.” The speaker of this book doesn’t use the word political, but, as she writes in “Letter to a Young Poet,” “It’s better to be illegible, sometimes. Then they can’t govern you. It takes time to build an ethics.” It’s clear that for Fernandes, love means a fugitive intimacy, a way of being together that escapes the language and jurisdictions of power.

If ethics enter this domain, they do so as a horizon of potential, not prescriptive rules. As the winking title I Do Everything I’m Told shows, love can also be logos—a way of making language flesh and vice versa. (Erotic love, in this collection, often sounds like divine love.) Though the title reads first as invitation, a coyly sub-Tinder lure, behind it—and the depth of need it marks—looms a martyrology. To read that promise-cum-threat earnestly is to understand that speech, even when most marked out as aesthetic or abstracted from real-world contexts, as it might be in a poem, is always hierarchical, always metonymically linked to real oppression, and always ends in the subaltern body. Fernandes suggests that love, along with cruelty, its shadow, is precisely the place where the ethical stakes of language are most vivid and thus where the renewals and scarifications that poems can offer are most powerful.

Language needs such care. The global English Fernandes confronts and channels has had the spark milled out of it by capitalism and its officiants. In these poems, linguistic jouissance is often contrasted with the impassivity of institutional speech, as when “they” ask the speaker to describe her relationship: “you reply, playfully, // do you mean cosmically? / and they say no. / They did not mean cosmically.” Or when the speaker, in Shanghai, remembers that the verb to shanghai meant “to be kidnapped against your will”—English bears witness to the scars of colonialism. But, interestingly, the poems’ speakers are generally suspicious of artifice and committed to what Wordsworth called “the real language of men.” Of course, there is still plenty of éclat throughout and splashes of fioritura, as in the high music of “May to December”: “come, sun, you muscular star.” More representative is “Catskills,” a poem that, sans line breaks, would read as smoothly anecdotal prose. But harsh enjambments throw that anecdote into a depressive key, registering as millennial Zen, an update of Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man”: 

I see a shooting star
and don’t
make a wish.
 
Is this fucking Buddhism
I ask Dan,
who is passed out
 
in the grass to my right.

It’s another instance of the speaker extending unrequited verbal play, and the stagey failure of the gesture hints at why the book returns so frequently to the oral. Fernandes’s speakers protect themselves by talking unremarkably, and the plainer or hipper or more self-deprecating the language is, the more reliably it indexes a wound. One of the book’s pitch-perfect takes on dejection, “Do You Sell Dignity Here,” reads almost as a brittle stand-up routine: “Do you know what aisle / they sell dignity, / I say to the store clerk / on University Avenue,” it begins. By the time the speaker tries the quip again at a grocery store, readers understand the point: these commercial spaces are the last vestiges of a commons the speaker can access, and the sociolect of the times has a narrow emotional band indeed—even as we wince for the underpaid clerks on whom these gestures land. 

This recurrent melancholy for a used-up language also plays out on a more overtly poetic register as Fernandes wrestles with one of the book’s other main targets: a masculinist white canon and its debris of clichés. The poem “Rilke” is a one-woman burlesque in which “los[ing] a job / at a women’s college to a dude” sparks a serial ventriloquy of the Eurydices and Circes and Blanches of the world, abandoned by their male creators and paramours. It finds its almost-empowered ecstasy as Fernandes’s speaker, vamping T.S. Eliot, plays the Prufrockian mermaid as a femme fatale. For all the jokes and charm, a hard, structural anger smolders in this collection. Again and again, looking for referents for a life of poetry and cosmopolitanism, the queer non-white speaker comes up against bulwarks such as Eliot, Ezra Pound, Joseph Brodsky, Paul Verlaine, and Arthur Rimbaud. Meanwhile, the book flies under epigraphs from Gwendolyn Brooks, Anne Carson, Lauren Berlant, and Meena Alexander, remediating at a structural level that ache in the poems proper. The joke of “Paris Poem Without Clichés” is that Paris, and by extension the condition of the deracinated cosmopolitan poet, is so belated and worked over that one might as well lean in. The poem fields not an evasion but a full-on metalepsis of cliché that begins in the concupiscent glee of “We got your knickers / in a twist and dropped like flies” before it darkens to “Absence makes a heart / of thorns.” Similarly, the taciturn “Companion” dwells on the origin of the cliché “rock-bottom” and hints at a fucked-up relationship, before reflecting, with some jealousy, that at least Rimbaud got art out of it, “wrote / A Season in Hell/ after Verlaine // nearly / killed him.” It’s a start—at least they’re queer, rebels against the romantic norms Fernandes grapples with—but it’s not quite a livable model.

To propose such a model, away from capitalism and the tyranny of bourgeois mores, is the central ambition of I Do Everything I’m Told. Hints are scattered across the book; in “Shanghai,” the speaker imagines another dimension “where the world goes uncrushed, / and instead my beloveds multiply, / and with them, their laughters.” This Pollyannaish vision has risks, but it’s poignant because it’s pitched against a broader emotional backdrop of frequent loneliness and sex laced with death, where even “good” nontraditional relationships prove fraught. Unsure which of three beloveds has to be “voted off,” the speaker of “The Trial” waits to see whose gifted flowers will die first; her poly utopia here plays like Survivor.

Yet the book’s most sustained document of erotic hope, its disappointments and its rehabilitation, comes in the crown of the second section, “Sonnets of the False Beloveds with One Exception OR Repetition Compulsion.” Why, readers might ask, if the goal is to break the shackles of the disciplinary couple form, does Fernandes marshal an artificial, ouroboric template, in which, as the student of poetry is taught, the last line of one sonnet serves as the first line of the next until all the repeated lines form their own sonnet? Indeed, Terrance Hayes’s crown in American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018) works so brilliantly because it connects the fetishism and carceral instinct inherent in the form—the blazon, the sonnet’s tendency to master or entomb the beloved, and the repeated closures of a crown—to America’s incarceration of Black men and the paranoid erotics behind it. It’s not an obvious tool with which to liberate love.

But there’s another narrative in which the sonnet is the founding document of the Western ideology of love and is key to its idealization of marriage—a relationship of property—as transcendental romance. In this story, the sonnet, packaged with Petrarchan humanism, is adapted into the languages of Europe in the early modern period just as its nation states are developing independent literatures. It’s an odd union. Whereas humanism promotes perfectibility and classical criticism, the sonnet is founded not on reason but on excesses of suffering and desire. It metabolizes the troubadours rather than antiquity; it’s wailed, supposedly, by someone on the fringes of society. The sonnet moves between countries as dark money, internationally fungible, converting the individual’s potentially subversive affect into licit prestige.

In this story, Fernandes works in the crown to expose the form’s baked-in tensions, no matter how sclerosed they’ve become; she hacks an element of this European source code, on which the culture’s ideologies, to some small degree, still depend. Fernandes’s sequence is structured as a web that knits seven sonnets addressed to beloveds across the world—“Shanghai Sonnet,” “Palermo Sonnet,” etc.—into an echoic undercommons in which language and emotions repeat even as their objects change. Each sonnet, printed on the verso, is decomposed on the recto into a skittery erasure of itself, yielding the requisite 14 poems. The first six lines of “Los Angeles Sonnet,” for example,

In love, the rules are meant to be broken.
In role-play and foreplay, I break character
and make things as unsexy as possible.
I’m the coy babysitter. You’re the dad.
I ask: How’s it going at the geophysical
mining plant?

become

                and                 character
        and           things
         I’m        coy
           ask

The moment reflects wittily on which kinds of technical proficiency are hot and on the drag logic of writing in form at all—after all, anybody can fill a pronoun, and everyone in LA is an actor. In such a place and time, following rules can be transgressive. Then, when the lines are eroded, as in Carson’s translations of Sappho, the stripped voice seems to meditate on the lyric irreducibility of the self ("character"), the world ("things"), and the need (“ask”) to reach out to others.

The first and last lines of each poem are assembled into, first, the traditional 15th “Wandering Sonnet,” which preserves the end-stopped camp formality of the titled pieces. Then the less-grammatical “Diaspora Sonnet” gathers, tenderly, the language excluded from the strict rule. With characteristic excess, there follows a supplement to this supplement, a two-page, white-spacey sprawl of alienated verbal phrases: “I sink,” “I used,” “you describe,” “we talk.” Using linguistic deconstruction to break subjects from the systems of their oppression, including in this case the syntax and form of the poem, this last supplement harkens back to the difficult liberations of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), which pioneered such operations on the archive of Atlantic slavery. At its last moment, Fernandes’s poem offers not edifice but Brownian motion, a grammar of action before and after its capture by narrative. 

In “The Notion of ‘Rhythm’ in its Linguistic Expression,” the French linguist Émile Benveniste goes back to the etymon of “rhythm” in rhein, to flow, and uses it to argue that rhythm, axiomatic to poetry and Western metaphysics, was not a fixed paradigm but described a fleeting stiffening of verb into noun as it presented to an individual observer. Fernandes makes a similar intervention, allowing us to read poetic form as a brief but useful formalization of language, sometimes self-alienated but also poignant as it gives way to its own decomposition. This pulse of systole and diastole, making and unmaking, control and abandon, is also, of course, sexy; what these poems know about love they express, coyly, not just in what they say but also by how and when they open. When in the first “Shanghai Sonnet” the speaker writes, “A device isn’t personal, but my blue wound / plus yours? It could be exquisite in the right / weather, in the right city,” the impersonal but inhabitable “device” of the form is linked to “wound,” and is floated as a kind of transcendental situationship that, remaining open to contingency, allows people to come together without forcing them to.

The youth and optimism of the sequence darken as it progresses, and “Philadelphia Sonnet” lands on the friable edge of love and violence, bringing the technical edge roleplayed in “Los Angeles Sonnet” (“How’s it going at the geophysical mining / plant?”) into the body as numerated trauma,

The cruelest person we love is the first.
In triage, they ask what happened.
My sister and I sit still, wait for a revelation.
A third, unnamed party is slow to say:
Three punches. Closed fist. Straight to the head.
I lose fifteen pounds in a few months
and everyone says how good I look except
that boy in Paris. The terrible one.
We sat at a bar. Don’t you ever eat?
A poet does not have enough mercy
for all the people who really need it.
I love the word triage because of tri-
Triangles. Tridents. I fall hard in pairs.
I cast beloveds. I kill them off, too.

The “device” or “blue wound” that in the first poem allowed people to come together here becomes a closed system in which the wounds are literal, and the speaker, like the people who surround her, has been worn down by the impersonal logic and settings. Language has, through love and cruelty, imprinted the speaker’s body with its pairs and threes. Whereas in an earlier poem “DaVinci only made, like, fifteen paintings,” at this point it’s “fifteen pounds” (a crown has 15 poems) that have been subtracted from the speaker. Each poem costs life. Still, with its final gatherings of broken language, this crown-as-system, crown-as-ode to fugitive loves across the globe, ends as a powerful statement of both the self’s endurance through trial and the empowerment of making, hinged by the bivalent verb, “I cast,” 

we love                                                     I sit
                            I lose
        I look                                         We sat                                       you
       eat 
                         I love                                      I fall                       I cast
I kill

In On the Inconvenience of Other People (2022), the late cultural critic Lauren Berlant suggests that “sexual optimism can build genre muscles for the possibility of elaborating one’s own and the world’s revolutionary resistance to projects of fake coherence.” I read I Do Everything I’m Told’s overshares and “Gucci kicks,” its unrequited but irrepressible jokes, its high pitches of possibility and its bravery in despond analogously, as militating against falsity and coherence even when the toll lands, as it often does, on the speaker’s own body. It shows us language renewed by love and love’s excess, and it offers to the children of the diaspora homes built on white space, on echo and break.