Hannah Grieco in Conversation With Megan Fernandes

At The Rumpus, Grieco's interview with Fernandes begins with some background: "She’s a poet, yes, but she also shoves aside walls that enclose poetry in form or subject. Her work has been published in countless magazines and journals, from the New Yorker to Ploughshares to McSweeney’s Internet Tendency." More from there: 

Fernandes’s debut collection, The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books, 2015), introduced us to her voice as both blunt truth-teller and measured verse-architect. In Good Boys, her new collection published last month from Tin House Books, she plunges back into family, relationships, and identity—then explores the lens itself through which she sees and thinks about her world. Her anger and agitation speak so clearly, so compellingly, that we find ourselves reading her poems on the edge of unease: What will happen next? Is this going to hurt? Will she soothe us?

And she does, with great care and love.

I was delighted to speak with Megan about her approach to writing family, using humor to add depth and perspective to her work, and how she defines and owns the narrative within her poetry.

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The Rumpus: Where and when did this collection begin for you?

Megan Fernandes: I’d say the poems are from between 2015-2018 with a few latecomers from 2019 that slipped in there. Most of the poems coincide with my move to New York City five years ago. This has been a period of intense change in my life. 

Rumpus: Every poem in this collection feels like a story, vivid and tangible. What defines your work (or any work) as poetry versus lyrical CNF or short fiction?

Fernandes: There are many ways to think about narrative and for me, I like a narrative poem that resists chronology. I like scenes that are nonsensical and outside of time. This mirrors a sort of feminist diasporic writing tradition which, as you observed, might mean vivid story worlds that are abandoned by context. A lot of hazy beginnings and endings. I’m thinking of poets like Meena Alexander or Bhanu Kapil, here, who can really do this kind of spatial and cognitive leaping between scenes. It makes sense that if you’re a person who is negotiating a lot of homelands, maybe especially if some of them feel abstract, that ability gives you both the sense of being fragmented but also belonging to a newly enacted narrative. Poems in my collection such as “The Poet Holds a Gun” moves from an Aeolian beach to a gun range in Pennsylvania, to an episode of meeting and shaking hands with Agnès Varda. These are narrative clips, sure, except they are not held together by any kind of chronological logic, but more by this kind of “poetic leaping.”

You know, when I was in graduate school, I remember thinking that narrative really belonged to men and to the colonizer; by that, I mean that those were the demographics that got to decide the official story of history and aesthetics. In contrast, I read work that was more formally experimental. Yet I was still compelled by narrative structure and became interested in the way certain poets like those I mentioned earlier were able to reimagine their relationship to storytelling in a way that did not do violence to their own subject-making.

I’m also influenced by some of the New York poets such as Frank O’Hara, obviously, and I remember reading about his ability to employ the “apparitional aesthetic” and that really hit me because, yes, I think of some of the poems in the collection almost burst into the poem as hallucinatory visions and then abruptly exit. It’s like narrating little epiphanic spells. And then those epiphanies can generate new story worlds within themselves like mini “mise en scenes.”

Continue at The Rumpus.