Megan Fernandes: On the History of Cities, Imperfection and Joy, and Her New Poetry Book “I Do Everything I’m Told”
Megan Fernandes is taking readers through the poetic journey of a lifetime in her new book, I Do Everything I’m Told. Described as “a brown femme travelogue book of love poetry”, the collection spans multiple cities and countries around the world, recounts some wild travel moments, and explores themes of desire, identity, repetition, and so much more.
I spoke with Fernandes via Google Docs about the duality of imperfection and joy, exploring the world as history-building, and her new collection—which gripped me from the very first page.
Erica Abbott: First of all, congratulations on your new book! Can you tell me about how I Do Everything I’m Told came to be and how it feels that your newest collection is out in the world?
Megan Fernandes: Terrifying?
EA: The title poem kicks off the final section of the collection. Why does the poem work so well as an introduction to this section that covers various themes, including current events, desire, and worship?
MF: That poem is still a bit of a mystery to me. The speaker is a little petulant, wants to know they are more loved, more important than the boyfriend of the beloved. It’s a poem of queer, unintelligible intimacy. But I think those poems about Venice in the book are also about being summoned and staying even when things get complicated. I Do Everything I’m Told isn’t a compromise, it’s a defiant unconditional way of obeying. It’s saying yes but with a little bit of a bite.
EA: The final lines of the title poem make reference to a playlist called I do everything I’m told. If such a playlist existed, what songs would need to be on it?
MF: The playlist does exist! And it includes Nina Simone’s “Wild is the Wind,” “Sure Thing,” by Miguel, “Camo” by Kota the Friend, and a bunch of Portishead, Vince Staples, and Blood Orange.
EA: There is an incredible crown of sonnets in the second part of the collection that spans from Shanghai to Philadelphia, in addition to erasures of and fragments-turned-complete poems of these sonnets throughout. What intrigues you about the cities referenced in these poems? How do the forms used throughout really shape the stories being told?
MF: Well the crown is called “Repetition Compulsion” so I think the poems were trying to figure out something about both what we repeat in our own behavior and also, what we inherit in terms of how we desire. Desire is about longing and so travel makes sense because we need distance to produce desire (we can’t desire what we already have). But also, I love cities. I love their distinctive personalities. I love the history we can build with them over years, and how that history sometimes precedes us.
My friend asked me if the cities were the real beloveds and yes, I think to some degree that’s true. Even in cities I dislike, like LA, some transformative things happened there. It deserves to be a stage.
EA: Of course, travel emerges as an overarching theme throughout the book. At the end of “Sagittarius”, there’s a line: “Because I believe so much in being led.” Could you talk a bit about this idea and how it fits into the larger theme?
MF: Again, bottom energy? HA! No, I enjoy a romantic, silly impulse to do something without overthinking it too much. I think we are socialized as adults (particularly women) to be sacrificial, to bear suffering, to believe in false meritocracies, to play-act adulthood. But most of that just serves a certain kind of heteronormative nationalism. People get married, have kids, wealth accumulate, go see their in-laws, drop their friends, work at jobs they hate, and maybe they don’t feel like they have a choice to change their life. I get it. I’ve participated, too. But also, we do have a choice. You don’t have to stay in boring or bad circumstances just because you’re not sure what else exists. Plenty exists. There are so many weird ways to live.
EA: The collection traverses many other topics and forms from the pandemic to Greek mythology to the “Fuckboy Villanelle” and the cosmos. How do these topics, and others in the book, shape the bookend of “Love Poem”/“Tired of Love Poems” and this idea put forth in the first poem: “Even if it was ugly, it was joy.”?
MF: So I actually switched the first and last poem in the final version. So now it opens with “Tired of Love Poems” and ends with “Love Poem.” I think that “Tired of Love Poems” is more of an invitation to the reader and a better first poem. It looks simple, controlled, even a little precious, but there is something sinister there in the lighting of the cigarette and pulling out the chair, the making gods and trees stand in for beloveds, the exhaustion in the speaker’s voice of like, okay, here we go again. And the last poem is a bit of a complicating of that notion. Like it’s against simplicity. It’s against the big signifiers of trees and gods and instead is replaced by misfit raccoons and bad weather and a failed caper. But even with all those imperfections, that sneaky, sneaky joy.
EA: I’m so intrigued by the cover of this collection — from the simple Polaroid image to the neon color. Can you share how it came to be and why it really fits with the style of the book overall?
MF: All credit goes to the designer, Beth, at Tin House. The only thing I said was give me something neon. I loved Danez Smith’s Homie. Both the book and the cover and I gave that to them and they ran with it. I kind of hate prissy little poetry covers with flowers on them or whatever, especially for people who identify as women. I wanted hard femme vibes, but also the rabbit is great because it is giving the best bottom energy and that works with the title. Wily rabbit.
Beth told me there were a few rabbits all over the book which I didn’t realize and then, I don’t know, I was trying to decide on maybe a different image, and this rabbit just kind of appeared to me and so I said, yeah, the universe is doing its thing, let’s go with it.
EA: Do you have a favorite poem from the collection? What is it about and can you share a snippet of it?
MF: “Drive.” It was a late addition, but it has both flow and restraint, adrenaline and composure. It has some Rumi in there, but also Russell Brand. The stars and also a record store. It’s a funny poem about how we try to justify our heartache, how much we want knowledge to solve what is unanswerable. I love it.
EA: How does travel shape who you are as a poet? What has your craziest travel experience been?
MF: Pretty sure I have ADHD. I can’t really sit still. Moving around keeps me in a space of unevenness, like trying to balance on a fault line. In a very freeing way, you can be a different person in one country than you are in another. Also, I love languages, especially if I can’t fully speak them. As a poet, there is something very tempting about trying to inhabit sounds without meaning.
EA; What are some of the biggest differences between I Do Everything I’m Told and your last collection Good Boys? Any similarities?
MF: I Do Everything I’m Told is a book of diasporic love poems and the beloveds are intimate, friends, cousins, etc. It’s trying to figure out something about distance, rootlessness, desire. But it’s also controlled. It is more attentive to form. But I also think it’s trying to work with history. The history of cities, of the canon, of a body, of a love story. And when one tries to undo time, tries to break up neat narratives of the historical and demonstrate how they interpolate our present, probably, you need more control.
I also wanted to write a book of love poems without having to address these big issues of the zeitgeist. I don’t always want to have to perform the racialized voyeurism that the publishing industry sometimes demands of us. Our right to love is also our right to universality. There’s so much broken about the world, but guess what, people still love and lose and want and leave.
Good Boys is more extreme and undisciplined, which I love, because there is something so anti-colonial and anti-capitalist about the unruly. It lives in the ephemeral.
EA: Who are some of your biggest literary influences? What inspires you?
MF: Dead: Gwendolyn Brooks, Rainer Maria Rilke, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Etheridge Knight, Jack Gilbert, Frank O’Hara, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Seamus Heaney, Meena Alexander
Alive: Evie Shockley, Anne Carson, Diane Seuss, Rita Dove, Brenda Shaughnessy, Bhanu Kapil
Also, alive, but maybe less known and you should read them: Virginia Konchan, Taylor Johnson, Fiona Benson, Tawanda Mulalu
EA: Do you have any other projects on the horizon?
MF: Many! All of them are funny, thank god.
EA: Anything else you’d like to add that I didn’t ask?
MF: No, these were great! Thanks!
Megan Fernandes is the author of Good Boys, and a finalist for the Kundiman Poetry Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Common, and the Academy of American Poets, among others. An associate professor of English and the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College, Fernandes lives in New York City.
