I Do Everything I’m Told, by Megan Fernandes, reviewed by Trevor Ruth
One of the most difficult things for the modern poet is trying to capture that balance between form and language. Do you care more about poetic structure, cadence, style, or are you looking for something that speaks more to experimentation and the social issues of today (there is no right answer by the way)? I Do Everything I’m Told by Megan Fernandes meets its audience in the metaphorical median: employing traditional lyrical approaches with a much more modern flair. Oftentimes, this works; other times, the poetry is overly ambitious, though not without its merits.
The collection starts off with the brilliant “Tired of Love Poems,” which ironically asserts that human action alone is an act of love and, by definition, any poem that chooses to portray an action is secretly a love poem, “To pull/out a chair is more than manners.” Thusly, the poem becomes a love poem through action alone. The book then leaps into “Letter to a Young Poet,” a hugely personal prose poem full of genuine self-imposing advice, along with very subtle social criticism peppered in: “It’s better to be illegible, sometimes. Then they can’t govern you,” and “Go slow. Wellness is a myth and shame transforms no one…You can walk off most anything.” The imagery conjured in this piece is one-directional and nostalgic. There’s something that speaks to a turn of the century (possibly millennial) mindset, typically through pop culture references: “Flow is best understood through Islamic mysticism or Lil Wayne spitting without a rhyme book, post-2003.” Such allusions will certainly speak to a younger audience of readers. It is also one of the strongest poems in the collection, apart from the cliché in the final lines that contradicts the otherwise depreciative tone.
A good portion of the collection is written in either unrhymed couplet or triplet stanzas; however, every so often there will come a sonnet (and, just as often, Fernandes conveniently inserts the word sonnet into the title to let you know that it is indeed a sonnet). Particular to these divergences are “Sonnet for the Unbearable” with its masterful use of assonance, “knelt at a grave/with grass unkempt and overstayed, and still/no spook came. It was a game.” The poem is also a tender one—as its namesake suggests—as it takes the form of an ode to barren women with a heavy dose of gothic imagery intertwined. Another ode comes in the form of a beautifully rendered visual poem depicting an Arizona landscape in “Phoenix” with its surreal balance between the rustic desert imagery and how it impresses itself on the mind of the reader; “Can a rock have a follower? Can a low desert sky/ follow me home? I start a cult of geographies/ of the extremes and stick microphones into cacti arms.”
The second part of the collection, entitled “Sonnets of the False Beloveds with One Exception or Repetition Compulsion,” is incredibly endearing. Here, Fernandes shares a collection of sonnets—each based on a different location—by displaying the sonnet on one page and an erasure of that same sonnet on the following page. Normally, I am not a fan of erasures, however I cannot help but feel inspired by Fernandes’ ability to search for a different kind of meaning by cutting out entire portions of her own poetry, sometimes to great effect: “how to raise a child/underwater/first in/disappointment.” This second section concludes with a foray into the abstract as each word of each erasure is thrown across two entire pages, preceded by the same poem in lyrical fashion in an enormous messy parody of structuralist poetry, but with varying nodes of connecting sentence fragments to consider. In this way, Fernandes seems to show appreciation for classical poetic structure, but also chooses to make fun of it by revolting against the general conventions.
Other times, the poetry seems to wane a bit in its balance of form and substance. For example, “Fuckboy Villanelle,” is not really a successful villanelle in that the refrains are totally reworded, but I appreciate the effort. “Dinner with Jack” takes a conversation between the speaker and a friend (presumably) about a hypothetical situation that recalls the plot to the 2003 film Open Water but stands as a metaphor for the absurdity that self-destructive couples go through, along with a quick name-drop to Samuel Beckett, who seems to appear to make the conversation appear more highbrow in its tone. Fernandes takes every opportunity to pay respect to past poets, including Ezra Pound, Allen Ginsberg, T.S. Eliot and Rainer Maria Rilke. Mostly these are done in a similar name-dropping fashion and less of an ode to each poet. Not to criticize Fernandes for her taste in poets (far from it, each of the names mentioned are brilliant), but recalling these names came off as deeply confusing.
Conversely, in what is possibly my favorite poem in the collection, “Rilke,” the speaker examines the very present intellectual dichotomies between Eurydice and Orpheus, and Fernandes gives us two of the most penetrating stanzas in the entire book: “See, I think Orpheus knew. Had always planned to turn back/and homegirl knew, too./That’s a kind of smart./To know what you know./To know what your man can and will do.” It starts with the introduction of what would later be defined as “dumb joy” by the speaker before referring to Eurydice as “homegirl” to give the language that modern edge, then it leaps to the inclusion of seemingly reversed Platonic ideologies and then the poem just keeps it going with more assonance, a bit of rhyme and a dash of dagger-sharp confidence: “What mama energy, one student said/ and I gave her a C. Baby, I’m Circe./I hold down the island./I don’t drown my own men in the sea./I tidy up the underworld…” All of this building up to a climactic finish in the form of an epic stanza followed by the refrain of a single line: “I know how to turn around./I know who waits in this clockless eternity/and who is allowed to drown.”
This spirit of rebellion remains a central theme for the collection. In the final lines of the title poem, “I Do Everything I’m Told,” the speaker examines the relationship between the subject and her boyfriend while noting a photograph of the boyfriend’s hands full of dead animals (the boyfriend is a chef). “I nod at their dead beauty,/put on a playlist called/I do everything I’m told, and can’t tell/what is kink or worship or both.” What better defines the tone for this book, then, but the conscientious blurring of the lines between kink and worship? Admittedly, it comes off as mildly hypocritical, but the book seems to carry its hypocrisies with a kind of self-indulgence: “Fuckboy Villanelle” is not a traditional villanelle; “Paris Poem Without Cliches” is riddled with cliches as far as language is concerned; the first poem in the collection is entitled “Tired of Love Poems” while the last poem in the collection is entitled “Love Poem”.
The entire book seems to endlessly contradict itself, but perhaps this is the point of the book. Note the sarcasm in the title, I Do Everything I’m Told. This can be seen on an academic (and quite possibly social) level, as if to say, “I do everything I’m told to do as a poet,” as one who practices a higher art form such as poetry, by employing classical poetic structure. Except Fernandes chooses to mock the conventions of classical poetry while also respecting their intricacies by giving each poem that distinctive modern touch to make the poetry exciting and unpredictable. On a technical level, Fernandes succeeds in doing just that; however, there lies beneath the surface that spirit of anarchy that ventures to break the mold and, in doing so, carries itself with a kind of pride and insubordination that one might consider perfectly balanced.