Kink or Worship or Both: Megan Fernandes’ “I Do Everything I’m Told”

“In invoking (and sometimes tweaking) cherished predecessors, this gently impious collection also helps refurbish form.”

Megan Fernandes is a highly literate poet who wears her erudition lightly. When she references other poets, one senses she has read them with attention and is not just name-dropping. Brooks, Rilke, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Carson, Eliot, Pound, Brodsky, O’Hara, Ginsberg show up in her epigraphs and poems, like former neighbors, wittily pranked, held hostage for homage. Whether she venerates or disrespects in the manner of a stand-up comic, there is a sense of tradition lurking in poems that often deliberately stage themselves as loosey-goosey improvisations out of her “neurotic,” smart-aleck, ultimately self-effacing psyche. She is Sarah Silverman if she were a poet, her confidence, nay, bravado, directly preceding a self-putdown, from which she always miraculously and instantaneously recovers.

In his seminal 1973 work The Anxiety of Influence, about how poets break through the stranglehold of their predecessors to be able to focus on their own invention, Harold Bloom writes:

“The great pastoral elegies, indeed, all major elegies for poets, do not express grief but center upon their compositions’ creative anxieties. They offer therefore as consolation their own ambitions.”

And ambitious this writer is. Yet when the persona of Fernandes’ poems gets anxious enough to invoke a predecessor, the purpose seems more related to immediate consolation than future glory. In the winsomely melancholy “I’m Smarter Than This Feeling, But Am I?” the Fernandes-equivalent speaker goes down low, as she often does in one way or another, courting the vulgar, which has a way of becoming a portal to the sublime.