Loading summary
Transcript86 lines
- [00:01]
Sponsor Announcer
Support for this show comes from the Exploratorium Leap into the wild New world of Artificial Intelligence this summer at the All New All Ages Exhibition Adventures in AI. Now through September 14th at Pier 15. Tickets at Exploratorium. Edu AI. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [00:45]
Kevin Young
You're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker Magazine. On this program, we invite a poet to choose a poem from the New Yorker Archive to read and discuss. Then they read one of their own poems that's been published in the magazine. The poems we're featuring today also appear in the anthology I recently edited, A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925-2025, available for purchase from the New Yorker Store or wherever you buy books today. My guest is Megan Fernandez, whose books include I Do Everything I'm Told and Good Boys. Her poems have been published widely, and she's received fellowships from the Yado foundation, the Sewanee Writers Conference, the Hawthornden Foundation. She's currently an associate professor of English and the writer in residence at Lafayette College. Meg, welcome. Thanks so much for joining me.
- [01:37]
Megan Fernandez
Thanks for having me, Kevin. I'm so excited to be here.
- [01:40]
Kevin Young
The first poem you've chosen to read is Half Life in Exile by Hala Alyan. What drew you to this particular poem while you were perusing the anthology?
- [01:48]
Megan Fernandez
Yeah, actually it was really hard to choose a poem by Hala because all of them are absolutely astounding. I think she's one of the best writers of our generation. And this is a poem that has sort of a sly way of thinking about dehumanization. It kind of creeps up on you. It's about the failures of art in a way, and also what can come of banishment. And I think somehow she's able to do this with a lot of sensual imagery and also without being overly didactic. So I think it's a poem that's doing kind of a lot with a lot and sort of suspending both the moment that the poem was written, which was published in 2021, but also is very relevant to our moment right now.
- [02:33]
Kevin Young
Let's listen to the poem. Here's Megan Fernandez reading Half Life in.
- [02:37]
Megan Fernandez
Exile Bahala Alyan, Half Life in Exile I'm Forever living between Aprils. The air here smells of jacarandas and lime. It's sunset before I know it. I'm supposed to rest, but that's where the children live. In the hot mist of sleep, dream after dream. Instead I obsess. I draw stars on receipts. Everybody loves the poem. It's embroidered on a pillow in Milwaukee. It's done nothing for Palestine. There are plants out west that emerge only after fires. They listen for smoke. I wrote the poem after weeks of despair, hauling myself like a rock. Everyone loves the poem. The plants are called fire followers. But sometimes it's after the rains. At night I am a zombie feeding on the comments. Is it compulsive to watch videos? Is it compulsive to memorize names? Rafif and Ammar and Mahmud. Poppies and snapdragons and calendrinias. I can't hear you. I can't hear you. Under the missiles, a plant waits for fire to grow. A child waits for a siren. It must be a child. Never a man, never a man without a child. There is nothing more terrible than waiting for the terrible. I promise. Was the grief worth the poem? No. But you don't interrogate a weed for what it does with wreckage, for what it's done to get here.
- [04:20]
Kevin Young
That was Half Life in Exile by Hala Alyan, which was originally published in the September 27, 2021 issue of the New Yorker. What a powerful reading. I was really struck by the sounds, hearing the poem, the rhyme and half rhyme that's embedded, especially in the beginning of the poem. Rest and obsess, dream and receipts, almost rhymes, those kind of E sounds. And I was wondering how the sounds kind of travel through the poem. Some of it is also these beautiful sounds set against poppies and snapdragons and jacarandas against missiles. You know, how do you sort of reckon with that sound and the sense?
- [04:59]
Megan Fernandez
Yeah. I mean, even the title, Half Life in Exile. I think Ala is really good at being super melodic and attentive to the juxtaposition or relationship tension, even between the assonance and the consonants. So you have those I sounds in the title and those F sounds, and they're sort of working against each other, even. Like, I love that line, I draw stars on receipt. So good.
- [05:22]
Kevin Young
What a great line.
- [05:22]
Megan Fernandez
You know, the asymmetry of the slant. Rhyme can feel really violent.
- [05:26]
Kevin Young
Sure.
- [05:27]
Megan Fernandez
And also, as you said, like botanical. There's so many flowers and there's the citrus of the lime and even the hot mist of sleep. There's something like Humid, right about it.
- [05:40]
Kevin Young
Yeah. But it's also. I'm supposed break to rest. But that's where the children live. I mean, even that has these tensions. And maybe they're almost line to line. And even within the line, it's almost like a balancing act that the speaker, I think, is also going through. I'm supposed to rest, but that's where the children live in the hot mist of sleep, dream after dream. And, you know, there's a kind of shifting quality. And there's sometimes this poetry of juxtaposition that I see. But that doesn't do it quite like this. It doesn't have the kind of sense of restlessness, maybe that is also, as you said in the title.
- [06:16]
Megan Fernandez
I mean, I love this poem, and I love poets like Nikki Giovanni and Gwendolyn Brooks, who write a lot about children. And I think this is a poem that is essentially kind of like what we do with innocence. And like that opening. I'm supposed to rest, and then the children live. But, of course, the children aren't alive. They're being put to rest. And they're in this sort of liminal space of this sleep. But it's not really sleep. It's actually a nightmare. So everything is a euphemism. Everything is covering for something else in those opening lines. Dream after dream.
- [06:47]
Kevin Young
Well, and even receipts, totally. There's the kind of colloquial term for receipts. Like, you know, I have the proof of what happened. There's something there that's powerful. And then you get. Everybody loves the poem which you read so wonderfully. It really is, you know, an empty love, or. How do you think of that?
- [07:08]
Megan Fernandez
Yeah, I mean, to go back really quickly to the receipts is like the receipt is proof of what something cost you. And then to draw stars on it is to make it pretty or make it cosmic or make it faded. But stars are like. They're uncountable to the human eye. And therefore they're also kind of anonymous or decorative. Which I think is how she's sort of thinking about, like, everybody loves the poem. Everybody loves the aestheticization of violence, the eroticization of violence. But, like, actually, there's just this violence here. And here I am, you know, and then when you get to the embroidery on the pillow, I mean, it feels violent. It feels like a sword. And I love that, you know, for readers who are reading the poem, that the word Milwaukee is at the end of one line and then Palestine is the end of the next line. Right. So that's also kind of an interesting juxtaposition. Of the stitching on, like the pillow, which is, to me, this image of almost luxury in this American city. And then nothing for Palestine in the next line.
- [08:07]
Kevin Young
But it's also indicting the poet, perhaps. I think that's what I think. A poem that thinks about poetry. When you then say the poem, which I assume is a previous poem, perhaps, or an earlier effort to do this, I think that it's almost haunting that can a poem do something? Can a poem make a change? Is that a question, you think, in the poet's mind?
- [08:35]
Megan Fernandez
Yeah. I mean, I think there's some sense of complicity here and certainly guilt of what can be done with horror. Also how empty language can feel in this moment. And I was just rereading the sound and the fury recently, and there was this line, like, tragedy is always secondhand. The moment that the horror becomes a genre or enters into language is the moment it's already so clean and there's something hygienic about it. And I think that this line, everybody loves the poem is like, everybody likes something when it's cleaned up. And I did the cleaning. Here I am cleaning it up for everyone.
- [09:13]
Kevin Young
I see. The poet did the cleaning.
- [09:15]
Megan Fernandez
Exactly. The poet's here to clean it up, but also to make it nuanced and complicated and painful. But a pain that it's hard to write about. Pain.
- [09:25]
Kevin Young
It is.
- [09:26]
Megan Fernandez
And I think you heard it here first. That's it. We're done, actually.
- [09:29]
Kevin Young
Yeah, yeah. The story has been told, finally. But there's a moment in the poem that says that after the part we're talking about, it says there are plants out west that emerge only after fires. They listen for smoke. I mean, which is kind of an ars poetica, you know? And so you think, oh, wow, that's the goal of the poet, to listen for smoke. And then I wrote the poem after weeks of despair, hauling myself break like a rock. Everyone loves the poem. So the poem is both this poem, half life in exile, but then perhaps this metaphoric, previous, actual poem, however we want to think of it. I think that's really fascinating. How do you think about writing as something that both can rescue, that can listen for smoke, but then also disappears like smoke.
- [10:22]
Megan Fernandez
Yeah. I think there's, like, a lot of language here about. And this is what I was saying about, like, there's like something really stealth about the poem because it can't talk about people. Right. And so it's trying to use the plant as a way to talk about what can't be spoken into this Reality, which is our reality. And so, you know, she becomes a zombie, the speaker. You know, I'm a zombie feeding on the comments. There's also something like self dehumanizing about that. You know, the child becomes a prop for the poem. The zombie becomes the speaker in the poem. And then we're seeing the labor, right, to make the poem. And then the plants are, like I said before, like, this is really a poem about innocence to me. Like the plant that comes back at the end. Like, you don't interrogate a weed. Like that word interrogates. Like, you don't interrogate innocence, because the plant is innocent in a way. It knows what came before it, which is ruin. But it also can never really know what came before it. So I think there's something here also about inheritance, and there's this dehumanizing of self, but to almost prove something about humanity.
- [11:30]
Kevin Young
The best poems have that quality of being of the time, but being timeless. And as you pointed out, this poem is not written yesterday, but it has a feel of trying to think about the world that the speaker is both inhabiting and then also sometimes in exile from and trying to escape from. There's a complicated relationship to exile in the poem as well. And I think that idea of the zombiness, it's like the ultimate exile. But we've all probably, in some ways, in this digital world of ours, been zombies at night. Just going through the comments or the videos for whatever it is. I think that's a really powerful way to talk about it as a contemporary specific problem.
- [12:11]
Megan Fernandez
Yeah, I mean, there's something interesting about the fact that the poem really begins in this absolutely sensual space. And then there's that part where it feels like it's about comments and compulsive and memorization. There's something really antisensual about those lines. And I think that that line, for what it does with wreckage, like, how do we memorialize? How do we, like, grieve without memorializing? Is there a memorialization that doesn't have a voyeuristic aspect to it that isn't about also, like, building the nation state? The lines about, like, memorizing names, I think tells us something like, about the speaker's sense of both guilt and also complicity and consumption of death, and what it means to have to be witness to death, how absolutely unbearable it is. And what do you do with that? That's why the ending of this poem is so incredible, including for what it does to. For what it's done, you know, that tense Change, I think, is also really telling here.
- [13:11]
Kevin Young
I love to talk about that line. Everybody loves the poem. It kind of seems to me like a refrain, almost like a song. And the way in a ballad where you have the refrain at the beginning and the refrain at the end, and it totally changes in between from the first time to the next time. How do you think the everybody loves the poem changes by the end?
- [13:30]
Megan Fernandez
I think that in some ways, that's calling the poet back from exile, you know, Everyone loves the poem. It's like, this is how I was called into this situation. This. This is how I'm calling myself back into the situation. This is how I'm trying to get myself out of being only a witness in this situation. This is what I'm doing with the wreckage. And so everyone loves the poem. The first one feels like an accusation against the self. Right. And the second, to me, feels like an accusation against everyone else. Because the lines that precede it are, I wrote the poem after weeks of despair, hauling myself like a rock, like, I have also been turned into, against my will, witness to this. And so here I go. So the accusation moves a little bit in that part of the poem. That's how I would read it. I mean, I also wanted to call attention to the fact that we go from plant to weed, you know?
- [14:29]
Kevin Young
Yeah, well, no, weed's just a plant you don't want.
- [14:31]
Megan Fernandez
Right, exactly. But it's also like the weed wants to live.
- [14:35]
Kevin Young
Yeah.
- [14:36]
Megan Fernandez
The disposability of a thing doesn't make it not want to live. And that's why that little weed that you can see in the moment, the idea of it being interrogated feels so abject at the end of the poem.
- [14:48]
Kevin Young
I think the other thing is this is a poem of declarations, in which the declarations are almost questioned and undermined and are juxtaposed in such a way that they don't just think about our unease or talk about unease. They kind of enact it and they enact half exile. And to me, that's the power of poetry, is you can talk about it or you can re. Experience it in a poem. And that's why I think we need poetry to have us, for a moment feel and experience a thing that we might not have felt or experienced. But at the same time, as soon as I said that, I'm undermining myself. Because there's also this quality where it's like, is the grief worth the poem? And it never is. I mean, when people say, oh, you'll get a poem out of it. It's like the worst thing you could possibly say to someone.
- [15:45]
Megan Fernandez
It's like absolutely the most trash thing you can say to a poet.
- [15:51]
Kevin Young
And that's what the poem almost foreshortens or is about. It says, everybody loves the poem. That isn't quite enough because there's another poem that has to be written.
- [16:01]
Megan Fernandez
I also love that you move from the grief, which is such an abstraction, to the weed, which is such a specific kind of image, to the wreckage, which is something sort of in between. It's hard to kind of slide in a signifier or an image that can take up as much space as grief sort of has in that moment. And I think that that line is also another line of trying to hold something accountable. I also want to say there's something really like eco about the poem and preservationist about the poem in a way that I'm still trying to sort of think through. Not just this, like, extended plant metaphor imagery, but also, like, the zombie being this kind of, like, dystopic sort of image. The poem is trying to do something, I think, with the way that this kind of, like, mass death, what it does, how it dehumanizes in parallel everybody who witnesses it. And, like, she can't rest. The speaker doesn't want to rest because to preserve herself or to get her rest would also mean having to sort of witness these children in her dreams. And so there's a strong death drive in the poem. And I think that the obsession, right, so we have the words instead. I obsess, and then later, is it compulsive? And I think there's also something kind of interesting there that is part of the speaker's interiority, which is to be preoccupied and not be distracted and to be, like, faithfully preoccupied with the witnessing in the poem.
- [17:37]
Kevin Young
More from my conversation with Megan Fernandez after the break.
- [17:47]
Megan Fernandez
Hi, I'm Susan Glaser. I'm Jane Mayer.
- [17:49]
Kevin Young
And I'm Evan Osnos. And we host the Washington Roundtable from the New Yorker's Political Scene podcast.
- [17:55]
Megan Fernandez
For me, this is the water cooler. This is a wonderful chance to sit down with two of the smartest colleagues in the country and, you know, just kind of compare notes. Now, that's so true, because, first of all, we are actually friends in real life. But I can't wait till Fridays to hear what you guys think. Everybody sees the headlines, but you guys fill in the gaps.
- [18:17]
Kevin Young
I also think, though, occasionally we get somebody to come on, and I'm always smarter for it. If you get a great historian who can tell you about a presidential election 50, 60 years ago. Often it can help you understand about what's happening today.
- [18:29]
Megan Fernandez
So if you're looking for weekly insights into what's going on inside the Beltway, please join us every Friday on the Washington Roundtable, part of the New Yorker's political Scene Podcast.
- [18:44]
Sponsor Announcer
Support for this podcast comes from Odoo. Imagine relying on a dozen different software programs to run your business, none of which are connected, and each one more expensive and more complicated than the last. It can be pretty stressful. Now imagine Odoo. Odoo has all the programs you'll ever need, and they're all connected on one platform. Doesn't Odoo sound amazing? I let Odoo harmonize your business with simple, efficient software that can handle everything for a fraction of the price. Sign up today@odoo.com that's o d o.
- [19:18]
Kevin Young
O.Com meg welcome back.
- [19:23]
Megan Fernandez
Thanks, Kevin.
- [19:24]
Kevin Young
Now, in our May 29, 2023 issue, the new Yorker published your poem on youn Departure to California, which you'll read for us in a moment. Is there anything you wanted to say about the poem first? Anything you think listeners should know before hearing it?
- [19:37]
Megan Fernandez
Just that, you know, I wrote this as a sort of queer romantic friendship poem about another poet who was leaving New York and it felt like a little pre grief poem.
- [19:49]
Kevin Young
Here's Megan Fernandez reading her poem on youn Departure to California.
- [19:56]
Megan Fernandez
On youn Departure to California Prayer for your out west where night falls only after mine, the second curtain, that enigmatic dark and daylight so clarifying it hurts. Prayer for the headless deer in Saratoga and the 30 lobster shells we buried in a small Connecticut town. For the elementary school kids rushing headfirst into the Brooklyn twilight. For the poets who came before and saw the purple northeast blizzard, full but no quakes and wanted for nothing else. For the gold shops of Jackson Heights and the dead soldiers in Mount Auburn. For the dead who just want to remain dead and not dance into the speech of men. For the tiny churches and their sullied bells for every gas station, for the Tri States, yes, even for Jersey's ease. For Cafe Paulette, our last meal before the city fell. Prayer for our heart Crane for our bridge, the blue one, for your return to Prospect park where I'll be waiting smug dripping in city bees. Prayer for you, queen of the wide air and your happy flights and scraped up knees and the young fields behind you. Prayer for the sand whipped Rockaway beach where we spent a birthday and fought the wind you ran into the cold May ocean and I thought Am I gonna have to go in if she gets caught? Just as you rose from the water and waved.
- [21:46]
Kevin Young
That was on your departure to California. By Megan Fernandez. Well, I love hearing this sort of range of New York references. I think, for me, I was always struck by the end of this poem and the way it somehow feels like it kind of joins the oceans, like the Pacific and the Atlantic or something in some cosmic moment. I love that ending and this sort of waving because there is a kind of farewell quality to the poem that has a kind of danger to it there at the end that then is fine. And I think that's the worry when someone leaves. You almost have this kind of, you know, you soon. Like, this is not farewell, but just goodbye for now. How does that kind of work in that repetition you have? And then this ending of the ocean.
- [22:33]
Megan Fernandez
A good poem always really surprises you. I think that this was very surprising to me, both the use of prayer. I was stunned by how reverent I felt in the mode of the address. How in some ways it felt like a letting go, a slow letting go. But, of course, wanting to use anaphora, the repetition of the word at the beginning of the line. And also just to say all these things were holy, you know, I always think about Frank o' Hara as like, making saints of everyone and everything, making saintly popular culture and celebrities and an intersection. And I think that that's what the poem was trying to do was like it mattered, you know? And I have such a love affair with the East Coast. I've lived on both coasts, and it's really easy to love the West Coast. It has all the beauty and it has all the kind of glammy signification. It's got the ocean, it's got the mountains. It's dramat. You know, the east coast is less dramatic in a way. It's got gas stations. But it's got grit. And there's something about that that I really wanted to sort of also honor as the background for the foregrounding of our intimacy and my intimacy with this person.
- [23:42]
Kevin Young
Sure.
- [23:42]
Megan Fernandez
And I loved that playfulness of, like, somebody running into the ocean without fear, which is something I would never do because I'm an earth sign, Kevin. And I don't go into the ocean.
- [23:56]
Kevin Young
I see even I go into the ocean.
- [23:58]
Megan Fernandez
I don't do that well.
- [24:00]
Kevin Young
And there's humor in that. And it goes everything from. For the dead who just want to remain dead and not dance into the speech of men, which is a little critique of the sort of speechifying of Men, I think, quite specifically. And then here. Yes. Even for Jersey's. E's a little, you know, dig, I guess. I don't know What. Shout out.
- [24:23]
Megan Fernandez
100% shout out and dig. Yeah.
- [24:26]
Kevin Young
Yeah. Well, Philly is your.
- [24:28]
Megan Fernandez
That is my hometown.
- [24:29]
Kevin Young
Yeah. So of course you're doing that. So the other thing I thought, hearing you talk about it is it only took you a little bit to get to Frank o' Hara. I'm surprised it took you as long as it did. Cause he's very much a presence. And he has that wonderful poem where he talks about having to go out to a country house and how horrible it is to not be near asphalt. And he's really embraced being this poet of the city. Do you think of that when you're writing, or is it a poem, a place that you're interested in? How do you, if you step back, think of your own writing in that way?
- [25:01]
Megan Fernandez
I only think of place I wish I could be more of. Like a meta poet somebody once is. Like, you're a poet who talks to God, or you talk to the people. And I'm only talking to the people. God's not taking any phone calls from me, Kevin.
- [25:12]
Kevin Young
But it's a prayer, as you said. And, you know, it might be a secular prayer, but it's a prayer to something that isn't there. Perhaps that something that you wish was there. And it might be a person, but it's a beloved.
- [25:27]
Megan Fernandez
Let's say it's a beloved. And it's a prayer for somebody who is leaving and is taking you with them, but also can't take you with them. And also, you know, there's this line for Cafe Paulette, or last meal before the city fell. You know, this became a very important friendship to me right before the pandemic. And we were there. We knew that New York was shutting down. We had no idea what was going on. And I lived in Manhattan at the time. This beloved lived in Brooklyn. And we would walk across the bridge to see each other. Sometimes it would take an hour or something. And so the sense of the scale of the really changed. Right. And, you know, nobody had anything to do except to be outside that one summer. And so there was also a sense of, like, we were living through. And with a lot of the surrealism of the city and the grief of the city. So it's not really said ever, like, explicitly. It's kind of hidden in all these places.
- [26:23]
Kevin Young
But the pandemic sort of underpinned it 100%.
- [26:26]
Megan Fernandez
Yeah. You know, there's so Much death around us. And yet there was this beautiful kind of friendship blooming in the middle of it. And the commitment that you have to have to friendship during a global death event, you know, is also very meaningful for the poem, I think. And then that, like, fear of loss at the end, because we had become so accustomed to it, of course. Well.
- [26:47]
Kevin Young
And, you know, the beach is one of the places you could go. And, you know, if you read it in that light, there's a lot there that feels like it's of that time. And even that for the dead who just want to remain dead, that's really powerful. Well, and I love this idea of the city falling. Cause someone else might be really specific about Pandemic. I mean, and instead this idea, the city fell because the city's always falling in different ways. And one of the things that I found working on the anthology is the ways that these events that impact us show up in the poetry and in the anthology. They sort of help frame it from 9, 11 to pandemic. And to see the ways that people are able to capture the moment. But I love the line after that prayer for our Hart Crane, for our bridge. That hour, which I think you really emphasized there, is really moving and touching. And for those who know Hart Crane, which is everyone, you know, he of course, wrote the bridge. And this idea of trying to make a myth out of this person made bridge. How do you kind of reckon with that bridge? You've explained it in a sort of autobiographical sense, but in the sort of bigger sense. There's a bigger bridge being built, isn't there?
- [28:03]
Megan Fernandez
Yeah. And also, you know, that poem is really described as a kind of failure, a sort of failed myth.
- [28:09]
Kevin Young
Hart Crane.
- [28:09]
Megan Fernandez
You mean Hart Crane's bridge? Yeah. There was like a scholar, Howard Moss, who was like. The bridge was metaphysical on the one hand and mechanical on the other. And the visions could never fully integrate, you know.
- [28:20]
Kevin Young
But that's what's great about that poem, I think.
- [28:22]
Megan Fernandez
I love that poem.
- [28:24]
Kevin Young
He isn't totally fit. You know, he hasn't figured it all out. Thank goodness.
- [28:28]
Megan Fernandez
Thank goodness. And also there's things that are just impenetrable. Like, the images are so eccentric and all over the place that it doesn't want you, you know, And I love that. I love not its indifference, but it's in its own ecology, that poem. And so we were talking a lot about Hart Crane because we were crossing the bridge a lot. And obviously the bridge is like a metaphor for so much. And I think I have in another poem, not to quote Myself, like, every poet has a love affair with a bridge. Like, there's both really timeless about its infrastructure and, of course, what it means in terms of, like, connection. But I think so much about the river and what's below us, like, what the bridge is trying to keep us from, in a way. And this was also sort of a moment of kind of thinking about these iconic New York places, like Prospect Park. Right. And like, both the bridges and Rockaway beach. Iconic for, like. It's not like the Empire State Building, because people who actually live in New York, that's not how the iconicity operates. But, you know, in a way, there's sort of these quieter places of intimacy that feel still really deified for the people who live here. And I think the bridges, the park, the beach, in some ways, it's an argument for what is elemental about the city as much as any natural place on the West Coast.
- [29:53]
Kevin Young
That was beautifully said. I almost don't want to say anything else, but.
- [29:56]
Megan Fernandez
Perfect. Let's go. See ya.
- [29:58]
Kevin Young
I want to ask you, lastly, I think about praise. How do you think of praise in a poem? And do you think that's a poet's job?
- [30:10]
Megan Fernandez
That's a great question. I think it's not my inclination. And that's what I love about this poem is I think that we have this idea that beloveds should be complicated enough where the poem feels really dimensional. And the dimensionality of a poem comes from a complicated love or gaze upon a beloved. And actually, this was a really uncomplicated love in a way. It was just so certain of itself, and it was so certain of its. Not goodness, but it was so certain of its care. And so praise to me, in this moment, you know, that Queen of the Wide Air. That's a Keats reference. You know, praise was an elevation. It was a lifting up. It was a lifting up and a kind of goodbye, which is the best kind of farewell. And so for me, this is an unusual poem because it's not trying to take its revenge. It's not trying to rewrite something. It's not trying to re. Narrate, you know?
- [31:16]
Kevin Young
I see.
- [31:16]
Megan Fernandez
Yeah. It's about letting go, letting someone go, but in a way that there's not a bad feeling at the end of it. There's not a feeling of abandonment at the end of it. Yeah. Praise.
- [31:26]
Kevin Young
Well, I think of you as a poet of praise. I mean, I think a poem that was also in the New Yorker of Shanghai, which is also in the anthology. It's questioning, but it's also a poem about a place much like this one that is trying to be understood as a way of saying it's mysterious and exciting.
- [31:45]
Megan Fernandez
Yeah. I mean, I think that like someone like o' Hara, everything becomes a little bit holy in his language, including the everydayness. I mean, things are apparitions. I remember somebody saying this about o' Hara, and I think I've sort of taken that on or am invested in that aesthetic, which is this apparitional aesthetic. Things appear to him and then all of a sudden they feel like visions rather than images. And a vision is a thing you praise because it feels like something that's arrived to you that you didn't know you needed, but all of a sudden you can't live without.
- [32:21]
Kevin Young
Well, thank you very much, Meg.
- [32:23]
Megan Fernandez
Thanks for having me.
- [32:31]
Kevin Young
On. Your departure to California by Megan Fernandez, as Well as Hala Alyan's half life in exile can be found on newyorker.com and in the anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, 1925-2025, out now. Hala Alianz latest book is I'll Tell youl When I'm A Memoir. Megan Fernandez's most recent collection is I Do Everything I'm Told.
- [32:58]
Megan Fernandez
You may subscribe to this podcast, the Fiction podcast, the Writer's Voice Podcast, and the Politics and more podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app, you can hear more poetry read by the authors on newyorker.com and the New Yorker app available from the App Store or from Google Play. The theme music is the Corner by Chief Zion Otunde Adjua, courtesy of Stretch Music and Rope a Dope. The New Yorker Poetry Podcast is produced by Chloe Prosinos with help from Hannah Eisenman. I'm David Remnick, host of the New Yorker Radio Hour. There's nothing like finding a story you can really sink into that lets you tune out the noise and focus on what matters in print or here on the podcast. The New Yorker brings you thoughtfulness and depth and even humor that you can't find anywhere else. So please join me every week for the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts from PRX.