Robert Fernandez

Robert Fernandez Interviewed by Simone dos Anjos

You recently graduated from the University of Iowa, and now you've completed your first manuscript. Tell us about your time at UoI, and about the beginnings of the manuscript.

On the whole, my time at the Writers' Workshop consisted of expending huge amounts of energy writing and revising poems I'd eventually discard. I produced a large amount of work during my first semester, but none of it went anywhere. Then in mid-December, after that first workshop had finished, and in the space of about three days, I wrote around 30 short prose poems that seemed different and that I liked. Only three or four of those poems are now in the manuscript, but that burst set me in a new direction and kept me going over the next year, during which I also produced very little I was happy with, despite a massive effort. I actually completed the bulk of the manuscript over the summer of 2006, immediately after graduation.

In retrospect, I guess it’s interesting, but of course not exceptional, that I completed the majority of the work in the manuscript after I was out of the Workshop. When I arrived at the Workshop, I thought it’d be a place for tearing down walls, a kind of no-holds-barred, angel-wrestling bloodbath, as well as a time for refining sensibility, drives, and technique. I had a wonderful class and wonderful teachers, but that doesn’t change the fact that an MFA program is in some way or other a political and social animal. Thankfully, the Writers’ Workshop’s main emphasis is on giving students the maximum opportunity to write, and thankfully I was in a head space that allowed me to at least attempt to take advantage of that time.

[…]

I get a sense of “controlled folly” from your poem “Auto-da-fé”:

                    Shadows defoliating the light,
                   we film the crowds issuing, gentle
as starlight, down the halls

             like a ring of keys, a meadow.

How much of your poetry is restriction (a ring of keys) and how much is freedom (a meadow)?

There’s always a host of prohibitive impulses struggling to keep the language from straying too far into the alien or the unfamiliar. Which is to say, that even while writing (not to speak of revision) intuition and ear negotiate the distinct and the interrelated demands of sight, sound, and intellect. One struggles back against those prohibitive impulses and maybe an equilibrium is achieved. Blake says, “Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.” However, it seems that radically unfettered language is often too chaotic and has a sense of trauma, not artistry, about it. Artaud, Blake, Amelia Rosselli, certain parts of Exodus, certain parts of Canetti, Dante, The Book of Revelation, all come to mind as handling very alien impulses and sensations while still rendering text that’s legible and precise. After all, Blake says “Poetry fettered, fetters the human race,” not “language fettered.” I also hope that one don’t have to oscillate only between the binaries of sense/nonsense, familiar/alien, restraint/freedom.

I recently read a short story (more a prose poem) by Musil titled “Can a Horse Laugh?”, and, in the course of reading it, it seemed to me that I briefly underwent—specifically as a result of the exasperating precision of the language—the utterly alien experience of being a horse laughing. Musil’s answer to the question “can a horse laugh?” is yes, and that yes is arrived at not simply because he tells us a story of his having seen a horse laughing and we’re supposed to take him at his word, but because he’s been able to transform himself, by writing (and the reader, by reading), into a horse laughing. I should also add that the sensation enacted in “Can a Horse Laugh?” is just as accurately that of a person becoming a horse becoming a person who is being “tickled” as if by a lover.

I think these types of language phenomena, strange as they sound, are real. John Grey, writing about Jenny Saville, describes her paintings as accessing “areas of sensation that ordinary experience struggles to close off, but which can never be wholly banished…a zone of experience that is not exclusively human…” Musil’s poem falls into that category of experience. I also think of Stevens in “Of Mere Being”: “A gold-feathered bird / Sings in the palm, without human meaning, / Without human feeling, a foreign song.” The goal of accessing those foreign zones of experience (if one could say there’s a goal) might be to uncover a more direct experience of the world. An interplay of freedom and restraint would hopefully ensure that the language did not dissolve into chaos while, at the same time, remaining language that unfolds new experiences and grasps present experience more accurately and vividly.

From the long poem “Pageant”:

A child drinking clustered pepper hearts in late afternoon.

Noon, behind, alive and young as us, is the mitigated occasion.

Born not to feet, hands, or any particular weightlessness,

but to an examination of this grey book.

A release of sensation in sterling causalities:

the hands along strings suddenly able to play,

anxious chalk-white flags coupling in the yard.

The flags reveal a precipitant relationship to the air.

They are brutal planes, mirrors that do not reflect.

Like Neruda, this excerpt seems to suggest that poetry arrived in search of you. From where?

As a kid, I was lucky enough to have a few good anthologies around the house—two from the 1960s, Naked Poetry and Just What the Country Needs, Another Poetry Anthology, and The New Oxford Book of American Verse. In the Oxford anthology, I remember I liked William Cullen Bryant’s “The Prairies,” Roethke’s “Snake,” Robinson Jeffers’ “Vulture” and “Rock and Hawk.” I really liked the three Stephen Crane poems. Crane’s poem “In the desert” stuck with me long enough to make it into the manuscript. (I was maybe 11 or 12 when I first came across “In the desert” and when I first really tried to write poems.)

I started reading and writing poems because they offered pleasurable, intriguing, eye-dilating durations of experience. The transition was indeed sudden—one minute I didn’t really care about poems and the next I was spending a lot of time thinking about them. At around 14 my father gave me copy of Neruda’s 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair. That sent off shoots to Vallejo, Rilke, Rimbaud. I remember stealing the anthology Roots and Wings: Poetry from Spain 1900-1975 from my high-school library. It introduced me to poems like Miguel Hernandez’s “El Herido” (“The Wounded Man”) and to lines like “La sangre llueve siempre boca arriba, hacia el cielo…,” which gave me a true sense of the force and power accessible through an image. It was fortutious that they had that book and insensitive of me to steal it (I hate to think I’ve deprived someone else), but at the time I stole it (1997?) there were no online book depots and I thought Like hell I’m giving this up…

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Are there any contemporary writers who have had a direct influence on your work?...

I’m not sure about direct influences. I recently had an editor write me back about the manuscript and mention what he called its “old New York-style glamor.” I disagree. I see a new Port-of-Miami-style glamor, which a sountrack by Timbaland and sunsets by Hieronymous Bosch.

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Was Pound right, is translation a poet’s responsibility? Does the poet (as a poet) have certain responsibilities?

As far as I can tell, the only real responsibility is to making the poem and managing one’s feelings toward the poem. One might write better poems if, for instance, one were working directly to better explain or shape the discussion around 21st century economics. Such things might unfold new territories in the poems and take them in fresh, interesting directions. But a poet could also find their poems had benefited just as much from flipping through Vogue, dropping acid at a bullfight, trekking across the English countryside, etc. Is it one’s responsibility, as a poet, to invest in any of these things if one finds in them an enhancement of one’s poems? I think so.

I happen to think personal responsibility is always essential, so for me the question is, “What does ‘personal responsibility’ mean in terms of poetic language?” I feel personally responsible for avoiding stale, lazy language; for avoiding pettiness and stagnation in thinking; for not letting the work be tyrannized by fear or vanity; and for letting the poems be as difficult as they need to be. I feel responsible for tricking myself into arriving at negative capability, and for examining other artists, thinkers, or movements, with whom I instinctively (or gradually) sync up and say, “Aha! There’s the kind of thing that really interests me…” And I of course see what Pound is saying. If poets aren’t going to translate or advocate for other poets, who will? I’d very much like to translate over the next few years.

What are your plans now that you’ve finished school? Are you working on a second manuscript?

In a few days I’ll start the University of Iowa’s Ph.D. in English. I’m looking forward to working with scholars like Dee Morris, Garret Stewart, and Ruedi Kuenzli. I don’t yet have an exact idea of how much of my time will need to be dedicated to the PhD, but, however much, I’m hoping that anything I read or write while working toward the PhD will have a positive impact on the second manuscript, which I am working on, but which is in the very-early stages. Either way, I have a sense that new work is on the horizon.

Originally Published 2006 in The Modern Review.