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.
Overall, 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, 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 sent me in a new direction and kept me going over the next year, during which I also produced 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 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 breaking down walls, a 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 a political and social animal. Thankfully, the Writers’ Workshop’s emphasis is on giving students the maximum freedom to write, and thankfully I was in a head space that allowed me at least to attempt to take advantage of that time.
How much of your poetry is restriction and how much is freedom?
There are always a host of prohibitive impulses struggling to keep the language from straying too far into the alien or unfamiliar, which is to say that even while writing (not to speak of revision) intuition and ear negotiate both the distinct and interrelated demands of sight, sound, and intellect. One struggles back against these 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 too often chaotic and has a sense of trauma, not artistry, about it. Artaud, Blake, Amelia Rosselli, certain parts of Exodus, certain parts of Canetti, Dante, and 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 doesn’t have to oscillate only between the binaries of sense/nonsense, familiar/alien, restraint/freedom. I recently read a short story by Musil titled “Can a Horse Laugh?” and in the course of reading it it seemed to me that I briefly underwent—specifically because of the incredible 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?” could just as accurately be described as that of a person becoming a horse becoming a person who is being “tickled” as if by a lover. 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 piece 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 potent or direct experience of life. 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 one’s 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, as well as 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” struck with me long enough to make into the manuscript. 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 care about poems and the next I was spending a lot of time thinking about them. At around 14 my father gave me a copy of Neruda’s 20 Love Poems and a Song of Despair. 20 Love Poems 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. Roots and Wings 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 sense of the true force and power of the image. It was fortuitous 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…
Will we see translations from you anytime soon. Was Pound right, is translation a poet’s responsibility? Does the poet (as a poet) have certain responsibilities?
For me the question is, What does responsibility mean in terms of poetic language? I feel responsible for avoiding stale, lazy language; for avoiding pettiness and stagnation in thinking; for not allowing the work to 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 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 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 PhD in English. I don’t yet have an exact sense 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 will have a positive impact on the second manuscript, which I am working on, but which is in in the early stages. Either way, I have a sense that new work is on the horizon.
Originally Published 2006 in The Modern Review.