1236: Letter to a Young Poet by Megan Fernandes
1236: Letter to a Young Poet by Megan Fernandes
Today’s episode is guest hosted by Myka Kielbon.
Transcript
I’m Myka Kielbon and this is The Slowdown.
When the pandemic kept everyone isolated, my roommate Madison ardently followed a Pitchfork series chronicling every song ever to hit the Billboard Top 100. We filled our days with video games, movies, and Wikipedia pages. I started watching old episodes of The Monkees sitcom. And we watched the movie Head, their response to the success of the Beatles’ feature films. It’s a can of cinematic worms, but I loved it. I still love it.
In the opening scene of Head, a bridge is being dedicated, a ribbon cut, an official mumbling in a megaphone. Then come The Monkees, running from their rabid fans. They run right off the bridge, and the pseudo-psychedelic, Carole King dreamscape of “Porpoise Song” starts up. Shots play of obviously fake stunt dummies flying through the air. Their bodies hit the water. The Monkees start canoodling with mermaids. “Wait!” I pointed at the T.V. “We know that bridge!”
It was the Gerald Desmond bridge, which links San Pedro to Terminal Island, suspended high above LA Harbor. Just before we were constrained to our apartments, my friend Stevie had driven Madison and me over that bridge to eat ceviche at Ports O’ Call. I had curled my body into the truck’s jump seats, windows down the sea air blasting through my hair. That bridge was my bridge. That life was my life.
Today’s poem holds its epiphanies close. It lives in that space which grows from wholehearted obsession, specificity, and the knowledge that the act of returning is the kind of love that keeps us going.
Letter to a Young Poet
by Megan Fernandes
If you haven't taken the Amtrak in Florida, you haven't lived. At 2:00 a.m., seven months into the pandemic, I'm looking up where Seamus Heaney died. It was Blackrock Clinic overlooking the bay and I wonder, sometimes, what is my thing with the Irish, but if the white kids can go to India for an epiphany, maybe it's fine that I go to Ireland. Don't read Melanie Klein in a crisis. She's depressing and there are alternatives. Like Winnicott or a lobotomy. Flow is best understood through Islamic mysticism or Lil Wayne spitting without a rhyme book, post- 2003. To want the same things as you age is not always a failure of growth. A good city will not parent you. Every poet has a love affair with a bridge. Mine is the Manhattan and she's a middle child. Or the Sea Link in Mumbai, her galactic tentacles whipping the starless sky. When I say bridge, what I mean is goddess. People need your ideas more than your showmanship. L.A. is ruining some of you. All analysis is revisionist. Yellow wildflowers are it. It's better to be illegible, sometimes. Then they can't govern you. It takes time to build an ethics. Go slow. Wellness is a myth and shame transforms no one. You can walk off most any- thing. Everyone should watch anime after a heartbreak. Sleep upward in a forest so the animal sees your gaze. I think about that missing plane sometimes and what it means to go unrecovered. Pay attention to what disgusts you. Some of the most interesting people have no legacy. Remember that green is your color and in doubt, read Brooks. In the end, your role is to attend to the things you like and ask for more of it: Bridges. Ideas. Destabilization. Yellow tansy. Cities. The wild sea. And in the absence of recovery, some ritual. In the absence of love? Ritual. Understand that ritual is a kind of patience, an awaiting and waiting. Keep waiting, kitten. You will be surprised what you can come back from.
“Letter to a Young Poet” by Megan Fernandes from I DO EVERYTHING I'M TOLD © 2023 Megan Fernandes. Used by permission of Tin House.