Megan Fernandes Reads Hala Alyan
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This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart choice. Make another smart choice with AutoQuote Explorer to compare rates from multiple car insurance companies all at once. Try it at Progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Not available in all states or situations. Prices vary based on how you buy. 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 Yaddo Foundation, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Hawthornden Foundation. She's currently an associate professor of English and a writer-in-residence at Lafayette College.

Meg, welcome. Thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me, Kevin. I'm so excited to be here. 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?

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.

Let's listen to the poem. Here is Megan Fernandez reading Half-Life in Exile. Bahala aliyan. 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 Amar and Mahmoud, 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.

That was Half-Life in Exile by Halal Alyan, which was originally published in the September 27th, 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. How do you sort of reckon with that sound and

Yeah, I mean, even the title, Half-Life in Exile, I think Allah is really good at being super melodic and attentive to the juxtaposition or relationship tension, even between the assonance and the consonancy of 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. What a great line. You know, the asymmetry of the slant rhyme can feel really violent. Sure. 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. Yeah. Humid. Right. About it. Yeah. But it's also I'm supposed to 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 balance.

restlessness maybe that is also, as you said in the title. 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 state.

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. Well, and even receipts. 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, you know, how do you think of that?

Yeah. I mean, you know, to go back really quickly to your, the receipts is like the receipt is proof of what something costs you. And then to draw stars on it is to make it pretty or make it cosmic or make it faded. But like stars are like, they're uncountable to the human eye. And therefore they're also kind of like 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. But it's also indicting the poet, perhaps. I think that's what

I think a poem that thinks about poetry, you know, 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, you know, haunting that can a poem do something? Can a poem make a change?

Is that a question you think in the poet's mind? Yeah, I mean, I think there's some sense of complicity here and certainly like guilt, you know, of what can be done with horror. Also, like how empty language can feel in this moment. And I...

I was just rereading The Sound and the Fury recently, and there was this line, 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. I see. The poet did the cleaning. Exactly. The poet's here to clean it up, but also to make it nuanced and complicated and painful. Right. But a pain that, you know, it's hard to write about pain. It is. And I think... You heard it here first. That's it. We're done, actually. Yeah, yeah. The story has been told, finally. Yeah.

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. Mm-hmm.

Everyone loves the poem. So the poem is both this poem, Half-Life in Exile, but then perhaps this metaphoric, previous, actual poem, however you 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?

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

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. And 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 like inheritance and like there's this like dehumanizing of self, but to almost like prove like something about humanity. The best poems have that quality of being of the time, but being timeless. And as you point 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.

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 anti-sensual about those lines and emotions.

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

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. I love to talk about that line, "Everybody loves the poem." It kind of seems to me like a refrain, almost like a song, in a 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?

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 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, you know? And so the, everyone loves the poem, but,

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 preceded 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? Yeah. Well, no, weed's just a plant you don't want, right? Exactly. But it's also like the weed wants to live. Yeah. 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. 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 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...

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. But because there's also this quality where it's like, is the grief worth the poem?

It never is. I mean, you know, when people say, oh, you'll get a poem out of it, it's like the worst thing you could possibly say to someone. It's like absolutely the most trash thing you could say to a poet. 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.

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. Right. 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. More from my conversation with Megan Fernandez after the break.

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Meg, welcome back. Thanks, Kevin.

Now, in our May 29th, 2023 issue, The New Yorker published your poem, On Your Departure to California, which you'll read for us in a moment. Is there anything you want to say about the poem for us? Anything you think listeners should know before hearing it? 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. Here's Megan Fernandez reading her poem, On Your Departure to California.

On your departure to California, prayer for you 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 going to have to go in if she gets caught? Just as you rose from the water and waved. 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 ends

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, see 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.

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 an aphora, 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 holy.

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 significations. It's got the oceans, got the mountains. It's dramatic.

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. Sure. 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. I see. Even I go into the ocean. I don't do that. Well, 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...

of the sort of speechifying of men, I think quite specifically. And then here, yes, even for Jersey's ease, a little, you know, dig, I guess. I don't know what, shout out. 100%. Shout out and dig. Yeah. Well, Philly is your hometown. That is my hometown. 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 because 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, you know, he's really embraced being this person.

Poet of the City. Do you think of that when you're writing, or is it a poem of place that you're interested in? How do you, if you step back, think of your own writing in that way? 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. But it's a prayer, as you said. Yeah. And, you know, it might be a secular prayer, but...

It's a prayer to something that isn't there, perhaps. Something that you wish was there. It might be a person, but it's a beloved, 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. Right. And also, you know, there's this line for Café Paulette or Last Meal Before the City Fell. You know, this became a very important friendship to me right before the pandemic. Right.

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 city really changed, right? Yeah.

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. But the pandemic sort of underpinning. A hundred percent. Yeah. Right.

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. Sure. Because we had become so accustomed to it, of course. Well, and, you know, the beach is one of the places you could go. Totally. 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, I love this idea of the city falling because—

You know, someone else might be really specific. Talking about pandemic, I mean. And instead, this idea of 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, you know, in the anthology, they sort of help frame it, you know, from 9-11 to pandemics.

pandemic and to see the ways that people are able to capture the moment. But I love the line after that, prayer for our heart crane, for our bridge, that our, which I think you really emphasize there is really important.

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? Yeah.

Yeah. And also, you know, that poem is really described as a kind of failure, a sort of failed myth. A heart crane, you mean? A heart 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?

But that's what's great about that poem. I love that poem. I love it. It isn't totally, you know, he hasn't figured it all out. Thank goodness, you know. Thank goodness. And also there's things that are just impenetrable. Like the images are so eccentric and like all over the place that like it doesn't want you, you know. And I love that. Like I love not its indifference, but it's in its own ecology, that poem, right?

And so, you know, we were talking a lot about Harcraine because we were crossing the bridge a lot. And obviously the bridge is like a metaphor for so much. And I think I have another poem, not to quote myself, like every poet has a love affair with a bridge. Like there's something 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, 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 core

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. That was beautifully said. I almost don't want to say anything else. Perfect. Let's go. See you. 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? 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? I see. 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. Yeah.

Well, I think of you as a poet of praise. I mean, I think a poem that was also in the New Yorker 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.

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 I'm 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. Well, thank you very much, Meg. Thanks for having me.

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 Alyan's latest book is I'll Tell You When I'm Home, a memoir. Megan Fernandez's most recent collection is I Do Everything I'm Told.

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