Letter to a Young Poet

Abstract

Letter to a Young Poet Megan Fernandes (bio) If you haven’t taken the Amtrak in Florida, you haven’t lived. At 2:00 am, seven months into the pandemic, I’m looking up where Seamus Heaney died. It was Blackrock Clinic overlooking the sea 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. LA 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 anything. Everyone should watch anime after a heartbreak. Sleep upwards 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. [End Page 189] Megan Fernandes Megan Fernandes has been published in the New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, LitHub, Chicago Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among many other journals. Her second book of poetry, Good Boys, was published by Tin House in February 2020. She is an assistant professor of English and the writer-in-residence at Lafayette College. She lives in New York City. Copyright © 2022 Middlebury College