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Behind the Byline

Megan Fernandes

May 6, 2022

NER staff reader Alicia Romero talks to Megan Fernandes, whose poem “Letter to a Young Poet” appears in NER 43.1, about the rhythms of quiet survival, the permission to stumble, and staying raw—unruly. 


Alicia Romero: When I first read your poem, it made me think of music. It’s like listening to Miles Davis in “Kind of Blue” or Chopin’s lamenting Preludes. Then I read your poem “In the Beginning” from Good Boys in which you write, “Muddy waters in the floods with Bach.” You seem to riff in that same way in this poem, “Letter to a Young Poet.” Could you talk about how music influences your writing?

Megan Fernandes: My relationship with music is part blood, part brain. I was not the kid growing up who was listening to all kinds of experimental music and knew obscure songs from limited release albums by heart, but I was surrounded by people who had a crazed and instinctual relationship to music. My sister was an excellent pianist. She could really get into some dreamlike zone and I was more of a plonker on the keys, not terribly nuanced. My closest childhood friend growing up, Judith, had musical tastes that were wildly diverse (she listened to everything from Rachmaninoff to Brazilian dance music) and her presence in my life shaped my sonic appreciation, not necessarily in any technical way, but she really got mood. She used music as a way to curate a car ride, a heartbreak, an awkward gathering of people, a necessary silence. Poets need to know how to do that, you know?

My parents listened to a lot of jazz and blues and would attend festivals and take us to clubs to listen to them in Philly. My mom was into opera and introduced me to Kathleen Battle and Maria Callas. And of course, I grew up in the 90’s and so lived through a great era of hip hop which taught me a lot about flow, wordplay, slant rhyme, and what can be great about rhythmic irregularity, the cognitive surprise and pleasure you get when the rhyme isn’t fully true. Recently, I’ve been reading about triplet flow in contemporary hip hop (Lamar, Migos) and femme folkloric performance in Portuguese fado music.  

AR: You emphasize via clipped sentences: “Bridges. Ideas. Destabilization. Yellow tansy. Cities. The wild sea.” The reader experiences surprise with the idea of “destabilization.” Why is a sense of destabilization important to a poet’s sense of language?   

MF: It’s hard to stay awake. The lull of the homeostatic is so comforting. It’s easy to make decisions that are based in comfort and stability and social expectation. It’s easy to believe in the scarcity politics of capitalism and literally “settle” into a set of static relations with the world. I mean that broadly. But why? To be a poet is, I think, to understand flux and dynamism. I’m not saying one should court destabilization (the glamour or romance of the tortured artist gets boring the older you get), but I do think poetry requires us to be a little raw. And stay raw. And with rawness, you’re a bit more porous and tender to the world. A bit more unruly. I think in a moment where poetry is becoming hyper-professionalized, it’s good to remember that to be destabilized is also to be moved. To allow yourself to reorient. To be the kind of person who can change their mind, to change their life.

AR: You talk about ritual in absence of love and in recovery. When and how does ritual come into play when you’re writing?

MF: The only ritual I have with my writing is to read constantly, widely, and voraciously. My writing happens in spurts and when I force it, it’s not very good. My mind has to arrive at the right time, in the right space, with the right set of constellations aligned. Then it happens. It’s tectonic.

But in this poem, I was kind of thinking that ritual is a way we cope with grief and loss. When you lose someone and you become unintelligible to yourself, sometimes all you can do is the basics. Eat. Sleep. Work out. Take a walk outside. Make coffee. Feed the cats. When any kind of stimulation or emotional engagement feels violent or violating or you’re just too tender, ritual is a kind of armor. It builds daily expectations that give structure and order to interior chaos. Ritual is a way into thinking about the durational, how to survive when time feels long and the absence of a beloved feels unbearable. You still need to eat. Sleep. You still need to step outside into the sunshine. When your heart goes on strike, ritual enters. That rhythm of quiet survival.

AR: This poem makes me laugh out loud and it also brings up deep, serious emotions. Sometimes, in one line, the reader experiences both laughter and quiet turmoil. For example, in the line “Pay attention to what disgusts you.” What do you think our dislikes reveal about us as people and as artists?

MF: I’ve read a lot about disgust. From Ahmed and Ngai. It’s an emotion of the gut. Disgust is that weird dual motion of revulsion and attraction. We are disgusted by something but we can’t look away. And it happens mostly when we come into relation with some other subject, where we are no longer sovereign over our own bodies. Haraway says something like, “sex, infection, and eating are old relatives,” which are three examples of what it means to be in relation to some other person, species, virus. To succumb or consume or fuck. That’s when we’re most vulnerable. When I said, “Pay attention to what disgusts you,” I think at the root of it is some fear of being contaminated by an other. And we should pay attention because often some dehumanizing feeling (racism or homophobia or some other prejudice, conscious or not), is lurking there. One only needs to close read the way the media talks about immigrants and the language of disgust and animalization to understand this.

AR: Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic, it feels as though our lives have come to a screeching halt in so many essential ways and yet in your poem you advise young poets to “Go slow.” Could you say more about why that might be wise?

MF: We’re in a moment where people seem both reactive and certain about what they believe. What I’m saying is that it’s okay to go slow. Both in your arrival to the ideas you have about the world, but also, as in, go look at the ocean today. To build a belief system requires experience, requires you getting burned a few times. It means you will stumble. “Go slow” is the permission to stumble. To walk to your beliefs instead of rushing headfirst into them.

AR: A powerful line in this poem is “A good city will not parent you.” How does your upbringing influence the way you approach identity in your work?

MF: I think what I meant by that line is that New York’s indifference to you, your heroic subjectivity, your belief in what you can do, can be useful. You become resilient to the need for validation because in the end, you’re just another person walking across the Manhattan Bridge. You’re not special. A good city will not fool you into thinking you’re exceptional, that you’re an exception to anything. It’s healthy ego prevention.

AR: The title of your poem beckons Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.” Could you discuss the mentorships that have impacted your work?  

MF: Dead or alive? I’ve had literary mentorships with some dead folks for a while. Gwendolyn Brooks. W.B. Yeats. Etheridge Knight. Jorge Luis Borges. Meena Alexander. I go on these obsessive little deep dives into the work of some dead authors. They talk through time, from the grave.

In the land of the living, my PhD adviser, Bishnupriya Ghosh, is brilliant. I never know what she’s going to write about next, but she also believes in fun which I think in academia, is kind of radical. I came to her at the age of twenty-two and she modeled for me in this fundamental way, how to live a life full of joy, friends, dinners, critical thinking, a radical living politics, in a way that few have, I think. The poet and my former colleague, Lee Upton, is another person who I count as one of my most important mentors. Again, she just did this by modeling kindness and an unparalleled work ethic.

Lastly, my older sisters. Everyone should be so lucky to have older sisters.


Alicia Romero is a graduate of McGill University. She taught AP English in San Diego, CA and led the English Department for the Oakland Unified School District. She taught English teachers curriculum and instruction at McGill University, San Diego State University, and Saint Mary’s College.

Filed Under: Behind the Byline, Featured, News & Notes Tagged With: Alicia Romero, Megan Fernandes

Behind the Byline

Hanh Hoang

March 14, 2022

Hanh Hoang, whose essay “Bedtime Stories from Vietnam” appears in NER 42.4, talks with NER staff reader Megan Howell about obsession, resisting certainty, and the ghosts we leave behind.


Megan Howell: In “Bedtime Stories from Vietnam,” you write about how your childhood in wartime Saigon influenced your continued “excitement of billowy smoke and flame.” At the same time, you were less exposed to the war than those who lived in the countryside, stating, “When the earth rumbled, when the house swayed, I was lulled to sleep, safe, with no knowledge of what was going on outside Saigon.” When you heard the soldier’s last words, you were in bed, technically “safe” but also aware of the suffering of others.

Your relationship to death seems to lie between two extremes: not far enough to ignore it or be voyeuristic, not close enough to become debilitatingly traumatized. Do you think that such a distance from death was what allowed you to overcome your fear of dying/living? Do you think it would’ve been harder to heal from your divorce had you grown up in America or the Vietnamese countryside?

Hanh Hoang: It’s true that I didn’t become debilitatingly traumatized thanks to the distance from death, a distance which allowed me to indulge in my obsession. Death started out as something fascinating because of my mother’s stories and her medical encyclopedia, which had pictures of diseased parts and dying people. We had few books at home, especially books with illustrations, so I was drawn to this encyclopedia. Later, thinking about death was an intellectual, philosophical exercise. Like Montaigne, I thought you needed to think about death constantly to learn how to live. Unfortunately, I didn’t, and haven’t, overcome my fear of dying.

As for divorce, I think it would have been hard to heal whether I had grown up in America or the Vietnamese countryside. There is no social support in either place for single parents. I know of a few women from the Vietnamese countryside who separated from their husbands. They led extremely hard lives and had to make difficult choices. One woman had to leave her son with her emotionally abusive husband and his second wife so she could find work in another city.

MH: On your son, you write, “I couldn’t relate to the violence in his world, and he couldn’t relate to the violence of mine.” While he experienced violence through the media as a child, you lived through war. I relate to your relationship as someone who’s also around your son’s age (I’m a millennial who came of age during the Minecraft, Ultimate Showdown crazes). Like your son, my understanding of violence is different from that of my parents, who dealt with segregation. However, I feel as though the pandemic has shortened this gap in comprehension between my parents and me as it has for my friends. That, and also growing older.

Do you think that you and your son still don’t see violence the same way? Or has your relationship also changed?

HH: My son has given up on trying to involve me in his video games, and he has stopped making fun of my belief in the spirit world. Maybe he still doesn’t believe in ghosts, though ghost stories have always scared him. Recently, when I told my son I wanted to conjure up my mother’s spirit, he suggested that I not do that. He probably thought that on a slim chance, a very slim chance, ghosts do exist, it’s best not to invite them to our world, or we might open the door to evil spirits.

MH: I’m curious about your decision to use italics in lieu of quotation marks for dialogue. Typically, when I see italicized dialogue, I think of Pecola Breedlove’s imaginary friend or inner-dialogue—something less than human, basically. Both the present and the past timeline make use of this technique, giving off an immaterial, almost ghostly feeling, which feels appropriate given the references to Vietnamese ghost-stories.

Why not use quotation marks? Why does every character, both the living and the dead, speak like a ghost?

HH: Quotation marks would have given more reality and certainty and energy to the dialogue, when what I have are reconstructed conversations from a past that is no longer a reality to me, especially my past in Vietnam. I don’t have any connection to it anymore.

MH: Did the Montaigne epigraph have any influence over how you wrote “Bedtime Stories in Vietnam”? Or did you find it after you’d finished drafting the piece?

HH: We spent a whole year studying Montaigne in our French class in high school. Probably our teacher had only limited authority over the choice of reading materials, but it was odd to have sixteen-year-old students analyzing Montaigne’s essay “That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die” in the midst of a civil war. Our teacher, a Frenchman, also had a violent past. One day he rambled about his life and told us that, from his experience in Algeria during the country’s war of independence against the French, no one could withstand torture.

MH: What inspired you to write a story about death?

HH: Montaigne’s essay provided me with a rationale to think obsessively of death. It was probably Montaigne that inspired me to write the essay.


Megan Howell is a fiction reader for NER and a DC-based freelance writer. After graduating from Vassar College, she earned her MFA in fiction from the University of Maryland in College Park, winning both the Jack Salamanca Thesis Award and the Kwiatek Fellowship. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Nashville Review, and The Establishment,  among other publications.

Filed Under: Behind the Byline, Featured, News & Notes, Nonfiction Tagged With: Hanh Hoang, Megan Howell

Behind the Byline

Michael Martin Shea

March 9, 2022

NER poetry reader David Francis speaks with translator Michael Martin Shea about “from The Somber Station,” a sequence of poems by Liliana Ponce published in NER 42.4.


David Francis: Liliana Ponce, a contemporary Argentine poet, has gained notable acclaim in the Spanish-speaking world, but less has been written about her in English. What do you want us to know about the author, and what draws you to the work you have published here?

Michael Martin Shea: I was initially directed towards Liliana’s work by the poet and editor Reynaldo Jiménez, himself also relatively unknown in English, as is the case for so many wonderful and thrilling poets from the Southern Cone (even while coming from a region and a language that are comparatively overrepresented in US publishing). I met Reynaldo while living in Argentina on a Fulbright fellowship, and he invited me over to his house, which doubles as a repository for tsé-tsé—the small but storied poetry press he runs, and which published two of Liliana’s five collections. I left with a list of names and an enormous stack of books, including Liliana’s Fudekara, which would become the first work I ever attempted to translate.

Initially what drew me to Liliana’s poetry was how different it was from my own. At the time, I was writing poems that were garrulous and irreverent, buzzing around images drawn from postmodern popular culture. Liliana’s are almost the opposite: they’re so careful and methodical in their approach. I’m tempted to say restrained, but that’s not quite true: her poems are quiet only in the way that a simmering pot is quiet. The most important thing to know about Liliana is that she almost never writes stand-alone poems. Beginning with her very first book, Trama Continua, everything she’s published takes the form of these multi-poem sequences. Sometimes they’re only five poems long; sometimes they have as many as twenty parts. I see this as the formal extension of her sense of the poem as a mode of meditation, a vehicle for thought in its purest form. The goal of her writing isn’t to convey an idea—the poem itself is the pursuit, one that she follows with an almost surgical precision.  

One thing that’s neither here nor there as far as the poems are concerned, but which I find interesting, is that Liliana’s long-time husband is the novelist César Aira, author of something like a hundred books (and counting). So in one respect they’re very different: César publishes at a maniacal pace, while Liliana is much more selective. César’s novels are whimsical, talky, and digressive; Liliana’s poems can be very stark, her images almost fleeting. But on a formal level, they’re two artists who use literary form as a philosophical apparatus, a way of asking certain questions. César is compared to Borges all the time, and not unfairly, but I see Liliana’s poems as similarly experimental, in the sense that the work itself is an experiment, an investigation.

Liliana Ponce

DF: The poem you have translated—from “The Somber Station” [“La estación sombría” in Spanish]—provides a profound meditation on the act of writing. The poem claims that “to write today is an emptiness.” What do you think that statement means? Would you make the same argument for translating poetry or, at least, for translating this poem?

MMS: The act of writing is something Liliana comes back to throughout her oeuvre. Perhaps her most famous sequence, Fudekara, was composed during a fourteen-day calligraphy course, and its jumping-off point is the physical act of tracing these Chinese characters. There’s a meta or recursive quality to her work: her poems think about thinking, she writes about writing. And I think at the heart of both of those processes is a blankness, not necessarily in the sense of lack, but in the sense of possibility. As the poem goes on to say, this emptiness at the heart of the form or the passage is also a kind of “maximum intensity.”

In my capacity as a scholar, I’m currently studying what I term “visionary poetics,” a kind of umbrella category for various religious, mystical, or New Age-y tropes and compositional strategies. I don’t know that I’d count Liliana as a visionary poet herself, not in the sense of a writer like Kamau Brathwaite and his explicit invocations of Afro-diasporic religious practices. But Liliana has studied Buddhism and other eastern religions for a long time, she’s a translator and scholar of Noh theater (among other things), and it’s certainly true that this influence makes its way into her poems. There’s a preoccupation with the denial of the self, the self’s erasure: some of the other words that crop up frequently in her work are “abyss, ” “nothingness,” “forgetting.” But I don’t think of her as a dark or brooding poet. So when she writes that “escribir hoy es un vacío,” I think there’s a complicated texture to that word “vacío,” “emptiness.” It doesn’t necessarily have that same negative charge that we might be tempted to put on it. Again, it’s that sense of exploration—what would it really mean to be empty?

DF: In the title, the Spanish word “estación” can mean both “season” and “station,” both words in English relating to time. What do you make of the speaker’s sense of time as it relates to the lyrical composition of self? Why did you choose to translate the poem’s title the way you did?

MMS: This was a big debate for me, and I’m still not entirely convinced that this poem shouldn’t be called “The Somber Season.” But I think having “season” and “station” as two possible translations bifurcates a certain flexibility that the Spanish word “estación” maintains, a word which as you point out can equally refer to a time period or a place. When I hear “station,” I really hear the word’s spatial connotation taking precedence over the temporal, and vice versa with “season.” So this was a moment in the translation process where I felt I was being asked to elevate one connotation over another. Ultimately, I chose place over time, in part because the subsequent sequence in Teoría de la voz y el sueño is entitled “Más allá de la estación sombría,” and I hear that “más allá” [beyond] as privileging the spatial rather than the temporal association.

But as theorists like Doreen Massey have pointed out, space is always-already linked with time—there’s no such thing as pure space. And I think Liliana’s sense of space and time is very complex. Often her poems seem as if they want to alter time, to pause it or, as she writes here, to draw it out, to “feed the creation” of it with words. And then at other moments she adopts a diaristic model where there’s a real time outside the poems that’s being tracked, not only in Fudekara but in another long sequence, Diario, which appeared as a chapbook from Ugly Duckling Presse a few years ago. So I think in some respects her lyric self is always creating itself against these limitations—space and time, but also body—which are at the same time absolutely constitutive of its existence.

DF:

Here is the thirst of the impulses,
beach without memory where the likenesses speak
and even so, sisters, they dissolve in mirages,
like your eyes, like my gaze.

The poem conveys a sense of solitude and, yet, it is also often conversational. Parts 1 and 2, for instance, speak primarily of the first person “I” as it relates to writing and the landscape surrounding the speaker. Part 3 then shifts its gaze to a “you,” and, in the stanza above, the speaker turns to address her “sisters.” For you, how do voice and language come to define the speaker’s relationship with those who hear her?

MMS: It’s funny that you put your finger on this line—it’s one that really threw me off when I first started reading, and then translating, Liliana’s work. As you note, her poems create these moments of heightened lyrical intimacy—as in the second poem of the sequence, where it feels like you’re really inside the void of the speaker’s mind—and then suddenly there are sisters there with you, or there’s a teacher, or you’re given a clear directive which shifts the poem from monological to dialogical. For a long time I didn’t know what to make of this, or how to render some of these asides into a readable English without breaking that lyric spell. And then at a certain point it dawned on me—oh, that’s the point. I think it relates to what I was saying above about space and time: there’s a similar give-and-take between self and other, between speaker and world or even speaker and reader. There’s a lyric self that wants to retreat from the world to that “dream unfamiliar,” and then there’s the intransigent fact of the world.

DF: Your stanzas contain compelling rhythm and musicality, based often on repetition. They reflect—to follow the poem’s words—a sense of “doubling” of the self through musical incantation. How did you come to convey this music? Balancing form and content in your translation, how does music inform your process as translator? 

MMS: It’s almost a cliché to say this, but of course one of the most difficult aspects of translating into English from a romance language is moving from a vocabulary with a lot of shared word endings to one with significantly fewer. In a certain respect, Liliana’s work makes this easier: she rarely (if ever) follows an end-rhyme scheme or a metrical pattern, so the kind of brute force labor required to maintain something like an ABAB pattern isn’t necessary here. But her poems do have a lot of subtle music in them, often created through the repetition of key nouns and phrases (which I read as an outgrowth of her meditative poetics manifested at a formal level, a sort of conceptual deepening by way of redigestion). The extent to which I can maintain that music depends a lot on the individual line. In the third poem, the phrase “like your eyes, like my gaze [como tus ojos, como mi mirada]” is something that repeats verbatim in the original, making it easy to convey in the English (though of course even there you can hear some sonic patterning—“como,” “ojos,” “mi mirada”—that doesn’t make the leap). But then there are lines like this one from the second poem: “With words I feed the creation of time [Con palabras alimento la creación del tiempo].” Ultimately, I couldn’t find a way to maintain that internal alimento/tiempo rhyme. When that happens, I try to take the same principle from that line and see if I can reinsert it elsewhere in the poem: for instance, in the subsequent line, I chose “speak” rather than “talk” for “hablar” to give back some of that music. It’s like I’m extracting a sonic blueprint from the original and trying to recreate it elsewhere with slightly different materials. It’s the balance that’s very difficult to achieve, and while I think that a lot of my own training as a poet and a reader of poetry has helped develop my ear for these patterns, the choices I make in an individual line ultimately comes down to a degree of intuition (though perhaps an intuition schooled through immersion in someone else’s language). In one of her other poems, there’s a final line that reads, “abandonar la idea como se abandona el tiempo.” Abandonar is a cognate, whereas abandonarse means something more like “surrender” or “give in.” But my felt sense was that the sonic pattern here was more important than that conceptual difference—this is the final line of the poem, after all—so I landed on “to abandon the notion as time abandons.” Maybe in a month or so I’ll feel differently—I’m not sure a translation ever achieves a balance that isn’t, in some way, provisional.

DF: If you were to anthologize this poem, what other authors would you include in the anthology?

MMS: I suppose that really depends on what kind of anthology I’m putting together. I think Liliana’s work is particularly interesting in a national or regional context, especially for Anglophone readers. She published her first book in 1976, so she’s writing contemporaneously with figures like Juan Gelman and Raúl Zurita—some of the so-to-speak giants of Latin American poetry in translation. But her work is less overtly indexed to the dictatorships that ruled the Southern Cone during those early years of neoliberalism, and so complicates the often-simplistic picture American readers get where Latin American poetry is all about capital-R Resistance. Similarly, she’s associated with many of the writers of the neobarroco period—her publisher, Jiménez, was included in the canonical Medusario anthology and she traveled in a lot of those circles in the 1990s throughout the ríoplatense region. But she doesn’t really display the kind of linguistic maximalism for which neobaroque writers like Néstor Perlongher or Haroldo de Campos are known. Her work is certainly influenced by that of the great Argentine poet Alejandra Pizarnik: I see Pizarnik’s touch in the way that Liliana’s images will carry you into these unfamiliar spaces and then simply drop away (perhaps a form of what Robert Bly called “leaping poetry”). But where Pizarnik is so focused on the body, in Liliana’s work the body tends to retreat, almost disappearing as thought takes center-stage. Thematically, the way her poems are influenced by religious thought resonates with the work of writers like Héctor Viel Temperlay or Miguel Ángel Bustos (both of whom have been wonderfully, recently translated), though each of those poets moves in a slightly different direction. And then of course if we abandon the regional-linguistic framework, there are all sorts of fun associations to make. Sometimes I hear something like an echo of C. D. Wright in her poems, or Cole Swensen—sometimes even Georg Trakl. This last option is the most interesting to me. I’m trained as a comparativist, and though I take a very historicist approach in my own scholarship, as a reader I’m charmed by the prospect of discarding these traditional frameworks in favor of a different organizing principle.

DF: What was the greatest moment of revelation for you in reading the poem during the translation process?

MMS: I’m not sure there was a distinct moment. I completed a first draft of these poems in December of 2016, so these have been kicking around in my head for over five years. My process for translating Liliana’s work involves doing a very, very quick first draft of the entire sequence, just to establish the basic architecture. And then I go back over the poems more carefully, sitting with the language, trying out various constructions. I make extensive use of dictionaries—both that of the Real Academia Española and various Spanish-to-English ones—to check almost every word or phrase, looking for gradations of meaning and generating a pool of options. And then I assemble a new draft, or various new drafts. In the case of “The Somber Station,” there were few major epiphanies along the way, but many minor ones, born from coming back to the poems with fresh eyes after some time away. I specifically remember the way things clicked into place for me in the first stanza of the fourth poem when I shifted from translating the word “raíz” literally (as “root”) to something more figurative (“cause”).

This was the second sequence of Liliana’s that I translated—Fudekara being the first—so those early drafts bear witness to the process of figuring out how to conjure her voice in English, how to speak this personal, singular language of hers. I just completed a book-length manuscript which was about six years in the making, and while I wouldn’t say it’s become easy to translate her work, it’s certainly become a bit more fluid. The more time I spend immersed in her writing, the more comfortable I am making certain choices which would have stumped me in the early days—not necessarily because I’m a better translator now (though I suspect I am, simply through practice), but because I have a more intimate relationship with her voice. If I were to start on a project by a different author, even one writing in Spanish, I suspect I’d have to internalize a different sense of language and sound. So I guess I think of translation more as a process of sinking deeper and deeper into someone else’s consciousness. A translator is of course actively creating the new text—I don’t want to erase that aspect of the work—but at the same time there’s a certain suspension of the self. For me, that’s part of the appeal.

DF: Section Five refers to “the first dream.” Is this publication part of a series of dreams? Are there other “station” poems we can look forward to reading in your future translations? If so, how will they differ from what we see here?

MMS: That’s a great question, and one that’s hard to answer. Liliana’s poems deal with dreams a lot. As she says here, “what one wants from the air is a dream unfamiliar / with the cloth of shadows;” in a later poem, she writes, “I am the dreaming woman / I want to be the dream.” And even though she plays with diaristic forms which suggest a kind of real outside that the poems are indexed to, there are other moments when it feels like the poem itself exists as a kind of alternate real, like a dream. “A beach without memory where the likenesses speak.” Maybe the best way to think about this is that dreams are a kind of emptiness, like writing is.

As I mention above, the sequence that immediately follows this one is called “Beyond the Somber Station,” which in some ways expands on the ideas here, and in other ways goes beyond: both Shinto and ancient Rome make an appearance in that suite. That’s part of the full-length manuscript that will hopefully soon find a home. And Fudekara, which is also obsessed with writing and what it means to write, is going to be released as a chapbook by Cardboard House Press later this year, which is really exciting—I’ve loved that sequence since I first read it, and I can’t wait for an English version to be in the world.


David Francis, a reader of poetry manuscripts for NER, serves as dean of Grace Hopper College at Yale University, where he teaches in the Program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. He has received a Fulbright fellowship to translate poems by the Colombian writer José Asunción Silva into English. His translations or poems have appeared in Inventory, The FSG Book of 20th-Century Latin American Poetry, Guernica, Exchanges, The Brooklyn Rail, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. He is the translator of Footwork (Circumference Books, 2021), the selected poems of the acclaimed Cuban author Severo Sarduy.

Filed Under: Behind the Byline, Featured, News & Notes, Poetry, Translations Tagged With: David Francis, Liliana Ponce, Michael Martin Shea

Behind the Byline

Leslie Sainz

March 4, 2022

Leslie Sainz, whose poems “Self-Determination Theory” and “Propaganda Ghazal” appear in NER 42.4, talks with NER poetry editor Jennifer Chang about poetic space, ancestry, and her new role as NER‘s managing editor.


Jennifer Chang: I was struck by how space and syntax relate to and complicate each other in both “Self-Determination Theory” and “Propaganda Ghazal.” “Self-Determination Theory” depicts the domestic spaces that organize families, but with the twist: the mother in the living room and the father in the kitchen. Meanwhile, neither poem ever forgets the spaces of nations, the U. S. and Cuba specifically. Syntax separates these varied spaces into discrete lines, even as the formal space of the stanza binds what might not be literally (or even comfortably) together. For example, the taut, tense lines of “Self-Determination Theory” locked into a narrow single stanza, or in “Propaganda Ghazal” the radif of “side” playfully turning the poem this way and that until finally arriving at the “right side.” It’s exciting how you move your reader through spaces that are on the page, in the imagination, and across the global stage of history and geography. Even the Gertrude Stein epigraph, to me, struck me as an encroachment into the various spaces configured in that poem. What does space mean to you and what role does it play in your formal and rhetorical choices? Is it just me, or are these poems also private cartographies, the maps of Leslie Sainz’s mind and heart?

Leslie Sainz: It’s every writer’s dream to be read this closely, this carefully—thank you. I’ve come to understand space as a cunning thing—both material and abstract—able to transfigure to meet the desires of the poem. But it’s also beholden to time. In the poem, as in life, space is an entity and a relationship one can nurture, neglect, trace. I feel a particular kind of anxiety when coaxing space to do what I perceive the poem to want, and I try to honor space as the living memorial it is. It’s sort of like groundskeeping, you have to tend to the aesthetics of an area but also its functionality.

I have a strong affinity for associative work, for the paratactic sentence. It can feel as though there are whole lifetimes between thought A and thought B in my mind. Among friends and beloveds, I famously have a poor sense of direction, though I agree with your assessment that these poems are maps. “Self-Determination Theory” and “Propaganda Ghazal” were written a day apart in October 2020 and, perhaps in lieu of compasses, there are fistfuls of breadcrumbs between them.

JC: Follow-up question: Gertrude Stein?

LS: My fascination with Stein is boundless. I’d been studying Tender Buttons and Harryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia for a new persona project when these two poems materialized. I am deeply suspicious of poetry that presents its ideas as unquestionable, and at the time, I feared my current manuscript wasn’t doing all that it could to match the nuance of its subjects. “Self-Determination Theory” and “Propaganda Ghazal” were important exercises in intellectually disinheriting myself. 

It’s interesting for me to consider your question about space in the context of Stein’s physical legacy, i.e., as a space-maker for fellow expatriates, and a self-proclaimed propagandist for Vichy France. The spaces she renounced, the spaces she saw fit for destruction. She left maps many of us pretend we do not know how to read.

JC: The father in both poems is rendered powerless, and he haunted me long after my first reading. By situating him in the kitchen in “Self-Determination Theory,” you upend gender conventions about the place of men and he’s then cuckolded by the United States, an occasion about which “though he is a jealous man, / he says nothing.” He’s similarly silenced in “Propaganda Ghazal” because we never learn the words to the Yanquis saying, though he “repeats” it in the first line, and then he’s, in a sense, vanquished from the poem. That powerlessness, I suspect, isn’t merely content, as there’s a lyric starkness to your work that suggests much is left unsaid. In my imagination, there’s a world of words that belongs to the father alone that might never be accessed. How does the interplay between power and patriarchy inform your poetics generally and your book project in particular?

LS: Fathers are especially good at haunting, aren’t they? As the daughter of Cuban exiles, I was made possible by estrangement and am a casualty of its compounding. I have mourned and continue to mourn, quite palpably, the lives I have lost by coming into being between “no longer” and “never was.” I’m also keenly aware of the privileges gifted to me by this liminality, and all of this—the historical, the political-personal—exists because of the mechanisms of power (both perceived and de facto), patriarchal dogma, and machismo. At present, I’m most interested in critiquing power and patriarchy by deferring to their inverses, which appear, to me, as spiritual connection, and partnership. 

My book project, titled Have You Been Long Enough at Table, is named after an unassuming line of dialogue from The Old Man and the Sea, which is itself a monument to hegemonic masculinity. I wrote Have You Been Long Enough at Table with the hopes of disrupting the binary discourse that dominates Cuba-U.S. relations, and of honoring my imagined past, present, and future as a result of “the revolution within the revolution,” or, the emancipation of Cuban women. Over time, the poems revealed that my family system could be considered a microcosm of the very violence that displaced us. 

JC: I’m a first generation Chinese American. That I am a poet bewilders my immigrant parents, who have never stopped asking me when I will write a novel. To them a story—prose fiction—makes sense, while a poem does not. How did you come to poetry and what does it mean to you to be writing poems as a first generation American?

LS: That parental preoccupation with sense-making, as you’ve described it, is very familiar to me. Though my immigrant parents are obsessive about their children securing the best credentials possible, I’m fortunate that they never actually enforced constraints on which fields of study we could pursue. I am grateful to come from a culture that reveres poets, to have been raised by parents who understand that poets can, and have, led revolutions. But I still have to, everytime I sit down to write, silence the voices—planted by my parents and perpetuated by my learned perfectionism—that insist I need to win X, publish in Y, and secure Z. No authentic artistic practice can cohabitate with these expectations. Instead, I actively build and adhere to systems and rituals that disorient me, in the best way, from anything that is not the page. For me, writing poems as a first generation American is to reject outcome thinking.

Ironically, the first poem I ever wrote was a mandatory display of nationalism. In third or fourth grade, our teacher tasked each of us with writing a poem in celebration of America for a county-wide writing contest. What did we know of America then? Of indoctrination and forced assimilation? I’m somewhat ashamed to admit that my poem was selected as one of the winners, and I was awarded a brand new bicycle and an obligatory photo-op with the then-mayor. When you come to something so young and are rewarded significantly for your efforts, there’s a biological impulse to chase that praise economy. Now, in every poem I write, I’m actively trying to redeem myself for that first poem. The bicycle, a kind of trophy, is still in my parent’s garage.

JC: Lastly, as a fan of your work, and because I am always eager for more poet friends, I am over the moon that you’ve joined New England Review as our new managing editor—congratulations and welcome! What do you love about being an editor, and in what ways does your editorial mind engage with your writerly mind (and vice versa)? What are your hopes for NER?

LS: It’s  an absolute delight to serve as NER’s managing editor, and to call you a colleague and new friend!

Long before I became comfortable calling myself a poet (I still sort of shudder at the title), I proudly embraced the role of editor. Aside from the author and their guides, I can’t think of a vantage point closer to the process of writing and all its mysticism than that of the editor. This positioning—the exchange of trust that it requires—is a privilege, one that I don’t take lightly. Discovering diverse, challenging, and ambitious writing; fostering generations of new writers and readers—I’m grateful to be able to make a living doing what I love. 

My editorial mind was once a saboteur to my writerly mind, though years of exposure have softened their relationship. Now, my editorial mind is more discerning than it is debilitating, and I hope its experience helps me recognize and avoid some of the tropes of the contemporary US style. My writerly mind humanizes my editorial mind, preventing it from forgetting the labor, costs, and sacrifices that created the work in front of me. There are many other ways in which these hemispheres interact, though these are, I think, the most mutually beneficial.

Thank you for giving me an opportunity to speak about my hopes for NER under my tenure! I would love to see NER become more widely recognized as a journal committed to uplifting the work of emerging writers and, more often than not, placing them in conversation with their literary heroes and ancestors. I believe NER to be a safe place for complex work—complexity of thought, language, feeling, etc.—and I hope our readers know that we trust that they’re capable of engaging with that complexity as they do everyday by leading their complicated lives.

As for my personal plans, I hope to fully usher NER into the digital age, replete with more opportunities for community-building and the exploration of craft. I’m also a big fan of our translations and international portfolios, and look forward to producing more of these features.


Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity and Some Say the Lark, winner of the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, A Public Space, Poetry, Georgia Review, The Believer, The New York Times, and Yale Review, and she has published essays on poetry and culture in New Literary History, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture, The Volta, Blackwell’s Companion to the Harlem Renaissance, New England Review, and Los Angeles Review of Books.

Filed Under: Behind the Byline, Featured, News & Notes, Poetry

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Vol. 43, No. 2

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Rosalie Moffett

Writer’s Notebook—Hysterosalpingography

Rosalie Moffett

Many of the poems I’ve been writing lately are trying to figure out how to think about the future, how to reasonably hope, and what we must be resigned to. How can you imagine the future when the present is so slippery, so ready to dissolve?

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