I Do Everything I'm Told

by Megan Fernandes

Imagine walking into: grocery stores; national apparel retail locations; fast-casual furniture stores and food halls; and transit hubs like train stations or bus depots. Now image these public locations, but piped full of music. Your music. Music from your adolescence, so important at the time, now the substrate of benign public existence. This shift is demographically hard to comprehend.

As a kid, your music was not the music. Your presence was accepted but not invited—sure, the cereal isle was yours, but the store was meant to soothe the one with the chequebook.

Now that the music of my adolescence is the ambient tone of generic American commerce, it is fair to admit that my generation has arrived. Not economically, of course, as the boomers cling to their frozen assets and guard their parcels of low-tax homesteads like sphinxes, but culturally. Things are made for me, the middle-aged white suburban male. You heard what they play at the Whole Foods? That’s basically my “I’m-sixteen-and-have-to-be-home-before-nine-because-I-have-a-junior-drivers-license” mixtape. So it is with–and I know this is a swerve–poetry.

Everyone should watch anime after a heartbreak.

There it is. My culture is ascendant. My interests are relevant. I am seen. Contemporary poetry now exists to me not as an abstraction I must force my way into (“April is the cruelest month”? Sure, I guess.) but in vibes I lived and can internalize, re-express and appreciate.

To want the same things as you age is not always a failure of growth. A good city will not parent you.

We know things, now, our generation of urban nomads and digital natives. We’ve lived our lives and want to see it spoken back to us in meaningful and cryptic ways, in flashes of emotion and broken shards of imagery that push deeper than expected.

I sit with

three bouquets

of birthday flowers

to see

which one

dies first

and then

scrutinize

the beloved

who must be

voted off.

Who does this.

How boring 

to accumulate love

only

to test it.

I Do Everything I’m Told works within my cultural milieu, allowing space for pop references that aren’t explicitly wink/nudge “look at the contrast of high and low art, aren’t I clever.” It’s simply the modern life I recognize, unobtrusively including reality TV in with the rest of reality. Personally, I—who wrote my undergraduate thesis on Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet and Beck’s Sea Change, saw Section II, which had these cool fragments that took me more than one to realize are sherds of the adjoining poems, introduced by an epigraph from the queen of “If Not, Winter” fragments herself—found myself appreciating the book front to back.

It’s clever, simply clever, without feeling forced or gimmicky.

I’m not sure what drives me to pick up a book of poems, so I can’t say for sure what needs to be inside your head to recommend I Do Everything I’m Told. But if you end up shopping in the near future and you find yourself nodding along to a teen anthem you hadn’t heard in a few decades, that might be the signal that poetry is ready for you, and you for it.

Children have no dignity

and I really admire that about them.

…

Their right to be tired

in public.