On October 23rd, Bennington College welcomed poets Megan Fernandes and Chet’la Sebree for the third Poetry at Bennington event of the fall semester. Megan Fernandes is an Associate Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Lafayette College. Her three collections of poetry are I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House, 2023), Good Boys (Tin House, 2020), a finalist for the Kundiman Poetry Prize and the Paterson Poetry Prize, and The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books, 2015).
Chet’la Sebre is an assistant professor of English at George Washington University and teaches in the Randolph College Low-Residency MFA program. She is the author of Field Study (FSG Originals, June 2021), winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Mistress, selected by Cathy Park Hong for the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize and an NAACP Image Award finalist.
Fernandes read first after an introduction by Michael Dumanis. He introduced Megan and called her most recent book, I Do Everything I’m Told, an “eloquent and elegant, brash and intense collection.” When Fernandes got up to the podium she joked that she should have invited her mom to come listen to the effusive biography and introduction.
Fernandes told the crowd she would read six poems. She started with her poem “Do You Sell Dignity Here?” which gets its title from the poet walking into a grocery store and asking the cashier the title question. She assures us in this poem that yes; she really did ask this of the store clerk, “partly because I was being funny and trying to make a friend, but also I would have taken a hug or any acknowledgment that I am a person who can laugh at myself, despite walking with that odd angle of defeat.”
After reading this poem she let the audience know that the poems were “all bummers,” eliciting a laugh from the crowd. Each poem Fernandes read had a humorous preface or anecdote before it. Before she started reading the next poem, she told the audience that it had been rejected by the New Yorker because the first line is about fisting. And the first line delivered on invoking fisting. It was a funny beginning that led to a meditation on art and friendship. Another highlight included a poem about what it feels like to have sex in your 30s and 40s.
After Fernandes read, Sebree went up to the podium. She started by reading from Field Study, a collection that launches, in Michael Dumanis’s words “a rigorous investigation of the significance of cross-racial, romantic and sexual desire, the history of it in this country and the personal aftermath of a relationship with the white man.” The beginning of the book drops us into a dinner party the narrator is at, and leads into connected fragments of thought investigating why she is attracted to white men, then turning to conversations with other black women, Claudia Rankine, politics and history, among other things. The reading took us on a journey from one moment to the history of black women in America.
Next, Sebree read some new poems from her forthcoming collection Blue Opening, which centers on a speaker who contemplates the origins of language, life, biology, and the universe, while deciding whether to have a child. It seems a collection of topics almost too large to tackle, but Sebree handles it gracefully and keeps the narrative grounded in one speaker’s perspective while being expansive. The poem she read begins with the speaker caressing a navel, the portal that once connected us to our mother, and turns to a contemplation on parenthood.
Both poets spoke from personal perspectives that radiated out into meditations on desire, friendship, sex, and race which resonates with a wide audience yet remains deeply personal.
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