Hunter Larson

Waking up at the dark edge of dreaming, the world appears in elemental neons, deep striations of light and shadow, coruscating vines, mythopoetic spectors, pharaonic pulses on the borders of speech; alive inside the universal tendon just outside of time, sphinxes pad on carpets of shadow, a marble bust is placed on a dais and rolled into a gallery by faceless acolytes. The dark song of the void is played on a loop as tropical birds dissolve into trails of smoke. What we desire now is a poetics for entering the maze.  In Las Moradas, a new chapbook just out from arrow as aarow, Robert Fernandez provides such a poetry, continuing his poetic navigation of apocalyptic modes, conjuring scenes of struggle and recovery. A poet who understands that art is in fact a battle, and that to write poetry is to find oneself at the point of collision; in the impact zone where language bends and refracts, where time is pliant and on the wind there’s the scent of blood and the sound of entropic chains rattling. 

Throughout his previous collections, We Are Pharoah (Canarium, 2011), Pink Reef  (Canarium, 2013), and Scarecrow (Wesleyan, 2016), Fernandez has opened portals to scenes as varied as warehouse raves in Berlin, cacophonous streets in Lagos, the insidious boardwalks of Miami, dead sunsets in London, and mythic galleries that exist on the other side of living. After the acid wears off and the sky opens up to reveal bright grids and icons, we come to in the symbolist dimension Mallarmé and Roussel had to enter in order to gather material for their great works. First and foremost, Fernandez is a poet of that field of poetry which some refer to as the visionary—his is a poetics of ‘deep time’, a poetry akin to Lorca’s ‘deep song’ or cante jondo wherein ‘The figure of the cantaor is delineated by two great paths; the arc of the sky outside him and the zigzag track within that snakes through his heart.’

To contextualize Fernandez’s work within and against received traditions of the visionary in lyric verse, let’s consider the opening poem of Robert Duncan’s The Opening of the Field, a seminal text for what I think of as a ‘postmodern visionary’:

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but a made place,

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein

that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

Here we see Duncan attempting to articulate through verse what it means to enter an ecstatic state of pure imagination; a field of visionary composition. In Duncan’s figuring, one enters the eternal through the shared commons of thought, a variegated field that is in constant contact with the heart—but crucially Duncan is given permission, he is allowed to enter the pasture. Duncan’s meadow has an antiquated, medieval feel to it, which reflects his obsessions with the Arthurian tradition, white magics, a reclamation of the medieval so as to envision a new romanticism. Later in the poem he refers to the meadow as ‘a given property of the mind / that certain bounds hold against chaos’ but what if said bounds don’t hold? What if this isn’t a given property, but the symptom of a certain kind of imaginative austerity, of a comfortability with the fancy, as Coleridge would have it. What happens when you let chaos rip apart the tapestry of the pasture? I think you find hell. Dante knew this, as did Artaud, as does Fernandez. Duncan’s contemporary Jack Spicer knew this, and it was a point of contention between them. I don't think Robert Fernandez was given permission to enter the meadow, I think he clawed his way into it and lit it on fire, and that dialectical struggle is at the heart of his work. Or as he writes in Pink Reef, ‘I cannot stop I love hell / I am light’. Ultimately, for many poets, Duncan’s meadow is a dull representation—insulated from the brutality of existence in the world; beautiful yes, but lacking texture, edges, depth. Like the print of a lino cut as opposed to the carving itself, merely representing the feel of the carved surface, the work of the hand cutting away material, exposing the image, lacking danger, or as Fernandez puts it, ‘if not terror / then to give us a sense / of just arriving’.

Fernandez’s images are lush, sometimes tropical in their aesthetic tenor. Throughout Las Moradas we see ‘the sunflower man’ with ‘a voice like wicker, a voice like faith’, ‘dinners of violets’, and ‘a colony / of vultures / on this bed of white light’. There is a sense of the bodily, of decay and mutilation; ‘the tiger is cut up / starting at the ribs / the liver is removed’ then later in the same poem ‘we use all of this / the blood is the teeth / in the wave trough / our children know ourselves’, wounds are knit back together only to be opened again—struggle, recovery, and the circuity of living and dying are the models these poems live by. 

These are decadent poems, studded with symbolist bravado, yet they occasionally gesture towards what I think of as aesthetic self-referentiality. Take this moment: ‘I murder myself with style // (I murder myself with / thought become flesh)’. Here the poet is reflexive, acknowledging the toll stylistic rigor takes on both poetry and poet. What it means to develop a poetic style, to be beholden to a voice. The time it takes to render the image in actual living flesh, to compose not the flash or tremble of the thing, but the thing itself; analogous with the beating thing in the mind. ‘the artist / has blood in the stomach…I cannot argue with the flesh / I cannot argue with the meat / across which I speak’ he writes in Pink Reef. In another poem from Las Moradas he writes ‘or I am lost in the mausoleum / & it is cool’. It’s hard to be certain whether the speaker here means cool as in cold, icy, or cool as in glamorous—it’s the slipperiness of a moment like this where Fernandez gets to play a little, lets the homonym open the poem up to different gradients and registers of meaning; the poem’s intent fracturing in media res, lit up by tonal possibility. 

Poetry, like all good art, is a reactive substance that requires polarity and contrast to get at real living, to open up the possibility for transcendence. André Breton wrote that ‘Beauty must be convulsive’, which I interpret as, beauty must be in-flux—lit by polarity, life and death, pain and joy, light and shadow, ecstasy and despair. It’s why the sad songs are the best, because they remind us that we’re alive. The dark heart of these poems activates something true about the human condition, or as Fernandez puts it, ‘I need to appear to be / human, I need to / appear to be pleasured’.  Wallace Stevens said that ‘the imagination is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos.’ In other words, the human imagination is the source of our collective derangement, our cosmic bewilderment. But to transmute this impulse into art, the imagination must be rigorously trained and tested, must rest upon the tightly woven cord of one’s craft. This is the real work of the artist—to translate chaos, to give shape and form to the void. Or as Fernandez writes of the work of lyric poetry: 

bright ribbons of work, tangled in our bodies,
will be vomited out and indeed bright ribbons
will be vomited out. In the meantime,
the light’s eyelashes open and close.
And in the meantime, work and reprieve.

Robert Fernandez is not merely a neo-surrealist but a true visionary, who uses the lyric as a methodology for opening up varicolored portals into the unexplored, half-lit zones at the edges of thought and experience. Perhaps the great triumph of Fernandez’s work is that it stands as a reminder of the dangers inherent in poetry, in deregulating oneself in order to access deep wells of violence and language, those ancient tools of human culture. It gives one permission to enter states of anti-lucidity, where a derangement of the senses is actualized. I would argue that Fernandez is a true inheritor of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, of Artaud and Bataille, Vallejo and Lorca; who, along with a handful of other contemporary poets, is opening poetry up to a real and systematic deregulation of the senses—not through the splintered syntax and random equivocation of a kind of post-language school model, but through deep imagining and attention to the antediluvian symbols that float at the edges of consciousness.