Play and Rules: On Megan Fernandes and the Poetics of Kink

Poetry is an art of play and of rules. You can play by the rules, following inherited conventions of form and meter. And you can play the rules, poking at them, tweaking them, even toppling them. Over the course of a poem, the rules that are supposed to govern play often become playthings themselves. There is a pleasure in obeying rules, fitting language perfectly to a given structure (a sonnet, an iamb), and there is a different sort of pleasure in breaking them: acknowledging an obligation by defying it, calling attention to an expectation by declining to fulfill it. Every poem is a negotiation between these competing pleasures, a tightrope balance of constraint and creativity, deference and defiance.