Bio:
Daisy Fried is the author of Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, named by Library Journal as one of the five best books of 2013, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It, which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Her poems have appeared recently in the Best American Poetry 2013, London Review of Books, Nation, New Republic, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Threepenny Review and elsewhere. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, the Editors’ Prize from Poetry and the Cohen Award from Ploughshares, and was for two years the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. She reviews poetry for the New York Times, Poetry, and the Threepenny Review, and lives in Philadelphia. She teaches at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
Lindsay Ahl: Many of your poems have what might be called a post-confessional “I.” Your particular “post-confessional I” is subtle, it changes form, is in the background rather than the foreground, more often then not, and I’m wondering how deliberate that decision is and/or if you could talk about this as a technique.
Daisy Fried: I’m not making poems to tell what happened and how I feel about it. I do use my life, I use narrative, and figure my poems are (partly) about emotion, about human nature, but I don’t think of my poems as primarily expressive. I’m pretty sure the original confessionals would feel the same way about their poems. I’m not even sure what makes a confessional a confessional and what makes another poet who says “I” not confessional. Why is Frank O’Hara not confessional? Is it his agitated hilarity? Who he hung out with? Yet Sylvia Plath with her hyper-arty performed freakouts is confessional. I confess I don’t really get it. I’m also not particularly interested in getting it—getting labels that is. They’re mostly methods of avoiding actually looking at what the words on the page are doing. At best they’re promotional strategy. The background-I: Well, my struggle when writing poems is often moving the poem from well-written lineated journalism to a poem that performs, makes some leap, has some intensity and necessity. I used to work as a journalist, where it’s frequently inappropriate to say “I,” and I like nothing better than to describe external realities. But poems, for me, should be more than notebook jottings. Still, the external world, its stuff and gestures and movement—people’s movement through it—can be more interesting and revealing, and expressive—than recounting of internal emotional landscapes. “I” is a strategy for immediacy. A compositional tool.
Ahl: So, next label—if I’m not mistaken, you’ve called yourself a “narrative” poet. In hearing you speak, I’ve always enjoyed your fluid and almost metaphysical definition of “narrative”—aside from the “this happened, than that happened …” how else would you talk about narrative? And how do you consciously create and break narrative?
Fried: Narrative is a technique, not a default position. I’m interested in all kinds of narrative but especially the kind that can be used as a destabilizing rather than as an orienting technique. To help explain what I mean, I like to send people to an excerpt from a Willem DeKooning speech called “What Abstract Art Means to Me” in 1951 in conjunction with the show “Abstract Art in America” at the Museum of Modern Art. As you know, DeKooning was one of the great abstract expressionists of the 20th Century. But he disliked the term “abstract expressionism,” in part because he felt that “It is disastrous to name ourselves.” Also because he didn’t entirely think of his work as abstract. His biographers Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan write that “DeKooning particularly disliked ideological or theoretical talk about abstraction and did not believe in what many people meant by abstract art…” Even at their most non-representational his paintings can often be seen as a struggle between representation and abstraction, and he would sometimes begin with figures, and abstract from there. At the time of his speech, he was working on his now-famous series of Women. The paintings in this series were shocking in part for the way they depict women, but more interestingly, because they were resolutely figural—and this was still a time when progress in art was still seen as a march forward according to a single narrative of innovation, when the new was supposed to replace the old in an almost moral sense. In other words, the fact that you could recognize the human figure in DeKooning’s Woman paintings was shocking. These women are strange hybrids of the representational and the non-representational. These are (like traditional portraits) vertically-oriented works in which the figure is presented against a sort of background. But in DeKooning’s Woman paintings, the figure blends with the background. It’s hard to say where the figure ends and the backdrop begins. The woman is simultaneously emerging from and submerging into her background. Emerging from and dissolving into paint. I go on about this, because I think this simultaneous move towards figuration and abstraction is a kind of useful metaphor for the way that some narrative poems aren’t sure they want to be narrative, or are non-narrative poems which find themselves helpless not to be narrative. Here’s the very end of his talk at MOMA in 1951: About twenty-four years ago, I knew a man in Hoboken, a German who used to visit us in the Dutch Seaman’s Home. As far as he could remember, he was always hungry in Europe. He found a place in Hoboken where bread was sold a few days old—all kinds of bread: French bread, German bread, Italian bread, Dutch bread, Greek bread, American bread and particularly Russian black bread. He bought big stacks of it for very little money, and let it get good and hard and then he crumpled it and spread it on the floor in his flat and walked on it as on a soft carpet. I lost sight of him, but found out many years later that one of the other fellows met him again around 86th street. He had become some kind of Jugend Bund leader and took boys and girls to Bear Mountain on Sundays. He is still alive but quite old and is now a Communist. I could never figure him out, but now when I think of him, all that I can remember is that he had a very abstract look on his face. What is this passage about? Why is it so delightful (assuming you agree that it is)? Besides taking pure pleasure in the details here, and in the combination of smartassness and seriousness, I’m fascinated that absolute clarity of event, and the accessibility in the language that’s used in the service of complication, perhaps in the service of destabilizing meaning or at least certainty. This passage tells a story, and somehow, while seeming very much like a sketch, manages to be more than a mere sketch. It’s funny! It’s moving! It seems to contain, via glancing reference, big human issues—hunger, revenge, fellow feeling—and large sweeps of recent history—political movements, several continents, axis and allied powers! (WWII was only recently over when he wrote this.) It suggests a narrative, and shapes it, and at the same time denies shape and exactitude. “About twenty-four years ago”: is that precise or imprecise? “I could never figure him out…all that I can remember”: these are in the last sentence of the passage and speech, but instead of the vagueness these phrases suggest, don’t we feel like we’ve learned something about abstract art? What goes into abstract art? Does narrative underlie even the most abstract of artistic gestures? I guess what I’m mostly saying is narrative is a technique.
Ahl: Would it be fair to say there might even be some kind of controversy (or politics) surrounding “narrative” poetry—as poetry? That is, the debate as to what constitutes poetry—would you ever go there—throw punches for your “position”?
Fried: People who don’t like narrative poetry say Narrative is artificial. Narrative implies closure which is fake. I mean, no, duh. Laurence Sterne in the 18th Century knew all this when he wrote Tristram Shandy. Meanwhile, I guess the politics behind some anti-narrativists has to do with who gets to tell stories? Who has power over the language? Can we subvert the ruling hegemony by severing the connection between signifier and signified? The writing-as-moral-political-practice is completely worthy of respect, and isn’t going to start any practical revolutions. So okay. Obviously, narrative is a straw man, and when people who think they are anti-narrative criticize a bad narrative poem, they miss the mark. The poem is bad because it’s bad. Not because it’s narrative. There are poets temperamentally drawn to story and others who are temperamentally drawn to other things—lyric, chance operations, etc. All kinds of poems have narrative elements. Why would anyone ever categorically throw out any of the tools available to them? You can get rid of the hammer but that’s going to be a problem if you ever want to stick a nail in a wall.
Ahl: After my first fleeting and momentary standoffish reaction to Ask the Postess: An Advice Column—I would just sit and laugh at the layered provocations, literary allusions and nuances for a long time. And strangely, I would read some sections, think, oh, funny, and then an hour later I’d burst into laughter, as though I had just then gotten the joke, even though there was no real “joke” I hadn’t “gotten”—just the idea of Bukowski being a “poetess”. So then, my initial standoffish reaction was probably fear-based—that is, you are almost dismantling “poetry” with a capital “P” not so much in a Derrida-like way, but with humor and deconstruction and irony. So also, you are doing that in your title poem. I’m having a difficult time articulating your particular brand of rebel-style poetry, but I do think it has that connotation. Through a kind of unpoetizing (in titles, in narratives, with humor and irony) you are rocking the boat of what people think of as Proper Poetry—not that this is unusual—what might be even more strange is that there is a Proper Poetry—nonetheless … can you talk about this?
Fried: I try to write things I would like to read, whether it’s poetry or prose. That’s about it. The idea of writing from a set of theories or pre-conceived strategies is foreign to me. Apparently I like disparates co-existing. Humor and sorrow. Sarcasm and sincerity. Narrative and interruption of narrative. Elegance and clunk. High and low diction. Metaphor and distrust of metaphor. Life is complicated and full of unresolvable contradictions. So should poetry be. I wrote the Poetess column at the request of Christian Wiman, then-editor of Poetry magazine, for a humor issue. He asked for either classified poetry ads or an advice column, and I picked the latter because it seemed more open to all the jokes and sarcasms and smart-ass remarks I’d ever thought or made or would make about poetry to that time. And an advice columnist needs a persona, and I thought a dominatrix know-it-all with a heart of gold would be the right kind of persona. Hence the Poetess. And then, it worked very nicely in tandem with some of the themes and strategies of the rest of my book. As for my title poem: it might interest you to know that poem started out as a narrative about two moms with strollers chatting on an urban street corner. But the only part, ultimately, that seemed worth saving was the pimped-out car. I added the Marianne Moore line “I, too, dislike it,” after I cut it down to the car. Two things at the same time, unresolvable: there is women’s poetry. Of course there’s no such thing. I guess one reacts viscerally to a pimped-out car differently than one reacts to, say, my gray ’99 Chevy Prizm, but underneath they both pretty much work the same way. A poem pimped out with menstruation, babies and complaints about boyfriends or husbands is still just a poem underneath, and should be judged as such. What’s it doing, more than what’s it saying. By the way, two reviewers independently claimed the car backing out of the garage in that poem is an image of childbirth. Are they right? I never thought of it before I read those reviews. I picture the midwife: Congratulations, Daisy, you have a beautiful pimped-out coupe.