Courtesy of Daisy Fried.
Daisy Fried is the author of five books of poetry, including the forthcoming My Destination. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Hodder fellowship, and a Pew fellowship in the arts, she is a member of the faculty of the MFA Program For Writers at Warren Wilson College. Zócalo’s poetry curator for October, Fried chatted with us in the green room about coming to terms with Sylvia Plath, writing in the style of poet Zbigniew Herbert, and finding inspiration at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Besides the poets you’ve curated for us, who are you currently reading?
I have been reading my former student Liza Hudock’s forthcoming book called Reveille, which is really great—very surprising, odd, interesting. I’ve also just been reading multiple biographies of Sylvia Plath, and reading through a lot of Ariel. For years and years and years, I haven’t really enjoyed [Plath], so, I thought that, in middle age, I would try again. I’m coming to terms with my distaste. All the things I dislike about her poems, I can understand what their strength is. And one more: I’ve been reading a lot of Zbigniew Herbert, Polish poet. Fascinating guy, one of the greats that should have gotten a Nobel Prize.
What got you into reading Zbigniew Herbert?
I went to Poland this summer, in part because I generally like Polish poets. I was there for 11 days, and I decided I was just going to take one poet, Zbigniew Herbert. I read a bunch of his work. He’s very interesting. He’s dealing with sort of the post-war 20th-century atrocities, living under communist rule, all that kind of stuff. There’s a lot to learn from him. He uses very little punctuation, so I started trying that out: What are the possibilities of creating narratives without punctuation, and how do you control them?
How has the pandemic affected the way you think about poetry or write poetry?
I wrote a whole book about 2020 called The Year the City Emptied. I took 28 poems of [Charles] Baudelaire and ran them through my American, 21st-century woman idiom and nervous system. 2020 was the year my husband died, and that was the pandemic and that was Trump and Black Lives Matter. I don’t necessarily write political poems all the time, but, thinking about human interactions and standoffs, how do people deal with each other? How do people live with each other? How can we be strong in our beliefs but also be tolerant? I feel like that we might be at a place in the world where we could be at a tipping point if we don’t draw back from this precipice.
You’re based in Philadelphia: Where is a place you’d recommend people check out when they visit?
I’m going to give you three places. If you come in warm weather, check out Parks on Tap, which is a traveling pop-up beer garden that moves around different parks in Philadelphia. And then I would say go to the 9th Street Italian Market. It’s a place where you have special food shops and also produce stands. Then, Wissahickon Watershed in northwest Philly, which has 50 miles of trails. It’s great.
If you could have dinner with any person, alive or dead, who would it be, and what would you serve them?
I would serve dinner to friends of mine who live far away, and whom I don’t get to see often enough. The thing about celebrities is, you never know if they’re going to be good company, however much you might admire them and their work. So I’d gather a half dozen or more friends whom I love and who love me, whom I know are entertaining and interesting, and whom I can’t, in real life, just pick up a phone to contact and say, “Hey let’s go get a drink in an hour.” I would serve a big vat of baked sage chicken meatballs with parmesan orzo.
What’s your advice for someone revising a first draft?
Hold off bringing something to a conclusion. Because first drafts, that’s just like pushing the accelerator on a car; you haven’t taken the journey yet. So, my advice would be to try to exist in confusion, as long as possible, to find out where else the poem might like to go.
What’s hanging on your living room walls?
A really beautiful poster of an Anselm Kiefer landscape, which, unlike most Anselm Kiefers, is not sort of gray and dire and disturbed, but actually has very beautiful colors and a very surprising landscape. And I’ve got posters of Paula Rego’s paintings. I’ve used her work on one of my book covers.
What was the last thing that inspired you?
I was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art a week or two ago. One of the installations was Xu Bing’s “Monkeys Reaching for the Moon.” The whole thing was about translating images into different languages and then making those languages into script, and then making those scripts into artworks. And they were made of lacquered birch. Some of it was hard to read, so it was sort of asemic. I just found it—and the whole idea of translation, visual and verbal—very beautiful.