Very Funny, Even When It's Sad: An Interview with Daisy Fried
Daisy Fried | The Year the City Emptied: After Baudelaire | Flood Editions | 2022 | 80 Pages
Daisy Fried’s most recent book, The Year the City Emptied, is a collection of translations and brilliant off-the-leash renderings of Baudelaire, written in 2020 in Philadelphia during the first year of the COVID pandemic. At the heart of the book is the harrowing slow death of her husband, Jim Quinn, of “a cruel disease that attacked his body and mind.” Onto Baudelaire’s poems Fried interposes, sometimes with a kind of violence, this story: her grief, fighting Medicaid and an insurance company, and the shifting winds of Philadelphia. Fried is, as Jennifer Moxley says, “a grave robber, revivifying the corpse of Baudelaire to mess with him and help her cope.” The Year the City Emptied is a departure, I think—from her other, more personal poems, so filled with tongue-in-cheek irony—but is still, somehow, unmistakably, Daisy Fried.
Fried and I conversed online together, on Zoom, in April, both in Philadelphia: her from her study in Roxborough, and I from my kitchen in West Philadelphia, in the third spring of the COVID pandemic.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
John Wall Barger: In The Year the City Emptied, I love your translation of Baudelaire’s famous “Reader” poem. I’d never seen mon semblable, in that famous last line, translated as my doppelganger. Your version—which starts, “Blunders, errancy, avarice, and horseshit / Occupy my mind while training my body. / And shall I feed Cousin Remorse / As beggars feed amiable vermin?”—seems to echo Baudelaire’s archaic diction. In this book, I find, compared to your other books, more changes in register from high to low, formal to informal, European to American.
Daisy Fried: I’ve always been interested in shifting diction, shifting tones, partly because I’m impatient. If I’m continuing in one vein, I want to throw a wrench in the works. And partly because I think all language should be available to poetry. I’m always interested in idiomatic propriety, as well as literary propriety, you know? So if I’m writing language as we speak it, rather than literary language—what happens if I interrupt that and get into some more literary language? And vice versa. Baudelaire made that a lot easier and more obvious for me, because in my other poems, to a certain extent, I have to be convincing if I’m writing in the persona of myself. But Baudelaire allowed me to appropriate his register. I guess with translation you’re trying to make the reader feel in the language you’re translating into: what the reader in the original would have felt, would feel. One of the things about French is it’s a romance language, it comes from Latin, and I think that English speakers don’t feel as intensely in Latinate diction. I think we Americans tend to react more emotionally to Germanic-origin words. For example, when my daughter was young, I used to play a game with her. I’d ask, Which is more lovey, hug or embrace? And she would say hug. Because we feel hug more. Embrace is a Latinate word, so it feels more distant, more cool. I wanted as little as possible of that in my versions.
So with Baudelaire, and the whole project, I wanted to have fun with it. Increase the extent to which I was taking peaks of high diction, certain registers, then undercut it. Later in “Reader” I say “Crocodile tears shall washeth my stains,” which is ridiculous, right? It’s me fooling around—nobody says “washeth,” including Baudeliare. I just wanted to get comedy and irony going there. Then I wanted to take it into real self-disgust later on.
JWB: It sounds like some of your translation choices had to do with who you were aiming these poems at. I assume that you’re not really aiming this—or perhaps any of your poems?—at academics. Somebody with a rod up their ass is not going to love your poems, which I assume is all right with you. If the Latinate does excite some tweedy character who teaches at Harvard, perhaps you don’t mind excluding them.
DF: Although, I mean, Stephanie Burt teaches at Harvard, and she doesn’t have a rod up her ass, but I know what you mean. [laughs] I’m not a scholar of Baudelaire so I might be wrong, but I believe he was writing at a time when there were very strict rules for verse in French. He wanted to adhere to those rules while also taking us into the depths of depravity. Combining certain content with certain forms; messing around with received ideas of what poetry should be versus breaking the rules of poetry in any way he could get away with. So I like to think he wouldn’t mind that I was messing around in this way. Sometimes the intrusions are smaller. The poem “Music,” a short poem, sticks fairly close to the expression and the feeling of Baudelaire. That one felt too close to a translation—who needed it?—so I stick in “mega emotions,” just to put that other register *splat* in the middle of the poem. Sometimes it would just be my sense of: Am I making a poem I’m interested in? Which is what I feel about my own wholly original poems. Am I interested in this poem, and where do I get bored with it? How can I make it more interesting to myself?
JWB: In your warmhearted forward to The Year the City Emptied you say, “Over... weeks and months I tried another, and another, and each poem I did seemed to have something to say about life in 2020, about illness, about losing one’s beloved, in a corrupt, violent, economically spiraling country led by an incompetent malignant narcissist.” How did you arrive at this project as a book?
DF: I started it by accident. My husband was dying. I didn’t have very much time, and I didn’t have very much help for a long time. It was sort of a desperate act, to try to get some time to myself in 2020. Maybe you find this, that when a poem is going well, it’s like you’ve had brain chiropracty, or like suddenly you’re pulling rabbits out of a hat. It doesn’t happen very often, but the world makes sense again for a moment when the poem is working. This was a place I could go for that, where I could go and be myself, and not just be a nursemaid, a person who was basically going nuts with my husband dying. It actually made me be a sane person. I really hate saying that, because I don’t like treating poetry as therapy; I don’t think we are better people for being poets; I don’t think poetry is healing. And yet the act of working on this saved me from... something. It gave me a sense that I am still Daisy, I still have a brain, I am still putting something out.
I didn’t know I was writing a book for a while, because I’m kind of modest about my books. I don’t write project books. I just write poems. And I really was just doing this to keep my hand in. My husband, also a writer, was always my first and best reader, and then when he was really sick, he could no longer read. His mind was affected by his disease. And that was horrible for him. But for the first half dozen of these poems, he was still lucid enough for me to be able to read them to him. And he was very encouraging. I thought that was a sign that maybe his mind was going already [laughs], because in the past he would always tell me what was wrong with my drafts. Either I was doing incredibly good on all of these, or maybe he just didn’t know how to critique anymore. But he did say, pretty early on, that I should collect these into a book. So I did. Basically, I took his advice. I decided I was going to try to write a book. In a way, to honor him. I wanted it to be a book because it was one of his last artistic suggestions to me.
JWB: I’ve been reading The Year the City Emptied at the same time as your 2006 book, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, and thinking about voice. In the earlier book, your voice is beautifully “loose”; it invites me in warmly, with all these little parenthetical asides, idiomatic expressions, and exclamations. But in The Year the City Emptied, I feel a trammeling, a holding back of voice. I was wondering if, first, you felt that and, if so, if it was liberating.
DF: Well, I didn’t feel held back. It felt like ventriloquizing. Putting on a mask, or taking on a voice that wasn’t my own, but that allowed me to see things and express things in a certain new way. For each of Baudelaire’s poems, I was generally rewriting them from beginning to end, so most of the structures—how you get from the beginning to the end of the poem—are similar to the original. In “Daybreak,” which comes from his “Le Crépuscule du matin,” Baudelaire begins with a sound ringing out (“La diane chantait dans les cours des casernes, / Et le vent du matin soufflait sur les lanternes”—“Reveille sang in the barrack courtyards / And the morning wind blew on the lanterns.”) I wanted to start with a sound, but I changed it from the trumpet rousing the soldiers to “Helicopters sang out”—that sound waking South Philly. I insert a lot into that one; it’s one that pulls fairly far away from the original. But I stay close to his ending—“Et le sombre Paris, en se frottant les yeux / Empoignait ses outils, vieillard laborieux”—with the “old worker,” Philly, in my poem, grabbing up her tools again as “dawn crawls up the Schuylkill.” Baudelaire’s dawn “S’avançait lentement” (“advances slowly”) on the Seine. I wanted to retain images and I wanted to retain arc, and a lot of times when Baudelaire would switch the subject or focus in ways that surprised me, I would try to switch focus as well, or swerve or turn the poem.
So I had places I needed to start, places I needed to go. I also gave myself permission to do it any way I wanted to, so I didn’t have to follow those rules if I didn’t want to. It’s not as though Baudelaire has suffered from lack of more faithful translation. And sometimes I didn’t follow those rules. Baudelaire is intensely self-centered; I think of him as a perimenopausal woman [laughs]. He makes a big fuss, a big deal about things, all the time. He’s not a cool cat. And, working on this book, I got to be less of a cool cat. Less loose. I got to heighten my emotions. Because I was feeling all these heightened emotions. My usual tendency is to joke and be ironic and... not to avoid emotion, but not to be like, “Look at me and my emotion! I’m suffering so much!” I don’t usually feel that my poems should simply be a display of my own sensibility. But I got to try on his hysteria, his drama-queen-ness. And I enjoyed that, because I am that inside. But I don’t let the world see it very much. [laughs]
JWB: “Daybreak” is one of my favorites. So much Philadelphia in it: the helicopters, the insurance adjuster, the ATM getting blown up. By the way, I know that happened to ATMs all over, but my wife and I heard one getting blown up just a block from where we live in West Philly, on 42nd and Baltimore Ave. And I love Philadelphia as “that old worker” at the end.
DF: And Philly is an old worker, you know? Paris in the 19th Century, at the time Baudelaire was writing, was having big changes. Putting the boulevards in, knocking down a lot of old houses. Things were changing in a big way. And that moment of change, and that moment of clash between the new and the old, felt very Philadelphia, to me, especially in 2020, when it sometimes felt like a neutron bomb had hit our city.
JWB: I’d love to talk to you more about the sense of place in Year the City Emptied, which, in poems like “Temper” and “Twilight,” seems to be set in Philadelphia, but also possibly in Paris. As I was reading, I had this sense of frisson—a kind of flickering back and forth from Paris to Philadelphia. Both places happening at once in the reader’s mind. Whenever there was a “Baudelaire” word, I was in Paris, and then when I sensed “Daisy,” I felt the switch to Philly.
DF: I’ve spent a lot of time in Paris, but not recently. Most recently, about 2012. I wandered around Paris a lot, modern Paris, and parts of Paris that aren’t so touristy. I wouldn’t say I know Paris any better than I know French [laughs], but I’ve put in some time on both. I was interested in tagging Baudelaire and coming back home, tagging Paris and coming back home. Not pretending these were totally my poems, and not pretending they were totally Baudelaire’s poems either.
JWB: Tagging as in Facebook or graffiti?
DF: Tagging as in “Tag, you’re it!” Touching that place, touching this place. I was interested in stitching together in dynamic interaction. Americans have a lot of associations with Paris, either from going there, or from seeing it in movies, reading about it in books, so the idea of Paris in a poem is going to create associative layering even when it’s set in Philly. After all, the Ben Franklin Parkway is modeled on the Champs-Elysees.
JWB: I’d like to ask about humor in your poems. For clear reasons, there’s less humor in Year the City Emptied than in your other books. But I love how you use humor in your work!
DF: I think life is very funny, even when it’s sad. That’s almost all I have to say about that. [laughs] I mean, I don’t want to exclude registers from poems. In “The Goose,” which isn’t a funny moment in The Year the City Emptied, I’m talking about the husband being the ruins of a city: “I don’t want to say I’m gnawed by longing / For a man like a city, city like a man / Whose mind’s a ruined city— / I’m bored with these feelings they call grief.” That’s the weird frickin’ thing about grief, that I can’t stay there all the time. Even early on in Jim’s illness, there were many things to laugh about. And that’s just my personality, you know. Jim had a big sense of humor. If you’re walking too seriously through life, taking yourself too seriously, it’s not—. Of course you have to take yourself seriously, right? And of course I take myself seriously. I’m very serious about my writing. I’m serious about my teaching. But I don’t think seriousness is the opposite of laughter. Laughter doesn’t tend to win prizes as much, because people really like the announcement of seriousness. I like to avoid anything that’s too monotone. Something that’s fooling around all the time is going to be as problematic as something that’s completely gloomy.
I don’t know if this story is appropriate to tell right now, but... So my daughter was taking French when she was in eighth grade, and they were reading Jacques Prévert, the French poet, in French. Very simple French. So his name is “Prévert” and she came home and said, “It’s a good thing the r and the e weren’t switched.” You know, pervert. This was when Jim was dying, and he was in hospice at 17th and Lombard. She came to visit. Really to say goodbye to him. And I said, he might still be listening a little bit, you should tell him that story. He was still interacting at that point, that day. So she told him that story, she had to repeat it over and over again, and then all of a sudden he said “pervert” and he laughed. And that was practically the last thing he said to her! I think that’s indicative of the whole idea: he’s dying, and she knows he’s dying, and she’s a kid, and she doesn’t know what to do, and we’re at the hospice. A really crazy moment. But she says this and he gets it and it’s funny, you know? It’s purely funny that he got it.
JWB: Are you ready for my corny question?
DF: Yes.
JWB: What is your hope for poetry?
DF: I hope people continue to read it. And I want people to read it—this is going to sound problematic—the way I read it. [laughs] Not for poetry’s aspirations, but for what it is. People want poetry to be, say, an expression of truth. Or a tool for redressing injustice. For shifting power away from people who are abusing power. I’m all for those things. But I think reading poetry needs to be just looking at what the poem is. And letting it be what it is: language on the page, an artwork made of words. Letting it be complicated and unresolvable. And letting poems and poets have mixed intentions. And letting poets fail at what they’re doing. Letting poets be ambitious for their work, without worrying about what will happen if they fail at their ambitions. I want poems to be respected as artworks made of language, and not as something useful for something else. It may end up being useful for something else. Poetry may well have utility, but that shouldn’t be required. It shouldn’t be required that poems heal, or bring about political reform—I say that as the poetry editor of Scoundrel Time, a literary journal that concentrates on the political. It shouldn’t be required to be revolutionary or to make huge statements or to make statements at all. That’s not really what most poets are going for. Most poets are just trying to make an artwork that feels, whatever their thematic content, dynamic, and dare I say, entertaining.
Daisy Fried was born in Ithaca, New York, and grew up in Albany. She is the author of four collections of poetry: The Year the City Emptied (2022); Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice (2013); My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (2006), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and She Didn’t Mean to Do It (2000), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. Fried has written prose about poetry for Poetry, The New York Times and The Threepenny Review, and has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and the Cohen Award from Ploughshares. Fried is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at The University of the Arts, and lives in Philadelphia.