Daisy Fried : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

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Here’s Christian Morgenstern’s (1871-1914) “Fisches Nachtgesang,” or, “Fish’s Night Song.”
Fisches%20Nachtgesang.bmp
It’s one more example of American parochialism that nowhere in Bartlett’s Quotations is a line of this poem reproduced.

03.24.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Daisy Fried

Prufrock Moment

There’s a particularly lovely bit in Stephen Colbert’s interview with Elizabeth Alexander the night after the inauguration.
Colbert: [mock-pathetic] “Poems aren’t true, right? They’re made up, right…because I recently read this thing called The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock which is about a guy, you know, in his mid-40s like I am, and he’s facing mortality and he’s got a sense that no matter what his achievement is in life, he’s never really gonna be great. That’s not true, right?
Alexander: [pitch-perfectly playing the straight woman] A poem should be in some way emotionally true…Prufrock might speak to you because there’s something in the poem that resonates, that feels true to you. And that’s how people connect with poems.
Colbert: [mock-distressed] He says ‘I’ve heard the mermaids singing each to each/ I do not think that they will sing to me.’ They—they’re still singing to me, though, aren’t they?
Alexander: [mock-maternally] They are if you want them to be.
Colbert: Desperately!
Prufrock is a comically-delivered tragic poem, of course, and Colbert/Alexander’s comedy on the subject had just enough, well, emotional truth in it, to make it more than poet-insider wisecracking. Maybe it’s a sign of how deprived poets are of any kind of mainstream recognition, but this actually seemed to be the most serious, and seriously informative, non-poetry-world exchange on poetry in a long time. (More informative than many in the poetry world too, come to think of it.)
In any case, it’s a Prufrock moment. Maybe it’s always a Prufrock moment. The Academy of American Poets recently unveiled this year’s National Poetry Month poster.

AAP’s own press release calls the image “Daring”—by which they may mean not stinking of Uplifting Messages of Poetical-Educational Opportunity for the Benighted. I don’t know if the poster is daring, really –the word is thrown around quite a bit—but the Paul Sahre design certainly is startling, elegant, and something of a departure from past Academy efforts.

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02.05.09 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (57)

Daisy Fried

Phillies! Phillies! Phillies!

9:58 pm South Philly—
Whooos, horns honking, somebody hitting what sounds like a cowbell…
we don’t have a TV and didn’t get around to see if it was streaming on-line, but we can always tell what’s happening in a ball game that really matters by the noise in the street. As the New York Times live blogger says “And after 98 seasons of failure in the four major sports, Philadelphia has a championship.”
(Jim reading little bits and pieces of Silliman’s The Alphabet out loud: “Nowhere are the yellow ribbons of the Gulf War larger or more plastic than at the gas station.”)
I had this idea all day that if the Phillies didn’t win the World Series, Obama wouldn’t win the election. Now I feel better.
Girls screaming, guys bellowing tenor phillllllllllllliiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesssss
like Marlon Brando moaning Stellllllllllllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa in Streetcar.
Whoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
(the firecrackers, fireworks, and the first sirens, begin…)
Silliman: “P=H=I=L=A=D=E=L=P=H=I=A” !!!!!!!!!
There go some (cop? news?) helicopters overhead.
phillies%20logo.jpg

10.29.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Daisy Fried

GO PHILLIES!!!!

phillies%20logo.jpg
The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them–
W.C. Williams, from “At the Ball Game”
Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
Marianne Moore, from “Baseball and Writing”

10.16.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Daisy Fried

Vitriol in the Arts

Always glad to see August Kleinzahler, one of the best poets writing today, get some press. Reporters for mainstream papers who write about AK seem to like to ask Billy Collins for a quote about him. In the LA Times recently, BC remarked, on AK’s attacks on the poetry establishment: “All the vitriol…I don’t get it.”
Which makes me ask a question of my own:
Billy—No vitriol? I don’t get it.

08.04.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (33)

Daisy Fried

Good Doggerel

sacco%20and%20vanzetti.jpg
Sacco and Vanzetti in handcuffs
I forget where online I found this, but I saved it in a computer file some months ago and only just came across it again. I suppose it wouldn’t charm me so much if it weren’t for who wrote it–it charms me and gives me a little twinge…
To babies we will their mothers’ love,
To youngsters we will the sun above.
To spooners who wont to tryst the night,
We give the moon and stars that shine so bright.
–Sacco and Vanzetti

06.21.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Daisy Fried

The Pure Products of France

This is a sad story.
We noticed the posters from the first day we were in Paris. “SOS Doudou Perdu!!!” they said in boldface block letters above a photo of a baby’s lovey–a stuffed white dog with an enormous nose, cute eyes and blue ears. I took a picture of it but can’t upload it; the computers at this Avenue Parmentier internet point won’t take my memory card. The posters are full color printouts, with all the elegance of a lost-cat poster and all the pathos of a lost-dog poster.
We notice that the SOS Doudou Perdu posters keep disappearing and being reposted. For who could resist taking one home? French people like children. Not the way Romans like them, with extravagant, voluble bursts of enthusiasm, but by putting little playgrounds all over the place, and carousels and even trampolines in random squares and parks, and by giving everyone free health care and education through university level and a bonus to families that have three children or more. So I believe that many of those who stole the posters did so not only for aesthetic reasons–though that too–but because they fully intended to buy a new Doudou for the child and needed to take along the contact telephone number.
Not realizing that the child didn’t want any Doudou, but the Doudou–the only Doudou.

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05.14.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Daisy Fried

Arson, a Recipe

Last time we were in Paris, in 2004, we were staying in the 20th Arrondisement near Place Gambetta, an upscaling neighborhood on the edge of one of the more multicultural areas of Paris. It was winter and you’d see African women in long traditional dresses and flipflops and their elder kids in flipflops and their younger kids in regular children’s shoes and it wasn’t clear if that was how the money stretched, or if the older kids and mom had been born/grew up in Africa and didn’t like closed shoes while the younger ones were conforming to Western footwear.
New Year’s Eve we planned ot go out and see what was going on. No specific plans; maybe down to Etoile for the fireworks, maybe not, but definitely out. Earlier in the day we’d been down to the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the hideous golden sculpted flame over top of the tunnel where Princess Di died, where to this day people leave notes in memory and dead flowers that wither and fray like autumn leaves all year round. There was a fancy schmancy street market nearby. Jim picked up a duck foie gras for our New Year’s Eve dinner. He also impulse-bought a bottle of Chartreuse. Chartreuse is a spicy green 140 proof liqueur. It is not what makes Gervaise die in a sodden heap of rags under the tenement stairs in Zola’s L’Assommoir (that’s absinthe) but it might as well be.

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05.14.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (1)

Daisy Fried

Opening Day

A few hours before we left for Paris (we are here for a month), William Corbett’s new book from Hanging Loose Press, Opening Day, came in the mail, so I stuck it in my carry-on bag. Our first full day here, we do something we like to do soon after we get off the plane and never again during a trip–walk out the Champs-Elysees from Concorde, sit in an overpriced cafe, and watch other tourists walk up and down in their brand-new Paris-bought outfits. Maisie napped in her stroller. I read Bill Corbett alternating with taking notes on fashions. All following poetry quotes are from Opening Day.
Fortune Cookie
Half moon over Fenway Park
over Vermont’s sawtooth trees
one ear on the ballgame
open book on lap
moths lovetap the screen
the houses are empty
wine calms the jets,
mud settles; mind unclenches
unknots all who were here.
Living is hard: art easier!
Throw strikes! Walks always
come back to haunt you.

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05.14.08 PERMALINK | NO COMMENTS

Daisy Fried

Questions for Fady Joudah

Fady Joudah
1. Your first book of poems, The Earth in the Attic, just came out from Yale University Press, the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award, selected by Louise Gluck. How does that feel?
It feels great, a life well dreamt or a dream well lived. I hope the book is received well, I naturally think its themes of exile and witness to refugees and displaced people in the world are an unusual event in poetry. I hope I was up to the task aesthetically (though I feel good about that with Gluck backing me up, after all she is not received as a socially engaged poet; although I beg to differ). Exiles (as a step up, descendants of the refugee) and, more urgently, the displaced and refugees are world historical individuals, in Hegel’s phrase…a disclaimer: I am not a Hegel specialist: to my mind they define the horrors of the nation-state, which is still a new concept in the world: 40 million displaced people (not counting the homeless and “disenfranchised” citizens of “stable” states) is a number that can not be ignored. These are people who define the other face of the mirror, the dark side that does not reflect us, or so we think.
2. Your son Ziyad was born on March 27th, 2008. What are you thinking about?