Daisy Fried

My poems are about relationships, sex, work, family. They're action-packed, linguistically adventurous, socially-aware and urban.

I like things to happen in them: characters move. They gesture, skateboard, drive, dance, weave, bellow, have sex, fight, shop, clean, put on makeup, more.

I like quick cuts, changes of pace, mixings of dictions inside a poem. Sometimes these poems violate literary and idiomatic properties. Cadences of colloquial speech may get broken by metaphorical flights, or the speaker of the poem might suddenly interrupt herself, blurting in the midst of a lyric passage.

These poems value immediacy and "realness," but also value a backwards kind of linguistic artifice: they sound almost natural; aren't found in nature. They tell stories that have song and song-sounds in them.I hope they are book-smart and street-smart.

I write poetry because I have to, to find out what I think, to be better able to see the world.
 

2000

New Year's Eve, it's 6 p.m. Bar door
on the corner opens and closes, it's just
silver slipping and slamming but first
a run of heat through the door, the shine
in the black of spigots and mirrors
and bottles and desire without method
and two men on some stools, womanless, elbows
slid together, cardboard hats reading "ew Yea"
in glitter that rains down and the door
shuts. Puddles by the curb, a little jazz
of rain. A girl down there showing her teeth
to a man, her voice all made of sirens
and rocks and dirty butter and cheap stockings,
preg again or out of dope or don't hit me
or don't leave me or what will I do
or take me with you and silence. Where the
wind goes when there is no wind. What
you will never be because you don't know
how to want to. If you cannot take me
under cover of night, if you cannot save
the whole world, what will become of me?

- from She Didn't Mean to Do It, by Daisy Fried; (c) Daisy Fried, reprinted by permission of the author and University of Pittsburgh Press