Anna Kirk reviews
by Philip Fried
The New York poet Philip Fried has been editing The
Manhattan Review since he founded it back in 1980, so is well-used to
reading through vast swathes of poetry by various poets from various countries
and then compiling his selection in an interesting and appealing way for
readers. It must be a very different business compiling a book of one’s own
work however; sifting through past collections, making old poems sit coherently
with both each other and the more recently written. Yet the construction of Early/Late
proves successful. It is comprised of selected poems from his previous four
collections: Mutual Trespasses (1988), Quantum Genesis (1997), Big
Men Speaking to Little Men (2006), and Cohort (2009), opening with a
series of new poems entitled The Emanation Crunch.
Being new to Fried’s work (which, having read this extensive
volume, seems absurd to me now), my first impression of him came from his most
recent poems. The Emanation Crunch is high concept poetry and unvaried
in theme. It is a reaction to the current economic crisis and the modern
technological world, with Fried absorbing and engaging with the corporate
slogans and advertising lingo that has become so common and integrated in our
everyday language. These poems read like memos and statements sent down from
big businesses, ‘Our mission: to work as instruments of financial faith
by/restoring credible options for the global marketplace’ (‘From the Mortality
Desk’). Yet Fried interweaves this faceless and all-too-recognisable rhetoric
with biblical language. He plays with the idea of heaven being like a business,
with all its hierarchy and doctrines. ‘Celestial, Inc’ is addressed to a worker
laid off due to a downsizing: ‘I wish/you every success in your post-salvation
existence’. The comparison of heaven and profitable companies is also present
in earlier collections, with angels being represented as ‘the vice presidents
of creation,/promoted and promoted but only so high…/exposed by the slash of
the heavenly accountant (‘The Angels Laugh’). Fried draws out the humour in
this recurring idea, imagining the room service in ‘Heavenly Enterprises’ as
being ‘run by the Four Prophets, Izzy, Jerry, Zeke and Mike’, and creating a
twitter account for God, each stanza of ‘Following Him on Twitter’ being around
140 characters long and written in a self-consciously biblical language.
Along with a wry humour, there is a musicality to Fried’s
words. He riffs on Villon’s ‘Ballade des dames du temps jadis’ (which was, of
course, originally set to music) in his own ‘Ballade (of the Brands of Future
Times)’. He replaces the names of famous women with names of brands, and
repeats the refrain ‘Where is the imminent blizzard of brandable names’ in this
formally constructed poem with its ubi sunt motif and appropriately hymn-like
quality. It questions a higher power, projecting investors with an omniscience
and omnipotence akin to God’s. Song is used in a different, yet just as
experimental, way in ‘Karaoke’, which uses Frank Sinatra’s classic ‘My Way’ as
the structure for a poem about Einstein:
‘…As I face the final curtain
I sing with the Theory of Everything, minus one:
I do it my way.’
The selection from Mutual Trespasses is in a freer
style than the new poems, and the language is refreshing following the highly
stylised specialist lexicon. It is unusual yet beautiful, such as in ‘On
Genesis’:
‘…God was urging the phloem to outlive empires,
and simultaneously He was wheedling
the unborn spirit of the truculent flea
to nurse its grudges in a wingless body’
Fried knows the power of individual words, and explores this
in ‘The Good Book’, which sees God reading the dictionary definition of ‘God’:
‘No picture/but just above are photos/of a “gnu” and a “goatee”’. In the
dictionary, God becomes just ‘the rattle of a word/radiant and small’. Yet He
presides over the whole of Fried’s work; the vulnerable deity that Fried
creates at any rate. In the poem ‘Little God’ from Quantum Genesis, the
voice of the poem asserts that ‘the purpose of a god/is never to answer’. It is
Fried who has the voice, the power of the word. He boldly uses it, whether it
is to take on the persona of God in various unusual situations (such as having
crackers with Grandma in her parlour, or sitting in his bathtub, or making
bouillabaisse) or if it is to create a poem in the voice of a snowflea. ‘My
voice’s fingers pluck you out of nothing’ ends ‘Contemporary Prayer’. This can
be applied to poetry itself, using the poet’s voice to create something out of
nothing.
It is the penultimate section Big Men Speaking to Little
Men in which the title poem for the whole collection of selected works is
found. Early/Late was written in response to 9/11, yet uses Amsterdam as
a city blueprint with its bridges and canals. Throughout the whole of Big
Men…, Fried’s phrases run like water along canals, with a freedom of
movement that takes the reader to his childhood, to Maine, to the d’Orsay, to
the Place de Vosges, to Spring Lake… Fried may be from New York, in the centre
of ‘Panic Boulevard, Turmoil Plaza, Faltering Bridge’ (‘Father They Value as
the Dawn’), but he, like O’Hara, and in the spirit of the New York School, can
walk to places much farther afield with the reader - in the mind, in memory and
imagination – and document with lyricism the immediacy of moments:
‘…A door like the sideways lid
to a music box has opened
on the melody of teaspooned laughter
at breakfast.’
(‘Indian
Summer at Spring Lake’)
Fried ends the selected poems with a sonnet series that
appears in the collection Cohort. In his notes he explains that it is
the 13th century Italian poet Giacomo da Lentini who is credited
with inventing the sonnet. Da Lentini was also a notary involved in legal
proceedings, so it is no surprise that debate and argument should be integral
to the form. He incorporates both in these sonnets, writing of the modern world
using this age-old and traditional poetic form, and self-consciously so: ‘I set
up the motherboard circuits for these sonnets’ (‘Son Net’). Again, the idea of
voice is drawn out and explored, most notably in ‘The Oral Tradition’, in which
Fried sets down in italics:
‘…I search out a motif, to mend the story
that holds the world together by word of mouth.’
If that is not the role of a poet, I don’t know what is. The
corporate language that saturates sections of his work is orally spread
throughout our metropolitan lives, inescapable and unrelenting. Fried uses this
cleverly, creating admirable, though-provoking poems. However, I think it is in
his less tricksy, less high-concept works, with their freer phrasing and
imaginative yet true observations, where his motifs are most mending, and most
beautiful to speak aloud, to pass on by word of mouth.
Anna Kirk lives and works in London, and is currently studying for an MA in Poetry at Royal Holloway.
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