DORINE JENNETTE CONTINUES THE CONVERSATION: ALICE FRIMAN
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One of the great pleasures of my brief tenure as assistant to the editors of The Georgia Review (2006–2007) was talking shop with poet Alice Friman, then on staff as a temporary assistant editor. She was the first person I thought of when offered a chance to conduct some brief interviews for this website. In particular, I thought Friman’s charms, including her quick, acerbic wit and her way with a wild intuitive leap, would be shown to advantage by a wacky interview format inspired by Albert Goldbarth’s “Why All This Music?” (Winter 2009), in which the poet interviews himself with questions he draws from literary sources. Following his lead, I decided the Winter issue should interview one of its writers with questions drawn from the issue’s text. Pulling questions out of their literary contexts makes them nearly non sequiturs, but I hoped that a quick-witted writer’s replies to such queries would generate a sort of verbal Rorschach test, and reveal a mind.
An issue of The Georgia Review is a kind of conversation, a dinner party in which some of the guests are old friends, while others have never met. I wanted to find a way to extend that conversation, to keep talking shop with Alice Friman. The issue hosted the party. (The Spring 2010 issue invites J. Allyn Rosser to the table. Thereafter, who knows who might turn up?)
“And what is it that makes a sentence beautiful, gives it its music?” 1
Ah, but that really is a double question, isn’t it? And I’m not so sure those two things—music and beauty—go together all the time. I like to think of “beauty” the way Keats did—that which stuns. After all, beauty was his great theme, what nature was to Wordsworth. If it is to change our lives it must stop us in our tracks. So we’re not talking necessarily about a lyrical line here, a music. No. There is something in “beauty” that’s a little terrifying. Well, Rilke said that and Edmund Burke too, speaking of the sublime. In other words, beauty isn’t necessarily pretty. They aren’t synonyms for each other. Pretty is pleasing; beauty shakes you up.
Since I am inclined to write lyrical phrases—musical phrases if you will—because I dance and love music and, well, that’s the way the words come out, I strive usually at the end of poems, sometimes in the middle, to undercut myself in order to, hopefully, raise “pretty” to a degree of “beauty.” What does that mean? Well, sometimes it means a quick switch from lyricism to starkness (see the end of “Rock-a-Bye”).2 Of course such a switch must fit the subject matter. Once when I read that poem, I heard a gasp in the audience; surely that was from more than what the subject matter was. It was the sudden switch of tone and the language that went with it. Or the last two lines of “Art & Science,” 3 wherein I switch from playful language using much interior rhyme and wordplay to a straightforward, stripped-down line that illustrates what the poem was really about—simplicity. Sometimes the switch is from a discursive tone to a highly lyrical one, a comic one to a serious one, or a switch from a narrative to an emotional plunge over a cliff. How much is thought out beforehand? Not much.
I sure do like this Kathleen Wakefield poem: the mystery of it, how Wakefield gives only a glimpse, and even of that we are not sure, for we see only through the eyes of the narrator husband who says, plain-as-Jane, “I believe in what I see.” What the wife, on the other hand, “sees” or, that is, has seen “that day” and also at the hour of her implied death is not the only mystery here, for what is the nature of this marriage anyhow when one partner’s “patience / . . . could drive a person crazy”? One mustn’t be hard on this narrator and take the easy way, saying he, being so unimaginative, cannot comprehend what signals signal from behind the veil. It’s not easy being married to a saint. I could be funny here and say, Just ask my two husbands. But the first one’s dead and the other has lost most of his hair. Perhaps that’s answer enough.
But talking about mystery, I always think my best work results in poems that are mysterious to me not only while I’m writing them but even after they’re finished. In other words, knowing I hit the mark even though I can’t see where it landed, and thus being sure that something is true even though I can’t explain how or why. Those are the pieces I’m always relieved an interviewer doesn’t ask me about. Hmmm.
Well, now that the BIG mystery has come up, the issue says, cheekily:
“I’ve decided I want to go
complaining and resistant and requiring
of effort to get: the way the meat
leaves the leg of the crab.” 5
You?
Oh, but I do love that Goldbarth fellow. I swear, the man can do anything. Take these lines—how he flips the image from active to passive, making the passive active. The actor becoming the acted upon. How he wants to die resistantly, if not putting up a fight then at least hiding out, huddled in the dark cringing from the great hook. You want me, then come and get me! One’s death, not the inevitable giving into but a stubborn holding out, reminding us, of course, of Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Ah Death, that great democracy, that great unavoidable. That great topic for poetry. And why not, for if you ignore that fairy tale about flapping off somewhere after that final gasp, it’s the knowledge of death that makes life worthwhile, precious even. After all, the opposite of nothing is something. And that something, whatever its makeup, is, in this beautiful and dangerous world, all we have.
I too write about death. Maybe all poems are about death, or at least a stay, a pause in the face of it. Or as I say at the end of “Autobiography: The Short Version”:
“How else are we supposed to live,
seeing the boulders in the field sporting
their blue brooches of lichen or the cold night sky
tipsy in sequins and runaway fire?” 6
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Alice Friman’s new book of poetry, Vinculum, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in 2011; her most recent volume is The Book of the Rotten Daughter (BkMk Press, 2006). Other new work has appeared in the journals Boundary 2, Shenandoah, and Field, as well as in the Best American Poetry 2009.
Dorine Jennette is the author of Urchin to Follow (The National Poetry Review Press, 2010), and her poetry and prose have appeared in such journals as the Journal, Coconut, Court Green, Puerto del Sol, and New Orleans Review. She lives in Davis, California.
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1 Martha G. Wiseman, “In Rehearsal,” The Georgia Review (Winter 2009): 656.
2 Alice Friman, “Rock-a-Bye,” The Georgia Review (Spring 2009): 121–22.
3 Alice Friman, “Art & Science,” Poetry (July/August 2007): 292.
4 Kathleen A. Wakefield, “Father to Son,” The Georgia Review (Winter 2009): 673.
5 Albert Goldbarth, “Why All This Music?” The Georgia Review (Winter 2009): 588.
6 Alice Friman, “Autobiography: The Short Version,” The Georgia Review
(Spring 2007): 8.
