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10 Questions for Alice Friman


“But I do wish
we had found the courage to use
those purpled hours and put them
to work: defy decorum and undress.
peel off,disrobe, strip down to the very
bones if necessary.” —From “On the Overnight Train” Summer 2019 (Vol. 60, Issue 2)

 

Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
I wrote poems in college. Didn't everyone? Terrible poems of love-longing and seventeen-year-old misery. But the first poem I ever wrote that I worked on and saved I called "Beneath My Heart." I had a friend who was pregnant and I wanted to express, to put into words, the tight clutch of a fetus—that little fist of 3rd month cells, that— well you see, I couldn't do it. I couldn't make the words portray an action even though I worked at it and those eight lines for months. Why couldn't I do that, bend the language enough to get that tight spring? Looking back at it now, I realize that what I was struggling with was how to make an image. But I didn't know that then. When I started to write poetry there was no such thing as an MFA (except maybe in Iowa, but I didn't know that either). I started writing because I loved it. For fourteen years I'd write poems (maybe one a year) and hide them in a drawer. Eventually after three kids and twenty years of marriage, I got a divorce and took the poems out of the drawer. That was the beginning of my second life. I was forty-two.

What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
Truthfully, I don't know how to answer that. Never having had a "teacher" or any sort of formal instruction, if I was influenced by anyone it would have been through the back door; that is to say, through reading the poets I taught and the poets I loved. Shall I make a list? Gerard Manley Hopkins because the work is so gorgeous, Keats because the work is so heartrending, Pope because the work is so clever,Hardy, Yeats, E.A. Robinson, Frost, Levertov, Gluck, Kasischke, Boisseau, Boruch, etc., etc.

What other professions have you worked in?
I taught literature and some creative writing at The University of Indianapolis for many years. And I was the Poet-in-Residence here in Milledgeville at Georgia College from 2003 until last year. I've also done some editorial work for The Georgia Review.

What did you want to be when you were young?
The first movie I ever saw was Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat. I was three years old and knew poetry when I saw it. I wanted to be a dancer. I still do.

What inspired you to write this piece?
I had been reading Primo Levi, and perhaps his stories of the Holocaust put me in mind of my own experiences traveling through eastern Europe and coming face to face with that black hole. But this poem had been in the back of my mind for a long time, just waiting to be written. In a sense it was an easy poem to write because everything in it really happened, and happened exactly as I wrote it: the train, the guards banging on the door, the drawn guns, my burst of sexual desire in the wrong place at the wrong time. And, yes, those little green pills, "so good you can't get them anymore." Indeed, the easy part of writing it was telling the truth; the hard part of writing it was also telling the truth because truthfully I did not regret any of my behavior or what happened. And how could I write that, admit to that? In the first drafts of the poem, I tried to say how much I deplored my unseemly actions. But that just didn't work. I deplored nothing. I regretted nothing. Truth is truth, and if poetry is anything it's that.

Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
I am from the heart of New York City. born and bred. As a child I spent my summers on the empty beaches of Long Island. I started writing seriously when I was in my forties and lived in Indiana—land of corn and soybean. When I add that all up, I am at home in the city, the shore, and the country. But the truth is, I am a loner, happy or unhappy wherever I am.

Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
I have a friend who says she can't write unless her collection of trinkets is on the desk arranged in a certain way. And there's the story of Cezanne who kept old apples in his desk drawer to smell before he could start his day of creation. Or was that Rachmaninoff? Me, I like quiet. Silence. But as far as rituals go or traditions, would I be giving my age away if I said I need the house clean before I can give myself permission to take up the pen? Or that the ironing must be done? (I do that too.)

Who typically gets the first read of your work?
Wendy Barker, a wonderful poet and good friend of mine, is the one person I share my work with, and then, of course, my husband, otherwise and famously known as my "sweet young thing.”

What are you working on currently?
Since I handed in the manuscript for my new book, Blood Weather, due out this fall from LSU, I have to admit I have no great project in mind. I just keep writing poems. What they will add up to in a few years when I look them over with an eye to compiling a new collection, I'll have to wait and see. That part is always exciting, a revelation: Look what I've been thinking about these past few years. Look what haunted me, what pleased me. Who would have guessed?

What are you reading right now?
My husband and I take long car trips and read to each other in the car. We try to stick to the classics:War and Peace, Vanity Fair, Jude the Obscure. One of my favorites was Independent People by Haldor Laxness. We just got home a few days ago from a stint through the Smokies and Jane Eyre. I just finished The Immortal Evening by Stanley Plumly—a wonderful read. And I perpetually immerse myself in the biography of Primo Levi. I just open it up at random and start reading. Too, I read a lot of poetry but can't say I'm finished with anything since I read poetry books over and over. But I am now newly lost in Margaret Gibson's Not Hearing the Wood Thrush and Kate Daniels' incredibly powerful In the months of my son's recovery.     

 

ALICE FRIMAN'S seventh collection of poetry is Blood Weather, forthcoming from LSU in the fall of 2019. New work appears in Ploughshares, Southern Review, Western Humanities Review, Gettysburg Review, and Plume. A recipient of a Pushcart Prize and included in Best American Poetry, she is professor emerita of English and creative writing at the University of Indianapolis and now lives in Milledgeville, GA, where she was poet-in-residence at Georgia College.

                        


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