An Interview with Daisy Fried

Very Funny, Even When It’s Sad: An Interview with Daisy Fried

Interviewer: In your warmhearted forward to The Year the City Emptied you say, “Over… weeks and months I tried another, and another, and each poem I did seemed to have something to say about life in 2020, about illness, about losing one’s beloved, in a corrupt, violent, economically spiraling country led by an incompetent malignant narcissist.” How did you arrive at this project as a book?

Daisy Fried: I started it by accident. My husband was dying. I didn’t have very much time, and I didn’t have very much help for a long time. It was sort of a desperate act, to try to get some time to myself in 2020. Maybe you find this, that when a poem is going well, it’s like you’ve had brain chiropracty, or like suddenly you’re pulling rabbits out of a hat. It doesn’t happen very often, but the world makes sense again for a moment when the poem is working. This was a place I could go for that, where I could go and be myself, and not just be a nursemaid, a person who was basically going nuts with my husband dying. It actually made me be a sane person. I really hate saying that, because I don’t like treating poetry as therapy; I don’t think we are better people for being poets; I don’t think poetry is healing. And yet the act of working on this saved me from… something. It gave me a sense that I am still Daisy, I still have a brain, I am still putting something out…