photo credit: Shoot for the Moon
Daisy Fried has a great reputation as a talented poet. As well as being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, she’s received Guggenheim, Hodder, and Pew fellowships, as well as a Pushcart Prize and the Cohen Award. As Butler’s visiting faculty last summer, Fried offered an intensive poetry course for Butler MFA students. She was welcomed back last week as a Vivian S. Delbrook visiting writer. She proved to be not only a poet, but also a dynamic entertainer.
Caitlin Dicus is a Poetry MFA student who greatly benefited from the Fried workshop last summer. In her introduction of Fried before the reading last week, Caitlin said, “I walked into a workshop with Daisy Fried one way, and left another…While offering that ‘chewy and sharply observed’ advice, Fried still manages to make a poem the student’s own.”
Photo credit: Shoot for the Moon
Fried’s reading was highly enjoyed by graduates poets, undeclared undergrads, and everyone in between. With poem titles like “My Brother is Getting Arrested Again” and “Torment”, a seven-page poem about a seven-page poem by the same title, Fried set the mood for a contemporary, high-energy reading. Fried herself is a charismatic, likeable force. She began her reading by recalling her past visit to Butler which included a trip to the duck pin bowling lanes. She also interrupted herself during the reading and asked, “Wait. Did I already read that line?” She laughed with everyone and explained, “I started wondering if you think am as nasty as this, and I lost my place.” She started and stopped again. “I’m not this nasty.”
Illustrating she is a rule breaker who likes to write about real life, Fried concluded her reading by asking the MFA director, Hilene Flanzbaum, to co-read her mock poem advice column, “The Poetess.” The two had the entire audience laughing as if they were at a comedy show.
Fried answered a few questions from the audience and gave advice to would-be poets, especially those worried about sounding hokey. “If it’s hokey, go with the hoke,” she said. “Make it hokier.”