Poetry Matters Home Notes from Milledgeville Essays on poetry matters by Martin Lammon Poets Who Matter Poems, interviews, essays, and more, featuring a poet who matters to me and, I hope, to you Poems that Matter A poem, past or present, formal or free verse, that matters. Reader Response Selected correspondence from readers who matter News that Matters Links to Internet media articles on poetry, other news and events Arts & Letters home The web pages of the print version of Arts & Letters
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	Photo by Lillian Elaine Wilson	What is a “far tar” poet? She is exuberant and sexy, book smart and street smart, a lover of words and the world. Someone who learns from students, and from whom students learn. Someone who finds insight and wisdom in the most unlikely places: lions mating, or ladybugs swarming a “fire tower,” or friends playing a game of dictionary and discovering the “The Mythological Cod.” Alice Friman is a “far tar” poet indeed. —ML	Martin Lammon introduces Alice Friman I first met Alice Friman when she came to my campus in the fall of 2001 as part of the Georgia Poetry Circuit. I picked her up in Atlanta and immediately got lost. Talking to Alice, it’s easy to lose yourself: she has an intimate intellect and energy that captivate you, and soon we were talking about poetry, living in the Midwest (Alice is from New York but lived and taught for many years in Indianapolis; I am from Ohio), love, death, parents and children.... A year later, Alice and her husband, Bruce Gentry (a renowned scholar of the works of Flannery O’Connor), moved to Milledgeville and became colleagues and friends. Alice Friman’s compelling poems reflect her natural intellect and intimacy, and just when you think her poems are casual renditions of conversational speech, Friman crafts an image, a whisper, a sonic boom, and you know you are in the presence of a poet who understands her craft, a poet who matters, whose poems matter to us and to future readers. Friends, I am pleased to recommend Alice Friman. Enjoy! Would you like to recommend a “Poet Who Matters”? See Reader Response for details. Poets Who Matter Past appearances: links to a poet’s home page or other Internet web page Alice Friman
	LISTEN to an interview with Alice Friman from the “Writers at Cornell” Spring 2007 Readers Series. READ Alice Friman’s essay “The Office,” an elegy to Susan Atefat-Peckham, originally published in Arts & Letters #12 (fall 2004). ORDER Alice Friman’s most recent books: The Book of the Rotten Daughter (BkMk Press, 2006) and Zoo (University of Arkansas Press, 1999). Below are three poems by Alice Friman that I love. You can read more poems, and learn more about Alice Friman, at her home page. I hope you will take time to check her out!
	Three Poems by Alice Friman Printer Friendly Version Far Tar And who was I with my New York cawfee, sticking in r’s where they’re not or erasing them, as in Hedder Gablah or Emmer—guess who—Bovary? So I kept my face still, not wanting to be impolite in case I hadn’t heard correctly, but then he said it again—Far Tar. He was talking about its steps being so slicked with ladybugs, the rangers had to post Keep Off, so dangerous they were, and what a shame, because this Far Tar was the forest’s most popular attraction. But by then, not grasping what mystery he was going on about, I was gone, slipped down the slide of Far Tar and into the pitch of it. A tar baby “pitched past pitch of grief,” as Hopkins said, and beyond sense. How far is Far Tar? How many miles of asphalt does it take to get there? Imagine a road of good intentions, stretching farther, further than Dorothy’s yellow brick and tar black to boot. A road of no return and less traveled by, but not paved with grief or the sludge of sin from Dante’s fifth bolgia, but just going on and on, zigzagging mountains, canyons, and herds of wild horses, then up and down and across the frozen steppes slippery with history thundering across the Russias. And what’s too Far Tar? Hawthorne’s Major Molineux tarred and feathered beyond recognition. That’s Far Tar. Or what about the British sailor lost to the opium dens of Shanghai then dumped in the Whangpoo whose venerable carp still haunt the spot of his sinking—his last breath, bubbles clinging to the weeds? So far from afternoon tea, from Mother and the playing fields, the mushy peas of home, and brussel sprouts. I call that a far Tar. A cold Tar. Coal tar, obtained from a distillation of bituminous coal, used for the “heartbreak of psoriasis” or explosives. Get that stuff over you and that’s Far Tar. Or go to North Carolina, where the Tar River rising in the north flows a fair and far 215 miles south. But that’s wrong, a misnaming if there ever was one, for Graves says tar means west, Ægean for the dying sun grateful for a west to crawl into each night on bloody knees. If so, Far Tar is a synonym for tar doubled—Tartar. Not a sauce for fish, but for a west beyond the West, beyond the beyond and over the edge, where the grinding gates of Tartarus open for us all. Who’d have thought this man manning the desk at the visitor’s center was a historian of such magnitude? To speak of Far Tar and know it for what it is—Argus-eyed and foreboding, as if it rose in the midst of the forest, tall as a fire tower, to remind us of the long climb and the steps made slick with ladybugs who seem more and more like us, forgetting the fiery house and the smell of children burning. Originally published in The Gettysburg Review; also included in Alice’s collection The Book of the Rotton Daughter (BkMk Press, 2007) ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Art & Science In chemistry, what’s severed looks to latch on to any other severed thing: orphaned electrons zizzing in your wires race to embrace, swirl a DC-do-ing, re-form their rings. Chemistry likes adherence, every tick its tock. Split an atom. What a noise! Then is it not passing strange when molecules into proteins make and muster into muscle, teeth, bone, knee, that when this vast multitude jostling under skin wakes, it wants to be alone? What did Greta Garbo have on me? Outside my window the great poplar tosses her leaves hand to hand like so much change as if she were rooted to a corner waiting for a bus. How antsy she is for all this autumn fuss to be over. Who knows but that November rains whet the appetite for cold: the annual jettison of gold to stripped-down shudder and pause. The air holds its breath. Listen. One red dot on a bare branch, singing. In here, the violin’s one note at a time. Originally published in Poetry. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Permanent Press When I think of that summer, it opens like a pleat in cloth: lake, tree, out- blooming itself. What deep delicious yardage of suffering: the virginal July we defended, all the while itching willful and goatish. Five hundred larks rising from the fields and all I could do was stare at the scar on your arm— the gold embroidery I longed to touch. What difference that time and pharmacology delivered too late? I loved you then in the old way of longing. Four wars, nine recessions, ten presidents: patches. Each year another July flings her ribboned hat into the ring, another summer trying to duplicate ours. Who were we on that park bench that defies being folded and put away? Forget it. Are you still alive? The rest is gibberish. Originally published in Poetry. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Return to Arts & Letters: Poetry Matters Go to Reader Response to make a comment