![]() ![]() She can no more keep from listening as her students decompress than she can turn off her sense of irony, as in the second line, when she describes the cohort of Tigers as “Fifteen responsible children.” Her poet’s attention to the world is an occupational hazard (like taking adjunct teaching gigs), and the cream of the world’s youth is only a high-five’s length away. She sketches, with a master’s brush, man-boys in Brooks Brothers suits sprawled on vinyl benches on top of trashed copies of Financial Times. The eye and voice of the poem is exhausted, but Fried is attentive to the dinky microcosm she has stocked for the occasion. Rather, Fried’s “Torment” originates in her eavesdropping, on the verge of sleep, on what these fifteen Princeton Tigers say when they say what they really want. The conflict of the poem is generated by Fried’s company on the train: fifteen Princeton seniors (two of whom are taking Fried’s poetry-writing course) slouching back to campus from Wall Street, where they have spent the day interviewing for jobs that come with enormous salaries and annual bonuses. I hope without expectation that an acute appraisal of “Torment” might lead to a robust questioning of that moral template, and that perhaps we might even set it aside.ĭaisy Fried’s “Torment” is a 214-line, free verse poem in eleven sections (none shorter than a sonnet, none longer than 25 lines) that offers, in real-time narrative and in flashbacks, a complex account of a journey made by a gravid, “not-quite-40” year-old Princeton University Writing Fellow on “the Dinky - // the one-car commuter train connecting // Princeton to the New York line.” Fried has been on a visit to the Big Apple, where she spent the day trying to convince university hiring committees that she’s perfect for adjunct teaching jobs she doesn’t really want. I want you to read it anyway, maybe because this is so. For “Torment is also clearer and more direct than much of the verse we see in contemporary magazines. It does not induce meaning under the pretense that it has none. The implications of “Torment” follow logically, almost simply, from its words and sentences and verse paragraphs. Though its language is loaded, morally, Fried has distanced her poem from the kind of poem-of-moral-instruction that has been one popular template for American poets working since the 1970s. I will do this for two reasons: first, I hope to keep phrases like the speaker or Fried’s speaker from clogging sentence syntax second, I wish to reflect, briefly, before I close this invitation, on how the impersonality of a critical tool like the speaker may deflect or obscure some of the power of a poem like “Torment.”Īt seven pages, “Torment” is longer and more complicated than many American poems published these days. ![]() Instead, I will attribute every move directly to Daisy Fried. In order to describe the poem I’m going to eschew the critical convention of referring to a poem’s speaker, a convention that “Torment” itself upholds. I will characterize the site and the elements of “Torment” and some of its contents, but I will stop short of indicating to you how the narrative arc of the poem unfolds. In the following essay I will describe its construction and set it alongside two important precursors, one from the Italian Renaissance, the other from twentieth century Britain. “Torment” is also a new poem by Daisy Fried, published in Poetry Magazine‘s March 2011 issue. Dante draws explicit and implicit distinctions between the punishments of the damned and the punishments of those who will eventually be saved, and that should torment us whenever we want to privilege the suffering of some people over the supposedly lesser suffering of others. Dante describes so many instances of torment in his Inferno that part of the pleasure of reading Purgatorio is being awed by the poet’s ability invent new ways of twisting the cord. ![]() What graduate student has failed to remark, upon receiving an A-, that her mentor is also her “tormentor”? Hellfire, too, is torment. Our consciences, we say, are tormented by the memories of our past misdeeds. The word is derived from torquere, to twist, as when a rope that is part of an instrument of torture is twisted in order to cause a detainee to admit guilt or to identify members of her cohort. Torment, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary, is great pain or anguish, physical or mental. ![]()
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