What is the working title of the book?
Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice, which has just been “released from the warehouse” which means you should be able to acquire it now, or shortly. See my "books" page on this website for a link to order it.
Where did the idea come from for the book? It didn't come from any idea. I write poems and when I have enough for a collection, I see how they fit together. The title poem of the book pays homage to Marianne Moore by starting the same way she started her poem "Poetry"--"I, too, dislike it"--and then riffs for a few lines about a pimped-out car. The title is both perfectly sincere and entirely tongue-in-cheek.
What genre does your book fall under? Poetry. Mock advice.
What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition? Since my "I" is not me, it could be anybody. But many of the poems are written in the persona of myself. In my early 20s my then-boyfriend introduced me to his buddy, whose name I believe was Donny or Donno or some such and Donno-Donny said "Dude, what's with the Sigourney Weaver chick." A few years later I was having dinner with a bunch of French chocolatiers (my husband was a food writer at the time and got invited to these things and I went along as his date) and one of them said "Yoo look lak An-DEE macdo-WELL." Be that as it may I’m not particularly fond of either of these actresses, so I think I would like to be played by a handsome large-boned lesser British character actress who gets good but not great parts in BBC mini-series. Someone with good posture, though.
What is the one sentence synopsis of your book? I loathe describing my own poetry so my husband kindly wrote the following (I can’t see any good reason to edit it down to one sentence): Daisy Fried’s third book of poetry is a book of unsettling, unsettled Americans. Fried finds her Americans everywhere, watching Henry Kissinger leave the Louvre, trapped on a Tiber bridge by a crowd of neo-fascist thugs, yearning outside a car detailing garage for a car lit underneath by neon lavender, riding the train with Princeton seniors who have been rejected by recession-bound Wall Street, feeding stray cats drunk at midnight, bitching at her mother in the labor room, shopping with wide-bodied hunters for deer-dismembering band saws in the world’s largest supplier of seasonal camouflage, cursing her cell phone and husband at eighty-five miles an hour, hiding behind the mask of an advice column to proclaim Charles Bukowski “America’s greatest poetess.” There is nothing like this book, because there is nothing in it but America. No comfort, no consolation, no life-affirming pats on the back, no despair about God, no fear or acceptance of death, no irrational exuberance, no guilt or weariness, no misery even in the middle of personal and political crisis. Plenty of humor and plenty of seriousness. Joy. And a new kind of poetry: not nice, but rich and real.
How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? I wrote most of the poems between 2006 and 2012. I think there's one really old one that I didn't put in my first or second book but finally decided to put in my third book (but I'll never tell which).
Who or what inspired you to write this book? Inspiration is more or less a myth.
What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? The advice part of it is a series of satirical letters in which a narcissistic know-it-all called "The Poetess" (any resemblance to real persons living or dead is entirely coincidental) answers desperate letters seeking for poetry advice.
Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency? It's published by University of Pittsburgh Press. Which is neither self-publication or agency. Who came up with these questions anyway?
Tagged writers for next Wednesday are: Sebastian Agudelo, Joy Katz, Jim Quinn, Marcela Sulak, Connie Voisine and Don Waters. Check back soon for links.