Leora Fridman, Obvious Metals

Leora Fridman’s Obvious Metals (Projective Industries, 2014) is at certain points an homage to and/or inspired by the contemporary experimental poet Carrie Lorig, being dedicated to and deriving many of its individual titles from her.  The “Poem for Carrie Lorig” provides both the title of Fridman’s overarching collection and acts as something of a personal manifesto:

stalk the most main street
uninterested in pacing or
what this town has to offer
in graceful rust. No one
wants me, Carrie, in the way
I want the slick street.
Anyone wants me, Carrie —
anyone wants the obvious
metals I know.

The reader wonders about the nature of this relationship — do they even really know each other?  Is this more to do with poetic influence?  Without conducting a bunch of research, we’re not sure.  And, at least in terms of the experience of reading these poems, it doesn’t really matter.

There is much in Obvious Metals that is ambiguous and ambivalent, and that is I think part of its charm.  Most of the poems herein rely on an emphatic “I” voice, a speaker who purports to assert the first person, but who at the same time never really reveals much about herself.  Aside from the declaration that she is “mean / to strange men” (“Proving a Bird”) or that “I can lie / this easily // and so / can live” (“A Body in Distress”) or that “I aspire / to find you / welcome” (“Attempts at Spirits”), this is largely a poetry of purposeful obfuscation.  At times, Fridman verges on outright surrealism/dadaism, as for example in “Dyad”:

the boy down in front
was in trouble for real

the salt shaker had
become the orient

had an awkward roomy
alibi all crust

Yet, in an oblique manner, Fridman also makes arguments about what it’s like to live in this world, in a society, where real connection is difficult and one is left seeking protection “on a grey / street”, metaphorically asserting oneself a bird “play[ing] lamely // at the feet / of the sun” (“Proving a Bird” again).  Or, one emulates a bear, storing up fat for hibernation.  Yet this same bear also acts on a communal level and “delivers / on a promise // when it tells its friends / where food” (“What’s Fatty”).

For that matter, let’s look at those lines from “Attempts at Spirits” again.  “I aspire / to find you / welcome” on one level suggests the speaker’s hesitance about her relationship with someone or other.  In other words, the person addressed is seemingly not or not yet fully welcome.  But Fridman’s use of enjambment here also allows a slightly different reading.  “I aspire” gets its own line, emphasizing a sense of hopefulness in the situation.  Read together, the phrase “I aspire to find you” certainly lends weight to this idea.  Then, the fact that the single word “welcome” gets a line to itself actually implies that the addressee is in fact quite welcome in her company.  Taken together, we might read this passage something like, “I am open to connecting with (finding) you — welcome!”

The physical rendering of Fridman’s words on the page is thus to fore, and in that regard she might be seen as a contemporary practitioner of Objectivism, whose foremost figures (Zukofsky, Oppen, Niedecker, et al.) at times exhibited similarly oblique qualities, also similarly often resolved with repeated readings.  And though I haven’t read Carrie Lorig as extensively as I perhaps should (some pieces online), it seems that she herself works in a similar mode and so makes an apt dedicatee here.  Dense at first, Obvious Metals gives pleasure in its density, in its unexpected suggestion(s), its eschewal of obviousness.  As Fridman herself concludes in the book’s final poem, “Take the Call,” “can any explanation / dispel” — the answer, I suppose, is just take the call and see what happens. . .