Alice Friman is an award-winning poet whose connection to Georgia began in 2001 when she was invited to read her work for the Georgia Poetry Circuit. A resident of Milledgeville since 2003, her work is distinguished by a mordant wit and a concern for the natural world.
Early Life and Works
Alice Ruth Friman was born in New York City on October 20, 1933, the younger daughter of small business owners Joseph Pesner and Helen Friedman Pesner. Raised in Washington Heights and educated in the New York public schools, she received a B.A. in elementary education from Brooklyn College in 1954 and taught at schools in Harlem and the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. She married Elmer Friman in 1955 and the couple moved, first to Dayton, Ohio, in 1956, and then to Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1960. There, Friman received an M.A. in English from Butler University in 1971 and began teaching at Indiana Central College (later the University of Indianapolis). The couple, who had three children, divorced in 1975.
Hired as an adjunct and later promoted to full professor, Friman taught English and creative writing and helped found the Indiana Writers Center. In 1978 she published A Question of Innocence, a chapbook of poems. Three other chapbooks followed, and in 1984, Reporting from Corinth, her first full-length collection, appeared. Friman remarried in 1989, and in 2003 she and her second husband, Marshall Bruce Gentry, a Flannery O’Connor scholar, moved to Milledgeville, where he had been invited to teach at Georgia College and State University. Friman began teaching at the college shortly thereafter and later served as poetry editor for the school’s Arts & Letters journal.
Though her poems frequently center on death and loss, Friman’s verse has been variously described as fierce and humorous. As she told Contemporary Authors, “My images…are mostly from childhood, and seem to be about yearning.” Her next two collections, Inverted Fire (1997) and Zoo (1999), explore similar terrain, dwelling on sadness and things undone. In Inverted Fire, for example, the speaker longs for “a simpler light, perhaps that never was.” Empty spaces, “broken decency,” and dissected love recur in the speaker’s perception of the world around her. The poems in Zoo contemplate the vagaries of memory, unfinished lives, and failure. As always, Friman is an astute observer of nature and, like Wordsworth or Thoreau, instructed by it. There is also the ever-present barrier between man and the natural world; the speaker reminds us that there is “a pawn ticket for a promise,” but that promise is often ill-defined and unresolved.
Later Works
The Book of the Rotten Daughter (2006) describes Friman’s experiences as a caretaker for her parents in their last days, mining topics of guilt, grief, and loss. These stark yet intimate poems move from anger to acceptance, as Friman explores her father’s passing as well as his rejection:
holding the hand
that for sixty-two years refused mine
singing the song he never sang for me
The title for her next volume, Vinculum (2011), comes from the Latin “to bind” or “to connect.” At age seventy she is still “rattling in the shadow” of her mother’s death and trying to connect the past with the present. In a telling line from “Birches,” the speaker asks: “What is paradise without longing?” That question is at the heart of many of Friman’s poems. She is often at odds with the real and the imagined.
The View from Saturn (2014) attempts to look at the earth from two perspectives: objective distance and subjective reflection. The impetus for the volume comes from Friman’s viewing the planet Saturn through a powerful telescope on the Big Island of Hawaii. In envisioning the larger picture and asking ourselves why we are here, Friman returns to the central purpose of her poetry: “Why else/ does one write, but to deliver up/ the vacuum and fill it.” The speaker of these poems finds beauty all around her, and her joy is realized when she can dance, remember, or write.
Blood Weather (2019), her seventh full-length collection, further mines the relationships she explored in previous volumes: her struggle with loss and her preoccupation with the natural world. Like so many of her poems, the pieces in Blood Weather transform common occurrences into revelations. Throughout the collection, blood signifies trauma as well as vitality, and in Friman’s hands, acts of bloodletting become acts of understanding. True to the vision of one of her favorite authors, Thoreau, she has been a fearless, truth-telling witness to possibility.
Alice Friman’s poetry, which she often refers to as “my sweet hell,” has won numerous awards, including two Pushcart Prizes, the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry in 2012 for Vinculum, three prizes from the Poetry Society of America, and the Ezra Pound Poetry Award. Her poems have been published in fourteen countries and in numerous anthologies. She has received fellowships from the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences as well as the Yaddo and MacDowell literary colonies, among others. In 2002 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Indianapolis, where she taught from 1971 to 1993.
