Intercepted Texts

It’s a given of post-apocalyptic fiction that sooner or later the survivors forget how and why the apocalypse happened in the first place. There’s no room for the past, for memory, when staying one shambling step ahead of zombies, mutants, and competing human scavengers demands full attention to the precarious present. But it’s also a given that someone, while rifling an abandoned home for, say, canned pudding, will eventually stumble across a crumbling magazine or diary documenting the disaster’s origins and providing cautionary clues to how things got so irremediably bad. Should a real apocalypse happen—and each day CNN offers evidence that it’s well on the way—a lucky survivor might find a tattered copy of Philip Fried’s Interrogating Water to be a ruefully illuminating discovery, a Yeatsian note of foreboding struck in its very first poem: “Rust and corrosion are everywhere, malfunction / is rife.”

In a time of instantaneously transmitted social and news media, we may no longer need artists to be the “antennae of the race” as they were for Ezra Pound in 1934, but Fried’s poems demonstrate that a poet’s acute receptivity to language in all its cultural and political manifestations can isolate and amplify the often unintended messages it conveys, no trivial skill in the rushed, roiling miasma of talking points and reflexive opinionating that constitutes what we call information. Amid this welter of cable TV blather, tweets, press releases, and Facebook flotsam, Fried plucks his controversial subjects—predator drones, capital punishment, climate change—and wraps them in familiar forms, both poetic and what Jonathan Holden dubbed analogical (e.g., letters, lists, prayers, memos) that supply contrasting discursive backdrops for the content, often integrating his own words with text found in pre-existing sources.

In “Prayer to the Small Arms Deity,” Fried addresses concealed carry policies through the rhetoric of devotional speech (“O portable and concealed god, barely visible / As a bulge, yet guardian of halcyon skies”), simultaneously highlighting and subverting the religious justifications with which some gun rights proponents advocate for their cause. Borrowing snippets from the King James Bible, “A Checklist” proffers a series of questions, both mundane and ominous, that one might find in the coat pocket of an overzealous Pentagon bureaucrat (“Have you taken hold of the ends of the earth and shaken/out non-state actors?”) while “Grammar as Glue” adopts the procedural format of home-assembly instructions, fashioning directions for the creation of American exceptionalism into a set of rhymed quatrains punctuated by couplets on first person usage found in a grammar handbook:

Fasten the Shining City to the Hill, Ensuring the nuts are secure. With the Leveraged Capital Rubberband, stretch an elastic liberty Until it nearly snaps, from sea to sea.

To intensify the pronoun I Simply employ the reflexive myself:

Passages such as this are typical of Fried’s bitterly insightful wit, studded with double-entendres (“Ensuring the nuts are secure”) that sometimes withhold their emergence until a second or even third reading. As often as the reader might snort and snicker, the political import behind the humor is no laughing matter.

As evidenced by 2011’s Early/Late: New & Selected Poems, Fried’s political consciousness has long been attuned to the ominous nuances of both mass and specialized discourse, particularly the subtle and not-so-subtle infiltration of military and political vocabulary into widely disparate sectors (sectors!) of everyday American popular culture. As we helplessly watch the 2010s surge (surge!) toward the 2020s, it can be argued that post-9/11 poetry is giving way to post-post-9/11 poetry as witness and trauma recede to acceptance and despair, or at least to the bitter acknowledgment that we have met the deteriorating national security state and it is us, perhaps not at the jackboot-and-truncheon stage of 1984’s Oceania, but within the circumference of that Orwellian nightmare’s ceaseless surveillance, warfare, and willful distortions of language. The rhymed tercets of “Today I’m Afraid…” succinctly map the strategy, one that governments have...