The Year the City Emptied: After Baudelaire

In Daisy Fried’s third collection, The Year the City Emptied: After Baudelaire, the agonizing subject is the death of Fried’s husband—of “a cruel disease that attacked his body and mind”—during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. If “Baudelairean” is a term applied to a certain sensibility (“the splendor and misery of cities, of bodies, an assent to that vast background of negativity,” as Richard Howard defined it), it offers Fried a way to overcome the “grave difficulty” of writing about her own experiences in COVID-stricken Philadelphia. Borrowing aspects of poems from Fleurs du Mal—their emotional valences as well as themes and attitudes—her book employs Baudelaire’s “disgust,” which Fried calls “glorious, and diagnostic,” to express a cathartic frankness in the face of overwhelming grief. As she says in “The Goose,” her bracing, moving revision of “Le Cygne”:

I don’t want to say I’m gnawed by longing 
For a man like a city, city like a man
Whose mind’s a ruined city—
I’m bored with these feelings they call grief.

Fried beautifully captures the ennui, self-loathing, and helpless futility that arose during the “unspooling nightmare” of her partner’s slow death and the arrival of pandemic isolation. As she writes in “Owls,” “My punishment for desiring change / Is desiring more change.” 

Fried’s voice is brass-tacks, demotic American, with an unsentimental erotic nostalgia—“We couldn’t stop being naked”—and a deceptively insouciant outspokenness that both veils and exudes a deep-seated melancholy. Her variations on Baudelaire are less convincing when they adhere too closely to his locutions, like the use of apostrophes (“Night!” “Winged wayfarer!”), or his subject matter, including an often-tiresome fixation on the demimonde (Fried, switching genders, speaks of “propositioning boys for sale”). When Baudelaire’s cruel eloquence inspires her to unleash her own voice, the work feels powerful, fresh, and Friedian, as in “Temper”:

The limping days are so fucking long
Snowed under by years and years and years and years. 
Say it: Boredom born of apathy
Achieves immortality. Body, you’re nothing […]