Benjamin Friedlander

Poet and scholar Benjamin Friedlander earned his PhD from SUNY Buffalo in 1999. His literary scholarship has focused on poetics and 19th- and 20th-century American poets, and his scholarly focus has included Emily Dickinson’s poems on the Civil War. He writes for American Poetry in the Age of Whitman and Dickinson and is the author of Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (2004). He also edited Larry Eigner’s areas lights heights: writings 1954–1989 (1989) and coedited Charles Olson’s Collected Prose (1994).

Friedlander’s poems reconsider conventional expectations of language. Critic Alan Gilbert, reviewing Friedlander’s A Knot Is Not a Tangle (2000) for Jacket magazine, commented that Friedlander’s poems are about “otherness.… One of the ways in which otherness is specifically embedded in Friedlander’s poetry is in language’s breakdown at the limits of rational sense, even when a poem initially seems to be fairly direct and straightforward.” Friedlander’s collections of poetry include Time Rations (1991), Algebraic Melody (1998), and The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes (2007).

Friedlander teaches at the University of Maine in Orono.