The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes

by Benjamin Friedlander

Poetry. "Benjamin Friedlander speaks with ungainsayable clarity of what we had thought to forget"—Robert Creeley. "Is melancholy good? I think Ben Friedlander has the moodiest ear for it in the field, and wit to match. Where he takes this immodest gift is to a tangled interstice where idiom intersects with the body's fault lines. Uncannily the reader has almost had these thoughts. The attraction feels sideways, vertiginous. We receive, with these poems, the shapeliness of tact. Then suddenly he shows us the tax we pay to Rome"—Lisa Robertson. "As a poet, scholar, editor, and translator, Benjamin Friedlander has dedicated more than half a lifetime to rigorously engaging with the concepts and practices of contemporary poetry, and this much-wished-for book provides a beginning survey of that commitment. Gathered here are poems from the first ten years of his wide-ranging, critically probing, and intellectually ambitious poetic project. This book will amaze, defy, and remind again how not to be made complacent by what poetry offers"—Alan Gilbert.

Genres: Poetry

195 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2007

About the author

I'm a poet, critic, and editor, and make my living teaching American Studies and Poetics at the University of Maine. I'm also a dabbler in translation, from German (with a dictionary, making a lot of errors) and Italian (with my wife, who is a native speaker).

Reviews

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This handsome volume places five early collections of Friedlander’s work, spanning the decade from 1984 to 1994, in one easy-to-pocket package, so that when you’re waiting for the bus and reach into you duster, Whoomp, there it is: the cerebral immediacy of “Lines for My Father,” “For Carla,” “Retrospectively, For Primo Levi,” and myriad other evidences of a poet who keeps erudition in a beautiful tangle with the everyday.

[Steve]

http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/...

[Andy]

It's on my "read soon" pile.