Benjamin Friedlander
Professor of English
5752 Neville Hall, Room 405A
Orono, Maine 04469-5752 U.S.A.
E-mail: friedlan@maine.edu
Office Hours – by appointment
Education
PhD, University at Buffalo, 1999
MA, University of California at Berkeley, 1990
BA, University of California at Berkeley, 1985
Affiliated Faculty of the Center for Poetry and Poetics
Editor of Paideuma: Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Member of the Historical Poetics Workshop
Research Interests
Poetry and Poetics, American Literature
Book in Progress
Emily Dickinson and the Civil War: History, Language, Crisis. Excerpts from this project have appeared in PMLA, Poetics Today, and The Explicator.
Published Books
Scholarship
Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (University of Alabama Press, 2004)
Edited Volumes
David Melnick, Nice: Collected Poems (Nightboat, 2024) (with Alison Fraser, Jeffrey Jullich, and Ron Silliman)
Robert Creeley, Selected Poems 1945-2005 (University of California Press, 2008)
Charles Olson, Collected Prose (University of California Press, 1997) (with Donald Allen)
Larry Eigner, Areas Lights Heights: Writings 1954-1989 (Roof Books, 1989)
Poetry
Some Cares (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2024)
One Hundred Etudes (Edge Books, 2012)
Citizen Cain (Salt Press, 2012)
The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes (Subpress, 2007)
A Knot Is Not a Tangle (Krupskaya Press, 2000)
Recent Articles and Book Chapters
“Celan in Conversation,” Boundary2, vol. 50, no. 4, 2023, pp. 61-73, https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-10694169
“Glory, Honor, Might, Majesty, Dominion, and Power: Reading Dickinson through Wilfred Owen,” Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson, edited by Cristanne Miller and Karen Sánchez-Eppler (Oxford University Press, 2022)
“Homage to Bayard Taylor,” 21|19: Readings in Proximity, edited by Kristen Case and Alexandra Manglis (Milkweed Editions, 2019)
“Longfellow’s Elsewheres (Canonical and Acanonical),” Il Velo di Maya: Scritti in onore di Maria Vittoria D’Amico, edited by Salvatore Marano (Bonanno Editore, 2017)
Recent Classes Taught
Graduate
ENG 542: Unfinished Business: Nineteenth-Century America and the Present (Topics in North American Literature) (Spring 2024)
ENG 580: Lyric Philosophy (Topics in Poetry and Poetics) (Spring 2023)
ENG 545: American Literature at the Fin de Siecle (Fall 2021)
ENG 549: The Personal Is Political—Adrienne Rich and Others (Studies in Gender and Literature) (Spring 2019) [See Class Project]
ENG 580: Poetics and the Discipline (Topics in Poetry and Poetics) (Spring 2018)
ENG 541: The Biopolitical 19th Century (Nineteenth-Century American Literature) (Fall 2016) [See Class Project]
Undergraduate
Most semesters I teach a section of ENG 222: Reading Poems, a core course for English majors and frequent gen ed option for students outside the major.
Other recent courses:
ENG 490: Adrienne Rich in the Present (Research Seminar) (Spring 2022)
ENG 440: A Short Course in American Poetry (American Seminar) (Fall 2017)
ENG 429: Emily Dickinson and Her World (Topics in Literature and Language) (Fall 2022)
ENG 343: Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Spring 2021, Spring 2019)
ENG 341: Colonial and Early National American Literature (Fall 2020, Fall 2018)
ENG 170: Foundations of Literary Analysis (Fall 2018, Fall 2017)
ENG 101: College Composition (Spring 2017)
LAS 150: Success in College (Fall 2023)
