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By Jason Canniff
Photo Editor
If approach, honesty and ambition are the keys to a successful poetry reading, then Benjamin Friedlander is the example and the champion.
Friedlander, a University of Maine professor and published poet, fidgeted through an immense stack of poetry at 4:15 p.m. last Thursday afternoon in his office, trying to organize a logical order for his New Writing Series reading advertised to commence at that afternoon 15 minutes later in Soderberg Auditorium in Jenness Hall.
“Shit,” he broods.
He goes back and forth between one poem and another, tosses a few in the trash and makes a decision. His final approach, he decides, will be to omit dedications and the superfluous, and just read straight through 17 poems, check the time and read some more “in a not-quite-chronological-order.”
After an introduction from Robert Creeley , a former State University of New York at Buffalo colleague and UMaine visiting professor poet, Friedlander begins. “I ‘ll just read through so that the language will flow together and show its consistencies and inconsistencies.”
Starting with a group of poems from 1984, he reads to a large crowd in the unadvertised changed location of room 101 in Neville Hall, pausing only for water.
Just as the crowd didn ‘t seem to mind the inconsistency in scheduling, neither did they in those scattered in his writing style, structure, or the cadence of his voice.
Whereas Creeley is known for a steady and predictable approach to reading, where breath and syllable marry into simplicity, Friedlander champions something of the opposite, and does so with vigor.
In “Moscow Nights” he reads, “The names/ of God are not so numerous/ as the bills of lading/ a toppled statue heeds/ when the state/ has withered away.”
His poetry here, along with a collection of poems entitled “Sonnets from the Bourgeoisie,” approach the particulars of the darkness and frustration of the political. His poetic content then levitates between the depressive and the beautiful, avoiding category.
Later, with welcomed unpredictability, his voice changes key as he enters into some list poems, their subtitles including “Things I Hate” and “Things that will always be cool.” In what was undeniably the highlight of the reading, he ripped into “Things I like,” of which one of the list items were the “Olsen Twins,” those lovable, cute kids from “Full House.” Half the
