Ben Friedlander

Into the Field from Jacket2.org

In this inaugural edition of Into the Field, I talk with Benjamin Friedlander at his home in Bangor, Maine. Friedlander is a poet, critic, teacher, and member of the Flarflist Collective. He currently teaches at the University of Maine. Friedlander reads a selection of poems originally posted on the Flarflist, as well as several from his book A Knot Is Not a Tangle (Krupskaya, 2000). In our interview, he discusses his years spent living in two of the major meccas of experimental writing in recent decades: San Francisco in the 1980s, and Buffalo in the '90s. We also talk about his use of the tools of Flarf to do the work of elegy, and his interest in widely forgotten poets of the nineteenth century.