Benjamin Friedlander

Biographical note:  Benjamin Friedlander was born in New Orleans in 1959 and has since lived in Ontario, Missouri, New York, California, and Maine. His books of poetry and prose include The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes (2007), Simulcast: Four Experiments in Criticism (2004), and A Knot Is Not a Tangle (2000). He has also worked extensively as an editor, producing literary and scholarly journals. Since 1999, Friedlander has taught American literature and poetics at the University of Maine.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714179
ISBN:  9781844714179
Author:  Benjamin Friedlander
Title:  Citizen Cain
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  DCF
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  20-Mar-11
Extent:  104pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  6 mm
Weight:  156 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  Citizen Cain is a cacophony of rhetorically enfranchised voices, fused in the very crash of discourse that grinds their speech into noise. The results are dizzying—and funny—and biting. From “Anakin Skywalker” to Zidane’s golden ball. From "Prosty / the Spokes-gland" to "Mrs Hitler's Dachshund." From user profile to Seder plate. This is our world.

Main description:  In Benjamin Friedlander’s newest poems the lyric I is both abject and plural. A cacophony of rhetorically enfranchised voices, fused in the very crash of discourse that grinds their speech into noise. First shared on “the Flarf list”—a forum for writers who use found language, search engines, and textual mash-ups to produce a new kind of poetic volatility—the work in Citizen Cain sets Flarf's playfully destructive gaze on the poet's own social imagination. The results flit between identification and disidentification, knotted by inferences that make this work as worthy of close reading as the condensed lyrics of Friedlander's earlier collections, The Missing Occasion of Saying Yes (Subpress, 2007) and A Knot Is Not a Tangle (Krupskaya, 2000). Ezra Pound famously defined poetry as language charged with meaning. But the full range of affects involved in that charge was never acknowledged. Citizen Cain makes those affects its subject matter, in a dizzying array of cathected objects. From “Anakin Skywalker” to Zidane's golden ball, from "Mrs Hitler's Dachshund" to "Prosty / the Spokes-gland," from turkey baster and overdrive pedal to user profile and Seder plate.

Table of contents:
Contents
Biological or Social Female Parent of a Child or Offspring and Its Poetry
Somebody Blew Up America
Fame
Crying in Public
Galang
When a Cop Sees a Black Woman
Jew
Normalized Relations
Fucked Relationships Archive
Stages on Life’s Way
Gaza
Mrs Hitler’s Dachshund
Pact
Gimme a Break!
Identity
Ballad of the Yellow Poet
The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry
Female Factory
Subsistence Impregnation
The Pound IRA
Joe Lieberman
AIPAC
Why Do Jews Reject Jesus as Their Savior?
Law and Order SVU
Hugs, Fudge, and 41 Cellphones
My Vaginal Lips Are Sealed
What Is an Internet Author?
Update
Me and My Gang
Joel Oppenheimer
Dear Diary
Yngwie Malmstein
Kiss the Chef
Drew’s Old
Hilary Duff
User Profile
Huggies
Secrets of Happily Married Women
Two Girls One Dreidel
Poetry
Google
Beloved
Friday News Dump
Alterity Cudgel
Eliot
Don’t Be Cowed by the MOO
Free Trade
The Bork Bork Bork People
Charlotte’s Web
An Accent Is Made by the Listener
Philosophy
Flame Free Discussion
Love Has Got Me in Tears Again

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Excerpt from book:  

AIPAC

Ismet Dural Circumciser
corn cob pipe
raining ash on Gaza

won’t eat pork
will accept pork
in exchange for a vote

Larry, I was just thinking about Jerome
in his Hugo Boss costume
shaking his moneymaker (pumpkin)

Every year the same donation
I find that comforting,
like religion

but without the food or funny hats
OK here’s a joke:
A lady approaches her rabbi and tells him,

Rabbi, obesity is a trend
that is prevalent In fact,
I blame Chinese food on Christmas

every day
the wine symbolizes blood
at sunset Saturday

eating Christian babies for their streetwear
Jewish dolls for Jewish children Just click
on Law

of Return
on Investment (ROI), Le Roi David
King David vinyl transfer

by Honegger, Arthur Honegger
coincides with Christmas
in July His murder

was the initiation rite into a terrorist cell
apprehended in July He subsequently published
several op-ed pieces in The Times,

Is it good for the Jews? Does the Pope shit
in wood? I don’t know, but apparently
Palestinians would rather not

if they can rise up
against Hamas we will support
their own

kind Their proper, dignified,
and easily
rattled personality

is the polar opposite in temperament of the protagonist
The Zazu character, a puppet
controlled by Iran,

provides comic relief He brings a pump
to stay above occupied territory
in a wicker basket

good enough to survive the passage
and yours? Eats away
at a steak

that troubles the intestines
of a baby
who floats away
on mylar-coated wings.
The thing is, the Middle East
is not for babies, The Arabs

have whale bone collars
to stiffen their will,
and a brief history of Parisian fashion

to coordinate colors
when flags are needed for replacement feeding
The code states family

members
must report any breaches (pronounced britches)
with “poop” stains, a slang term for inside information.

I like you
and your inflatable vote. I swing you
in the direction of my people. I say, “Be off.”

Unpublished endorsement:  Citizen Cain is the slightly queasy-making darker brother, fusing the nimble to the clumsy, the erudite to the banal, in lines that swing with the unerring timing of a punked-up oracular klezmer. Its knowing send-ups of world politics and mass culture jostle each other as one Google-searched term leads to another in uproariously sardonic semi-sequiturs that pave the road to Amerikan hell. “A poem is not a spoil of war.” Not these anyway. Welcome these huddled masses of scathing critique into your national bosom. Bring ’em on!

Maria Damon

Unpublished endorsement:  Benjamin Friedlander speaks with a survivor's humor and ungainsayable clarity of what we had thought to forget.

Robert Creeley

Unpublished endorsement:  Just from reading its title, you can tell that Citizen Cain is really good — to use an adjective that some folks say flarf is trying to delegitimize. Cain is a citizen with full keystroke rights, which the enlightened reader (good grammar & thoughtful hygiene, correct distance in all interactions) would love to abject. Friedlander, however, is anti-abjection. Cain is an update of Williams's ‘from the mouths of Polish mothers.’

Ethical cardioversions [look it up] happen throughout the book. It keeps you on your toes. The only posture that makes poetry bearable. Every word counts, is meant ethically, is a travesty, occasions hysterical laughter, hysterical weeping, clear-eyed quizzicalness. What else to want?

Bob Perelman