Citizen Cain

by Benjamin Friedlander

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.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published March 20, 2011

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).