Professors publish works on avant-garde poetry

ORONO – For Steve Evans and Ben Friedlander, assistant professors of English at the University of Maine, poetry is a beautiful – and serious – matter.

Evans and Friedlander believe the careful arrangement of words on paper by the poet has the power to enchant and surprise, restoring the mind and stirring the imagination to inner reflection or social action.

They have established themselves in a community of American “avant-garde” poets and critics that holds fast to that view.

Evans and Friedlander’s contributions to that community have been recognized in recent publications, including essays in the book “Telling it Slant: Avant-garde Poetics of the 1990s,” published this year by the University of Alabama Press.

Evans is a scholar and a critic of contemporary poetry and poetics; Friedlander is a poet, historian and theorist of poetry and poetics.

Both joined the University of Maine English Department three years ago and have contributed to the work of UMaine’s internationally acclaimed National Poetry Foundation by coordinating the New Writing Series, which sponsors poetry readings by local and internationally recognized poets.

“Their work – Steve Evans’ scholarship and Ben Friedlander’s scholarship and poetry – makes avant-garde writing a continuing and living reality rather than a nostalgic scholarly category,” said UMaine English Department chairman Tony Brinkley. “Their work is brilliant and courageous.”

Because avant-garde poetry is self-consciously unconventional and questions the established traditions of literature and society, its proponents risk alienation and criticism.

“Avant-garde poets are hostile to mainstream, business-as-usual poetry. They think of themselves as an oppositional tradition. By insisting on the extreme, the experiential and exploration, the avant-garde tends to generate the works that people are reading 20 years hence,” Evans said.

“Telling it Slant,” edited by George Washington University English lecturer Mark Wallace and independent scholar Steven Marks, highlights the diversity within avant-garde poetry. The book is a collection of essays documenting the growth in readership and awareness of avant-garde poetry.

Evans’ essay, “Introduction to Writing from the New Coast,” explores the interaction of poetry with consumer culture and the efforts of poets to establish “non-identities.”

Friedlander’s contribution, an excerpt from a long essay, “Jetting I Commit the Immortal Spark,” is an analysis of the poem “Poem” by Frank O’Hara. His essay dissects 1960s poet O’Hara’s “Poem,” focusing on the language and content of the poem in order to comment on O’Hara’s wider body of work.

Burton Hatlen, director of the National Poetry Foundation and a professor of English, said, “Steve Evans has positioned himself as one of the key critics writing about contemporary poetry. He’s an internationally known figure on that subject and has brought that knowledge and reputation to what we do here.”

“Ben Friedlander’s work as a poet and in 19th and 20th century American Literature, in particular as editor of the collected prose of Charles Olson, has made him a major figure in an area where the National Poetry Foundation has focused its work,” he added.

At UMaine, Evans teaches courses in literary theory, American women’s literature, 20th century American poetry and poetics. Friedlander teaches a survey of American literature and a senior seminar in postmodern American poetry.