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Explores the ways American poetry engages with visual art, music, fiction, spirituality, and performance art Many people think of poetry as a hermetic art, as though poets wrote only about themselves or as if the subject of poetry were finally only poetry—its forms and traditions. Indeed much of what constitutes poetry in the lyric tradition depends on a stringently controlled point of view and aims for a timeless, intransitive utterance. Stephen Fredman's study proposes a different perspective. American Poetry as Transactional Art explores a salient quality of much avant-garde American poetry that has so far lacked sustained treatment: namely, its role as a transactional art. Specifically Fredman describes this role as the ways it consistently engages in conversation, talk, correspondence, going beyond the scope of its own subjects and forms—its existential interactions with the outside world. Poetry operating in this vein draws together images, ideas, practices, rituals, and verbal techniques from around the globe, and across time—not to equate them, but to establish dialogue, to invite as many guests as possible to the World Party, which Robert Duncan has called the “symposium of the whole.” Fredman invites new readers into contemporary poetry by providing lucid and nuanced analyses of specific poems and specific interchanges between poets and their surroundings. He explores such topics as poetry's transactions with spiritual traditions and practices over the course of the twentieth century; the impact of World War II on the poetry of Charles Olson and George Oppen; exchanges between poetry and other art forms including sculpture, performance art, and ambient music; the battle between poetry and prose in the early work of Paul Auster and in Lyn Hejinian's My Life. The epilogue looks briefly at another crucial transactional occasion: teaching American poetry in the classroom in a way that demonstrates that it is at the center of the arts and at the heart of American culture.

First published in 1976, this beautiful, interactive collaboration is a unique work of book art in which Marisol's monumental pop-art sculptures face the blocks of Creeley's prose poems. The new introduction by Creeley scholar Stephen Fredman describes how the poet's autobiographical prose poetry arose in conversation with images of Marisol's equally autobiographical sculptures.In addition to the introduction, this edition features an appendix of newly discovered material, much of it found in Creeley's own copy of the original edition of Presences. These include postcards and letters from Marisol, designer William Katz (who brought the poet and artist together), Mexican poet Octavio Paz, and several university professors. The material in the appendix allows the editor to reveal the genesis of Presences as a collaborative work of art involving three creators: artist, designer, and poet.

Poet, performance artist, and critic David Antin invented the “talk poem.” He insists that his poems be oral and created in front of a live audience, in a specific time and place, with the transcription of the performance adjusted for print by presenting it not in prose but in clumps of words without justified margins or punctuation, peppered with white spaces that indicate pauses.In this book, editor Stephen Fredman provides a critical introduction to a selection of talk poems from three out-of-print collections, accompanied by a new interview with the author. As Fredman points out, Antin's work is a form of conceptual writing that has influenced generations of experimental poets and prose writers. His profound and humorous talk poems are essential for classroom and scholarly discussions of the arts in modernism and postmodernism—offering as well an invitation to strengthen the ties between the sciences and the humanities.

This Concise Companion gives readers a rich sense of how the poetry produced in the United States during the twentieth century is connected to the country's intellectual life more broadly. Helps readers to fully appreciate the poetry of the period by tracing its historical and cultural contexts. Written by prominent specialists in the field. Places the poetry of the period within contexts such as: war; feminism and the female poet; poetries of immigration and migration; communism and anti-communism; philosophy and theory. Each chapter ranges across the entire century, comparing poets from one part of the century to those of another. New syntheses make the volume of interest to scholars as well as students and general readers.