Stephen Fredman asserts in his work that American poetry is groundless - that each generation of American poets faces the problem of identity anew and has to discover fresh meaning for itself. His argument focuses on four pairs of poets - Eliot/Williams, Thoreau/Olson, Emerson/Duncan and Whitman/Creeley - and points out that although the later ones all were influenced by their predecessors to some extent, ultimately their poetry is, paradoxically, grounded in an essential groundlessness. In order to demonstrate how approaches to groundlessness have persisted over time, Fredman explores the various measures taken by these American poets to provide a provisional ground upon which to construct their poetry: inventing idiosyncratic traditions, forming poetic communities, engaging in polemical prose, assessing all the dimensions of particular places and treating words as emblematic and mysterious objects. At the very core of the book stands Charles Olson, whose work so dramatically articulates the whole range of issues arising from the American poet's anxious search for and resistance t, an authentic and unified tradition.

Poet's Prose is the first scholarly work devoted exclusively to American prose poetry and has been recognised as a pioneering study in contemporary American poetry. Many recent American poets have been writing prose; Fredman has set out to determine why and what it means. Three central works of American poets' prose are discussed in detail: William Carlos Williams' Kora in Hell, Robert Creeley's Presences, and John Ashbery's Three Poems. In these chapters, Fredman both demonstrates how to read these difficult works and examines their philosophical seriousness. In a final chapter and a new epilogue, he discusses the newest trends in contemporary poetry, the 'talk poems' of David Antin and the prose of the Language poets, in which poet's prose forms an important aspect of the 'theoretical poetry' now being written.

The Poetry and Poetics of Michael Heller: A Nomad Memory is the first comprehensive treatment of a singularly important American poet of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Michael Heller (b. 1937) has amassed a body of poetry and criticism that places him in the vanguard of modern literature, and this essay collection provides the first extensive critical treatment of his varied career. This book 's multifaceted appraisal of his engagement with poetry as well as crucial ideas across various traditions establishes him as a preeminent writer among his contemporaries and younger generations, and as a major poet in any era.

Stephen Fredman asserts in his work that American poetry is groundless - that each generation of American poets faces the problem of identity anew and has to discover fresh meaning for itself. His argument focuses on four pairs of poets - Eliot/Williams, Thoreau/Olson, Emerson/Duncan and Whitman/Creeley - and points out that although the later ones all were influenced by their predecessors to some extent, ultimately their poetry is, paradoxically, grounded in an essential groundlessness. In order to demonstrate how approaches to groundlessness have persisted over time, Fredman explores the various measures taken by these American poets to provide a provisional ground upon which to construct their poetry: inventing idiosyncratic traditions, forming poetic communities, engaging in polemical prose, assessing all the dimensions of particular places and treating words as emblematic and mysterious objects. At the very core of the book stands Charles Olson, whose work so dramatically articulates the whole range of issues arising from the American poet's anxious search for and resistance t, an authentic and unified tradition.

Poet's Prose is the first scholarly work devoted exclusively to American prose poetry and has been recognized as a groundbreaking study in contemporary American poetry. Many recent American poets have been writing prose; Fredman has set out to determine why and what it means. Three central works of American poets' prose are discussed in detail: William Carlos Williams' Kora in Hell, Robert Creeley's Presences, and John Ashbery's Three Poems. In these chapters, Fredman both carefully teaches us how to read these difficult works and examines their philosophical seriousness. In a final chapter and a new epilogue, he discusses the newest trends in contemporary poetry, the "talk poems" of David Antin and the prose of the Language poets, in which poet's prose forms an important aspect of the "theoretical poetry" now being written.

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.

"Some of the most innovative works of poetry and art in the postwar period (1945-1970) engaged in a 'contextual practice' - both a way of making art and a new relationship between art and life. A response to the devastating experiences of the Depression and World War II, contextual practice involved drawing together visual and verbal fragments from daily life in order to reveal secret meanings and to insist on the regenerative potential of the everyday. Poets and artists particularly based their work on the body and its erotic energies, creating an art of daily life that reveled in sexual display and drug experimentation, espoused an anarchist politics and communal sociality, and encouraged mystical and shamanistic excursions. Contextual practice informed all branches of the New American poetry; the work of the Beats; happenings, events, and dance theater; the underground film movement; and, currents of assemblage, collage, junk art, and pop art. Fredman illuminates the theoretical and practical stakes involved and takes us back to the first stirrings of a countercultural ethos that was to have a profound effect on society at large. "

The first major Jewish poet in America and a key figure of the Objectivist movement, Charles Reznikoff was a crucial link between the generation of Pound and Williams, and the more radical modernists who followed in their wake. "A Menorah for Athena," the first extended treatment of Reznikoff's work, appears at a time of renewed interest in his contribution to American poetry.
Stephen Fredman illuminates the relationship of Jewish intellectuals to modernity through a close look at Reznikoff's life and writing. He shows that when we regard the Objectivists as modern Jewish poets, we can see more clearly their distinctiveness as modernists and the reasons for their profound impact upon later poets, such as Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bernstein. Fredman also argues that to understand Reznikoff's work more completely, we must see it in the context of early, nonsectarian attempts to make the study of Jewish culture a force in the construction of a more pluralistic society. According to Fredman, then, the indelible images in Reznikoff's poetry open a window onto the vexed but ultimately successful entry of Jewish immigrants and their children into the mainstream of American intellectual life.