Description
Book SynopsisExplores 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.
Trade ReviewIn
American Poetry as Transactional Art Stephen Fredman studies contemporary poetry as a dialogic art, composed in conversations and, often, contentions. He challenges the view of poem as an isolated monad, created in a single author’s imagination, and places it in its generative relationship to other arts, historical events, and internecine aesthetic debates. Although many of these essays have appeared elsewhere, they are now linked by Fredman’s biographical account of his transactional relationships with many of the poets under discussion. Informed by a subtle deployment of pragmatic theory in Dewey and James, this important book takes poetry off the page and into the world."—Michael Davidson, author of
Invalid Modernism: Disability and the Missing Body of the Aesthetic"These the companions’—Stephen Fredman follows Ezra Pound in thinking of his key writers as intimate presences, real and imagined, and of their art as a vital source of creative alliances, conversations and exchanges. This is poetry as an outward looking, ‘transactional art’ that invites in its turn a companionable kind of reading that is as intellectually exciting as it is deeply felt."—Peter Nicholls, author of
George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism"For more than thirty years Stephen Fredman has brought new concepts, contexts, and combinations of writers to the study of modern and contemporary American poetry, and this new book is likely to be his most compelling—and provocative. Fredman’s argument is that poems are not just formal or cultural artifacts but experiences of engagement—intellectual, historical, political, mystical—that carry readers into new regions of experience and new occasions of self-understanding. Indeed, poetry should be read more as performance art with immediate and unpredictable consequences than as linguistic constructions to be analyzed from an aesthetic distance. The same may also be said of Fredman’s book, which will take its readers into any number of unexpected places."—Gerald Bruns, author of
Interruptions: The Fragmentary Aesthetic in Modern LiteratureTable of Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Introduction
- Poetry & Spirit: Against Orthodoxy
- Chapter 1. Why Mysticism in Twentieth-Century American Poetry?
- Chapter 2. Jerome Rothenberg's Technicians of the Sacred: Transactions between the Indigenous and the Avant-Garde
- Chapter 3. Judaism as Loss and the Buddhist Element in Michael Heller's Eschaton
- Poetry & Its Time: Revising Literary History
- Chapter 4. 'And All Now Is War': George Oppen, Charles Olson, and Literary Generations
- Chapter 5. 'The Lordly and Isolate Satyrs': Charles Olson's Contemporaries
- Chapter 6. Laurie Anderson in the Reagan Era
- Poetry & the Arts: Multimedia Exchange
- Chapter 7. Robert Creeley, Marisol, and Presences as Transaction Network
- Chapter 8. The Language Art of David Antin's Talk Poems
- Chapter 9. Audio File Audiophile: Listening for Ambient Poetry
- Poetry & Prose: Intimate Opposition
- Chapter 10. Translation and Not-Understanding
- Chapter 11. Paul Auster's Solitude in the Room of the Book
- Chapter 12. Lyn Hejinian Becomes a Person on Paper
- Epilogue: Teaching American Poetry
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
