Books by Stephen Fredman

Fredman makes the original argument that some of the most innovative works of poetry and art in the postwar period (1945-1970) engaged in a "contextual practice," a term that refers both to a way of making art characterized by assemblage and to a new relationship between art and life, an "erotic poetics."

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.

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.