Stephen Fredman is emeritus professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art; A Menorah for Athena: Charles Reznikoff and the Jewish Dilemmas of Objectivist Poetry; The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition; and Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse.

"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.""--