Contextual Practice

"Fredman has written a clear, well-informed study of a specific facet of mid-20th-century poetry: how 'contextual practice' informed much of the work of avant-garde poets, painters, and filmmakers ... Recommended." - B. Wallenstein, CHOICE "Contextual Practice takes a wide-angle, interdisciplinary look at some of the most important if overlooked works, figures, and social scenes specic to the American avant-garde from around 1945 to 1970 ... Fredman recovers the provocatively contingent and charmingly social structures that informed some of the most dynamic art made after the Second World War. Those of us interested not only in the postwar American poetry scene, but in the humanities and counterculture history broadly speaking, will find in Fredman's evocative juxtapositions a Grand Collage indeed." - Daniel Kane, Review of English Studies "Stephen Fredman's Contextual Practice provides an in-depth exploration of cultural and aesthetic contexts shared by poets Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov, filmmaker Harry Smith, philosopher Norman O. Brown, and artist Wallace Berman and the circle around his seminal Semina magazine. Fredman has written a brilliant treatise on the poetics of collage in the New American poetry. And he puts his theories into practice with his exemplary use of contingent juxtapositions of a precisely ordered constellation of examples." - Charles Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania