Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 44)

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.