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Poet, performance artist, and critic David Antin invented the talk poem. He insists that his poems be oral and created in front of a live audience, in a specific time and place, with the transcription of the performance adjusted for print by presenting it not in prose but in clumps of words without justified margins or punctuation, peppered with white spaces that indicate pauses.

In this book, editor Stephen Fredman provides a critical introduction to a selection of talk poems from three out-of-print collections, accompanied by a new interview with the author. As Fredman points out, Antin's work is a form of conceptual writing that has influenced generations of experimental poets and prose writers. His profound and humorous talk poems are essential for classroom and scholarly discussions of the arts in modernism and postmodernism--offering as well an invitation to strengthen the ties between the sciences and the humanities.

Stephen Fredman is a professor of English literature and American studies at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is Contextual Practice: Assemblage and the Erotic in Postwar Poetry and Art.

David Antin's most recent book is Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005. He lives in San Diego, California.