Kirjahaku

Charles Olson was an important force behind the raucous, explicit, jaunty style of much of twentieth-century poetry in America. This study makes a major contribution to our understanding of his life and work. Paul Christensen draws upon a wide variety of source materials-from letters, unpublished essays, and fragments and sketches from the Olson Archives to the full range of Olson's published prose and poetry. Under Christensen's critical examination, Olson emerges as a stunning theorist and poet, whose erratic and often unfinished writings obscured his provocative intellect and the coherence of his perspective on the arts. Soon after World War II, Olson emerged as one of America's leading poets with his revolutionary document on poetics, "Projective Verse," and his now-classic poem, "The Kingfishers," both of which declared a new set of techniques for verse composition. Throughout the 1950s Olson wrote many polemical essays on literature, history, aesthetics, and philosophy that outlined a new stance to experience he called objectism. A firm advocate of spontaneous self-expression in the arts, Olson regarded the poet's return to an intense declaration of individuality as a force to combat the decade's insistence on conformity. Throughout his life Olson fought against the depersonalization of the artist in the modern age; his resources, raw verve and unedited tumultuous lyricism, were weapons he used against generalized life and identity. This volume begins with an overview of Olson's life from his early years as a student at Harvard through his short-lived political career, his rectorship at Black Mountain College, and his retirement to Gloucester to finish writing the Maximus poems. Christensen provides a systematic review of Olson's prose works, including a close examination of his brilliant monograph on Melville, Call Me Ishmael. Considerable attention is devoted to Olson's theory of projectivism, the themes and techniques of his short poems, and the strategies and content of his major work, the Maximus series. In addition, there is a critical survey of the works of Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and other poets who show Olson's influence in their own innovative, self-exploratory poetry.

Like many a pioneer exiting the eastern forests, Paul Christensen felt the strangeness of an alien landscape when he first arrived in Texas in 1974. Schooled in the cool colors of life and poetry in the urban East, he approached his new career in the Southwest with missionary zeal and purpose: to discover the land and the kind of people and poetry it produced. West of the American Dream is a multifaceted account of that search. Christensen shares his feelings of culture shock in eastcentral Texas as he meets the cowboy version of the bluecollar Texan and his Mexican American neighbors. He introduces readers to the convoluted history of poetry in Texas, a tradition, started by women, that shifted from a focus on the land to the quotidian habits of urban living. Using a unique dissection of the public ritual of a poetry reading, Christensen assesses the origins of modern poetry, the value of imagination in modernist and postmodernist verse, and what Texas poets achieved and how their work evolved after World War II. Taking a break here and there to describe characters who crossed his path and who embodied different aspects of Texas mythology, Christensen then presents three portraits of modern Texas artist/poets--Vassar Miller, Charles Gordone, and Ricardo Sanchez--to show the results of twentiethcentury poetic evolution in Texas. He concludes that in order for Texas poetry to achieve maturity and fulfillment, writers must turn away from selfreflection and become "new Whitmans" who will instill moral passion and delight into poems that offer a vision of nature and a sense of responsibility for the earth. West of the American Dream will find an appreciative audience in all readers who respect the deep purpose of environmental action and the important role poets can play in its nurture, in Texas and elsewhere.

Writing some books makes you feel pregnant. You can't deny that you are growing something mysterious inside you. It swells in your gut, it moves you to complain that life is growing hard and thorny. Your back aches. You want sympathy, someone to hold your hand and reassure you that things will work out. You need consolation. You feel pity for yourself and wonder how women can endure the pain and agony of giving birth. It makes you stagger at the miracle of existence, and you go on, each day carrying more weight and pain until you lie down in the dark and your organs grind against one another and the thing you may not have wanted to create is suddenly there, a helpless, wrinkled mass of new life. When you behold the thing that grew inside you, questions arise at once. Is it something you want to be responsible for, that you are willing to protect and nurture to maturity? I'm still groaning and tossing around in my hospital bed, you might say, uncertain if I have given the world anything it wants or needs. But there it is, the created thing, the idea that grew flesh and bone, and is crying for attention. When I named the book, I was compelled to wake from a dream and go down stairs in the dark of night and write "The Unraveling of America." I dread the thought that I could be right, that something was coming undone and was beyond my power to change. But the times are hard, and the forces arrayed against each other terrify me. I believe in liberty, in democracy, in all the ways I was made to believe in my country. But the erosion of faith and doubt in the future have also sickened me and filled me with dread. That is what this creature is that I felt wriggle free of my body and now stands before me.

The poet for the most part makes subtle use of matter-of-fact, everyday words instead of ornamental phraseology.

After winning the Palme d'Or at Cannes, Michael Glendower is drawn into the corrupt and twisted heart of Hollywood. Running afoul of criminal elements, he enters politics, founding his own micronation in an attempt at Western revival. But are his efforts to prove Spengler wrong a waste of time? Is he merely putting lipstick on a pig? Meanwhile his old bandmate, Shiv, after hellish travails, attempts against all odds to start a family, only to find the system more against him than ever. The two mismatched friends must once more work together, as the rising tide of populism forces each to examine what he really believes.