Background
Christensen, Paul Norman was born on March 18, 1943 in W. Reading, Pennsylvania, United States. Son of Kenneth Serenus and Ann Theresa Christensen.
( Like many a pioneer exiting the eastern forests, Paul C...)
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 Sánchez—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.
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( Charles Olson was an important force behind the raucous...)
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 Paul Christensen draws upon a wide variety of source materials—from letters, unpublished essays, and fragments and sketches from the Olson Archives to the full range of Olson's published prose and poetry.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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0292739982/?tag=2022091-20
(These are poems reconciling the light and dark of experie...)
These are poems reconciling the light and dark of experience, from first love's bright luster to the ways in which love can lead to irresolvable distance between a man and woman, and then renew itself out of the thin and mottled air. The poems, some gritty and jagged with the life they were torn from, others lyrical and charged with exhilaration and relief, were written over the past two decades, and take the reader across the sometimes bleak, sometimes wonderous landscapes of central and southwestern Texas, and over time from youth to middle age, with leaps across the Atlantic to the last idyll of western experience, southern France. The road is winding, and the light always uncertain between clouds and rain, and the sudden burst of sunlight. Even a roll of film negatives plays a part in this argument, with its unscrolling narrative and reversals of white and dark, life and death. In the end, the light proves as necessary as the shadow, and The Mottled Air ends by embracing both.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0971836175/?tag=2022091-20
(In this, the first full-length study of Clayton Eshleman'...)
In this, the first full-length study of Clayton Eshleman's poetry, poet and scholar Paul Christensen descends into the torch-lit underworld, the cave of the soul, that Eshleman has been exploring in his work for more than three decades. "In the caves of Dordogne," Christensen writes, "Eshleman discovered an underworld in actuality, a labyrinth in which Paleolithic humanity daubed and slashed their marks, their primordial psychic images." He also found a controlling metaphor for all his mature poetry: "For Eshleman, these markings were a first language, and they represent the primal separation between sleep and waking," between the darkness of pre-consciousness and the light of self-awareness, between the amoral animal (which simply "is") and the guilty man (who is tortured by the realization "I am"). More than a penetrating study of Eshleman and his mythmaking, Minding the Underworld is an exploration of Eshleman's poetic generation. Eshleman is perhaps the most accomplished of a group of poets, sometimes called the "deep imagists," whose "critical interests and artistic vision arose in the early days of postmodern thought and have worked out in common many of the main themes of postmodernism in their poetry." The artistic father of this group is Charles Olson; its many members include Robert Kelly, Diane Wakoski, Jerome Rothenberg, Armand Schwerner, and David Antin. "To treat the themes and strategies of Eshleman is, in a way, to deal with all the other figures in his circle as well. Despite all their individual differences . . . they follow a similar program of psychological self-analysis and mythopoeic critique of contemporary life." They are, in Christensen's view, "the only real extensions of postmodern writing after Olson." Eshleman's search for a "way out" of modern life, which led him to conceive of the underworld as pre-consciousness, joins his work not only to his fellow "deep imagists" but also to a much larger force within experimental writing of this era - "the postmodern revival of pagan thought and the wisdom of the dream." "It is Eshleman's peculiar minding of that underworld of the self," Christensen concludes, "that is his unique poetic achievement."
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0876858213/?tag=2022091-20
Christensen, Paul Norman was born on March 18, 1943 in W. Reading, Pennsylvania, United States. Son of Kenneth Serenus and Ann Theresa Christensen.
Bachelor in English, William and Mary College, 1967. Master of Arts in English, University Cincinnati, 1970. Doctor of Philosophy in English, University Pennsylvania, 1975.
Associate editor Stock Car Racing Magazine, Alexandria, Virginia, 1967-1968. From assistant professor to associate professor English Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University, College Station, Texas, 1974-1983, professor English, since 1983. Editor, public Cedarshouse Press, Bryan, Texas, since 1977.
Director Provence Writer's Workshop, Buoux, France, since 1998. Fulbright senior lecturer Council International Exchange of Scholars, Washington, 1989, 96.
(In this, the first full-length study of Clayton Eshleman'...)
(These are poems reconciling the light and dark of experie...)
( Like many a pioneer exiting the eastern forests, Paul C...)
( Charles Olson was an important force behind the raucous...)
Married Jane T. Flowers, April 18, 1964 (divorced March 1968). 1 child, Sean Oliver. Married Catherine Anne Tensing, August 30, 1969.
Children: Maxine Elizabeth, Signe Laura, Cedric Owen.