William Everson

William Everson (1912-1994) in 1992). Courtesy Literrata.

William Everson (September 10, 1912 – June 3, 1994), also known as Brother Antoninus, was an American poet of the San Francisco Renaissance, who was also a literary critic and small press printer.

Life

Beginnings

Everson was born in Sacramento, California. His Christian Scientist parents, both of them printers, raised him on a farm outside the small fruit-growing town of Selma, south of Fresno in California's San Joaquin Valley. He played football at Selma High School and attended Fresno State College (later California State University, Fresno).

Poet and thinker

Everson registered as an anarchist and a pacifist with his draft board, in compliance with the 1940 draft bill. In 1943, he was sent to a Civilian Public Service (CPS) work camp for conscientious objectors in Oregon. In Camp Angel at Waldport, Oregon, with other poets, artists and actors such as Kemper Nomland, William Eshelman, Kermit Sheets, Glen Coffield, George Woodcock and Kenneth Patchen, he founded a fine-arts program in which the CPS men staged plays and poetry-readings and learned the craft of fine printing. During his time as a conscientious objector, Everson completed The Residual Years, a volume of poems that launched him to national fame.

Everson joined the Catholic Church in 1948 and soon became involved with the Catholic Worker Movement in Oakland, California. He took the name "Brother Antoninus" when he joined the Dominican Order in 1951 in Oakland. A colorful literary and counterculture figure, he was subsequently nicknamed the "Beat Friar." He left the Dominicans in 1969 to embrace a growing sexual awakening, and married a woman many years his junior. The 1974 poem Man-Fate explores this transformation. Everson was stricken by Parkinson's Disease in 1972, and its effects on him became a powerful element in his public readings.

Everson was an influential member of the San Francisco Renaissance and worked closely with Kenneth Rexroth during this period of his life. Throughout his life, Everson was a devotee of the work and lifestyle of poet Robinson Jeffers. Much of his work as a critic was done on Jeffers's poetry.

Everson spent most of his years living near the central California coast a few miles north of Santa Cruz in a cabin he dubbed "Kingfisher Flat". He was poet-in-residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz during the 1970s and 1980s. There he founded the Lime Kiln Press, a small press through which he printed highly sought-after fine-art editions of his own poetry, as well as of the works of other poets, including Robinson Jeffers and Walt Whitman.

Recognition

His papers are archived at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA and The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley.

Black Sparrow Press released a three-volume series of the collected poems of Everson, the last volume of which was published in 2000.

Publications

Poetry

• These Are the Ravens. San Leandro, CA: Greater West, 1935.
• San Joaquin. Los Angeles, CA: Ward Ritchie, 1939.
• The Masculine Dead: Poems, 1938-1940. J.A. Decker, 1942.
• War Elegies. Waldport, OR: Untide, 1944.
• The Waldport Poems. Waldport, OR: Untide, 1944.
• The Residual Years: Poems, 1940-41. Waldport, OR: Untide, 1944
  • revised & expanded as The Residual Years: Poems, 1934-1948. New York: New Directions, 1948
  • enlarged edition (introduction by Kenneth Rexroth) published as The Residual Years: Poems, 1934-48: The pre-Catholic poetry of Brother Antoninus. New York: New Directions, 1968.
  • reprinted with uncollected and previously unpublished poems, Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1997.
• Poems, MCMXLII. Waldport, OR: Untide, 1945.
• A Privacy of Speech: Ten poems in sequence. Berkeley, CA: Equinox, 1949.
• Triptych for the Living (with prints by Mary Fabilli). Seraphim, 1951.
• There Will Be Harvest. Albion Press, 1960.
• The Year's Declension. Albion Press, 1961.
• Single Source: The early poems of William Everson, 1934-1940 (with introduction by Robert Duncan). Berkeley, CA: Oyez, 1966.
• The Blowing of the Seed, Henry W. Wenning, 1966.
• In the Fictive Wish. Berkeley, CA: Oyez, 1967.
• Poems of Nineteen Forty Seven. Reno, NV: Black Rock Press, 1968.
• Tendril in the Mesh. Aromas, CA: Cayucos Books, 1973.
• Black Hills. San Francisco, CA: Didymus Press, 1973.
• River-Root: A syzygy for the bicentennial of these states. Berkeley, CA: Oyez, 1976.
• Missa Defunctorum. Lime Kiln Press, 1976.
• The Mate-Flight of Eagles. Blue Oak Press, 1977.
• Blackbird Sundown. Lord John Press, 1978.
• Rattlesnake August. Santa Susana Press, 1978.
• The Veritable Years: Poems, 1949-1966. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1978
  • reprinted with uncollected and previously unpublished poems, 1998.
• Cutting the Firebreak. Kingfisher Press, 1978.
• Blame It on the Jet Stream!. Lime Kiln Press, 1978.
• The Masks of Drought. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1979.
• Birth of a Poet Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1982.
• The Engendering Flood: Book One of Dust Shall Be the Serpent's Food (Cantos I-IV). Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1990.
• The Blood of the Poet: Selected Poems (edited and with an afterword by Alfred Gelpi). Seattle, WA: Broken Moon Press, 1994.
• Prodigious Thrust. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1996.
• Ravaged with Joy: A Record of the Poetry Reading at the University of California, Davis, May 16, 1975 (with woodcuts by Keiji Shinohara). Middletown, CT: Robin Price, 1998.
• The Integral Years: Poems, 1966-1994: Including a selection of uncollected and previously unpublished poems. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 2000.

as "Brother Antoninus"

• At the Edge. Albertus Magnus, 1958.
• A Fragment for the Birth of God. Albertus Magnus, 1958.
• An Age Insurgent. Blackfriars, 1959.
• The Crooked Lines of God: Poems, 1949-1954. Detroit, MI: University of Detroit Press, 1959.
• The Hazards of Holiness: Poems, 1957-1960, Doubleday, 1962.
• The Poet Is Dead: A memorial for Robinson Jeffers, Auerhahn, 1964.
• The Rose of Solitude, Oyez, 1964
  • revised and expanded, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967.
• The Vision of Felicity, Lowell House, 1967.
• The Achievement of Brother Antoninus (selection of poems, with an introduction by William E. Stafford), Scott, Foresman, 1967.
• A Canticle to the Waterbirds. Berkeley, CA: Eizo, 1968.
• The Springing of the Blade. Reno, NV: Black Rock Press, 1968.
• The City Does Not Die. Berkeley, CA: Oyez, 1969.
• The Last Crusade. Berkeley, CA: Oyez, 1969.
• Who Is She That Looketh Forth as the Morning?, Capricorn Press, 1972.
• Man-Fate: The Swan-Song of Brother Antoninus. New York: New Directions, 1974.

Non-fiction

Autobiography and interviews

• If I Speak Truth: An Inter View-ing with Brother Antoninus (With J. Burns). Goliards Press, 1968.
• Naked Heart: Talking on poetry, mysticism, and the erotic. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico, College of Arts and Sciences, 1992.
• On Printing (edited by Peter Rutledge). San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1992.
• Prodigious Thrust (1996). Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1996.
• William Everson: The Light the Shadow Casts, Five interviews with William Everson plus corresponding poems. Berkeley, CA: New Earth Publications, 1996.

Literary criticism

• Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an older fury (as "Brother Antoninus"). Berkeley, CA: Oyez, 1968.
• Archetype West: The Pacific coast as a literary region. Berkeley, CA: Oyez, 1974.
• Dionysus and the Beat: Four letters on the archetype. Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow, 1977.
• Earth Poetry: Selected essays and interviews, 1950-1977 (edited by Lee Gelpy). Oyez, 1980.
• The Excesses of God: Robinson Jeffers as a religious figure (foreword by Albert Gelpi). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1988.

Religious writing (as "Brother Antoninus")

• Novum Psalterium Pii xii (liturgy and ritual). Los Angeles, CA: 1955.
• Friar among Savages: Father Luis Cancer (With Brother Kurt). Benzinger, 1958.
• The Dominican Brother: Province of the west. Dominican Vocation Office, 1965.

Collected editions

• Dark God of Eros: A William Everson reader, (edited by Albert Gelpi). Berkeley, CA: Heyday, 2003.

Edited

• Robinson Jeffers, Cawdor and Medea. New York: New Directions, 1970.
• Robinson Jeffers, Californians. Cayucos, 1971.
• Robinson Jeffers, The Alpine Christ. Cayucos, 1973.
• Robinson Jeffers, Tragedy Has Obligations. Lime Kiln Press, 1973.
• Robinson Jeffers, Brides of the South Wind. Cayucos, 1974.
• Robinson Jeffers, Granite and Cypress. Lime Kiln Press, 1975.
• Robinson Jeffers, The Double Axe, and other poems. New York: Liveright, 1977.

Letters

• Take Hold Upon the Future: Letters on writers and writing, 1938-1946 (with Lawrence Clark Powell; edited by William R. Eshelman). Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow), 1994.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

Audio / video

"San Joaquin," by William Everson

• The Savagery of Love: Brother Antoninus Reads His Poetry. London: Caedmon, 1968.
• " Poetry of Earth" (selections from Everson's and Robinson Jeffers's poetry). Big Sur Recordings, 1970.
• " Robinson Jeffers" (lecture; cassette). Everett/Edwards, 1972.

See also

• List of U.S. poets

References

• Gelpi, Albert. Dark God of Eros: A William Everson Reader. Berkeley, CA: Heyday. 2003.
• Bartlett, Lee, and Campo, Allan. "William Everson: A Descriptive Bibliography, 1934-1976". Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press. 1977.

External links

Poems

• William Everson 1912-1994 at the Poetry Foundation.
• William Everson: Online Poems

Books

• William Everson at Amazon.com
• Works by or about William Everson in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

About

• William Everson (1912-1994) at the University of Illinois' Modern American Poetry website.
• William Everson at the Beat Page