William Everson

William Everson (September 10, 1912 – June 3, 1994), also known as Brother Antoninus, was an American poet of the Beat generation and was also an author, literary critic and small-press printer.

Beginnings

Everson was born in Sacramento, California. His Christian Scientist parents, both of whom were printers, raised him on a farm outside the small fruit-growing town of Selma, which is 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).

As a poet, thinker and man

The third volume of Everson's collected poetry, The Integral Years, published by Black Sparrow Press in February 2000

Everson was an influential member of the San Francisco Renaissance in poetry 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 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 the camp at Waldport, Oregon, with other poets, artists and actors, 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 countercultural 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 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.

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

Selected Bibliography

Poetry

• These Are the Ravens (1935). San Leandro, CA: Greater Western Publishing.
• San Joaquin (1939). Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie Press.
• War Elegies (1944). Waldport, Oregon: Untide Press.
• The Residual Years (1948). New York: New Directions.
• A Privacy of Speech (1949). Berkeley: The Equinox Press.
• The Crooked Lines of God (1959). Detroit: University of Detroit Press.
• The Hazards of Holiness (1962). Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
• The Poet is Dead: a Memorial for Robinson Jeffers (1964). San Francisco: Auerhahn Press.
• The Blowing of the Seed (1966). New Haven: Henry W. Wenning.
• Single Source: The Early Poems of William Everson, 1934-1940 (1966). Berkeley: Oyez.
• In the Fictive Wish (1967). Berkeley: Oyez.
• The Rose of Solitude (1967). Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
• The Springing of the Blade (1968) Reno, Nevada: The Black Rock Press.
• A Canticle to the Water Birds (1968). Berkeley: Eizo.
• The City Does Not Die (1969). Berkeley: Oyez.
• The Last Crusade (1969). Berkeley: Oyez.
• Who Is She That Looketh Forth as the Morning (1972). Santa Barbara: Capricorn Press.
• Tendril in the Mesh (1973). Aromas, California: Cayucos Books.
• Black Hills (1973). San Francisco: Didymus Press.
• Man-Fate: The Swan Song of Brother Antoninus (1974). New York: New Directions (W.W. Norton)
• River-Root: A Syzygy for the Bicentennial of These States (1976). Berkeley: Oyez.
• The Veritable Years, 1949-1966 (1978). Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press.
• The Masks Of Drought (1980). Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press.

Autobiography and Interviews

• Prodigious Thrust (1996). Santa Rosa, California: Black Sparrow Press.
• Naked Heart: Talking on Poetry, Mysticism, and the Erotic (1992). Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, College of Arts and Sciences.
• On Printing (1992). San Francisco: Book Club of California.
• Take Hold Upon the Future: Letters on Writers and Writing, 1938-1946 (1994). Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.

Literary Criticism

• Robinson Jeffers: Fragments of an Older Fury (1968) Berkeley: Oyez.
• Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region (1974). Berkeley: Oyez.
• Dionysus and the Beat: Four Letters on the Archetype (1977). Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press.
• The Excesses of God: Robinson Jeffers as a Religious Figure (1988). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Recommended reading

• 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

• William Everson at the University of Illinois' Modern American Poetry website
• The Death of a Poet

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