From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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 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 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. His papers are archived at the William
Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA[1] and The
Bancroft Library at UC
Berkeley[2].
Black Sparrow Press recently
released a three-volume series of the collected poems of Everson, the last
volume of which was published in 2000.
