- Everson's "Crooked Lines of God."
On December 7, 1969, Brother Antoninus, a poet and lay brother of the Dominican Order,
removed his friar's robes during a reading at the University of California, Davis,
dropped them on the stage and left for Stinson Beach to marry Susanna Rickson,
a woman thirty-five years his junior.
This dramatic act by the poet Time magazine had christened the "Beat Friar,"
marked the end of nearly twenty years of monastic life and a return to the secular world as William Everson.
Everson's celebrity may have peaked with this episode, but his influence has been far-reaching
and continues to grow.
Dark God of Eros: A William Everson Reader
is a welcome arrival and offers a sixty-year retrospective of Everson's poems, essays,
autobiographical writings, interviews, and letters, as well as reproductions of his work on the handpress.
Albert Gelpi, who also edited Everson's selected poems The Blood of the Poet,
has gathered an impressive range of texts that chronicle Everson's immense poetic,
artistic, and critical achievements.
Everson envisioned a cumulative poetic oeuvre - the record of his own lapidary existence -
as a collected whole, which he called The Crooked Lines of God.
He divided his work into three volumes that correspond to the three major phases of his adult life:
- The Residual Years 1934-1948,
- The Veritable Years 1949-1966, and
- The Integral Years 1966-1994.
Gelpi's selections reveal not only the trajectory of Everson's poetic career,
but the course of his dramatic life as well.
- "Sex is the consciousness of materiality."
-
Everson liked to say that he'd led "an archetypal life,"
he moved through the world with extraordinary intensity.
His searing intellect and his mystic's yearnings were uncompromising.
His spirituality was ecstatic, and he had faith in the instinctual human capacity for transcendence.
He lived in an incarnated world where "sex is the consciousness of materiality,"
and he often justified his conversion to the Church by saying,
"it gave me a God I could eat."
He spent a lifetime attempting to reconcile the two poles of his nature, Eros and agape,
erotic love and a hunger for God.
I met Everson two years after his departure from the Dominicans.
He had accepted a position as poet-in-residence at the University of California, Santa Cruz,
and was teaching a course on poetic vocation, Birth of a Poet.
His meditations were a rare blend of personal reflection, autobiography, and vast erudition;
one of the few disappointments of
Dark God of Eros
is the absence of any sections from the Birth of a Poet collection.
- "A religious conversion."
-
William Everson was born in Sacramento, California on September 10, 1912,
and grew up in the San Joaquin farming town of Selma.
While taking classes at Fresno State College he chanced upon the poems of Robinson Jeffers,
and the result, he says, "was essentially a religious conversion."
He became a pantheist, and a devoted disciple of the reclusive poet of the California coast.
While his poems from this period show the influence of his master, Jeffers,
and his affinity with the erotic mysticism of D. H. Lawrence,
he was forging his own knotty, muscular lyricism.
"The Rain That Morning" is distinctly Eversonian:
We on that morning, working, faced south and east where the sun was in winter at rising;
And looking up from the earth perceived the sky moving,
The sky that slid from behind without wind, and sank to the sun,
And drew on it darkly: an eye that was closing.
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Everson and his first wife, Edwa, tended their vineyard in the San Joaquin Valley until 1943 when Everson,
a conscientious objector, was ordered to the civilian public service camp in Waldport, Oregon.
The marriage did not survive their separation, and after the war,
Everson settled in San Francisco where he joined a group of poets and artists
that included Robert Duncan and Kenneth Rexroth.
- Printing.
-
Everson had helped establish the Untide Press in the camp at Waldport,
and after his discharge from alternate service, set up his Equinox Press.
The press accommodated Everson's dedication to literature and to a devotional activity
that was both chastening and rewarding.
"The poet needs a printer, and the printer needs a text."
He was instrumental in the revival of fine printing in America,
which saw a renaissance in the second half of the last century that continues today.
Not since William Blake have we seen such a sublime fusion of poet and printer.
The three pieces on printing presented here, and the reproductions of Everson's presswork
are a welcome addition to this compendium.
- Great Catholic poetry.
-
The poetry Everson wrote as Brother Antoninus is thought by many to be the greatest Catholic poetry produced
in the second half of the last century (T.S. Eliot takes honors for the first half),
and two of his greatest poems,
A Canticle to the Waterbirds and
The Poet is Dead: a Memorial for Robinson Jeffers,
date from this period.
Most of Everson's poems beg to be declaimed, and
A Canticle to the Waterbirds,
written shortly after his conversion and overflowing with passion
became Everson's signature poem at readings.
Exuberant, stately, and musically rich, its deep attention to the natural world
is matched by its ardent, reverential music:
Clack your beaks you cormorants and kittiwakes,
North on those rock-croppings finger-jutted into the rough Pacific surge;
You migratory terns and pipers who leave but the temporal clawtrack written on sandbars there of your presence;
Grebes and pelican's; you comber-picking scoters and you shorelong gulls;
All you keepers of the coastline north of here to the Mendocino beaches. . .
Break wide your harsh and salt-encrusted beaks unmade for song,
And say a praise up to the Lord.
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The two chapters excerpted here from his long 1976 essay,
Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region
identify the chief architects of the western ethos as manifested in poetry -
Robinson Jeffers and Kenneth Rexroth - to which we should add Everson.
There is a reassuring synchronicity that
Dark God of Eros
has been issued concurrent with
The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth
and several new editions of Jeffers work, including one edited by Gelpi, The Wild God of the World.
- Growing independence of West Coast writers.
-
In A Conversation with Brother Antoninus, Everson admits,
"I carry a lot of regional bitterness against the East,
because I feel the power of criticism lies in the East,
while the power of creativity seems to be out West."
The growing independence of West Coast writers,
the coherence and ever-expanding body of achieved work that attends to a Western ethos
rather than aping or deferring to the dominant East Coast bias,
proves the fundamental soundness of Everson's vision.
Of all his critical works, this investigation should remain seminal
in a consideration of the literature of the West,
the terminal position on the continent, the coast of sunset and oceanic vistas at the edge of the world.
- Anima
-
Everson considered each woman he loved throughout his life to be not only his muse,
but the embodiment of his anima, his feminine side,
which he believed could be opened like a receptive sex for penetration by the Holy Spirit.
While in the Dominican Order, he fell in love with Rose Tannlund,
a devout Catholic with whom he had an erotic though not a sexual affair.
Everson's poems from The Rose of Solitude
chronicle the affair and its effect upon Everson's struggles with his God.
Gelpi stresses the benign aspect of the relationship, but there is something Gnostic,
even perverse to all this approach and avoidance.
Certainly Everson's mystical longing was peaked,
but so, too, was his passionate ardor for the unattainable female.
The enforced celibacy of Everson's years in the religious
order produced poetry of grave spiritual and erotic power, but also a perverse attraction to denial:
O Christ & Lady
Save me from my seed!
O Christ & Lady
Save me from my tongue!
. . .
O Christ & Lady
O Christ & Lady
Save me from myself!
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Everson's book-length poem, River-Root, is emblematic
of his attempt to reconcile the carnal and the divine.
The poem juxtaposes the action of the Mississippi River with a married Catholic couple's lovemaking,
and Gelpi is correct in calling it the "most sustained orgasmic celebration in English."
But it's impossible not to smile at times at Everson's relentless eroticizing.
While the phallic river, "dredger of female silt and engorger, sperm-thruster,"
makes its run to "the uterine sea," bucks mount does, rams copulate on the riverbank,
moose and buffalo passionately mate, and a grizzly "Mauls his fierce woman crazed with desire."
All of creation seems to be clownishly in rut, and yet in the end Everson convinces.
He convinces because this eroticism is not simply an ardent libidinous jag;
it is transcendent, compassionate as well as passionate, and it is beautiful:
Deep down under
The snapping turtle sulks in his cutbank hole. Over his head
Bigmouth bass break water for joy. Far back on the bayou
One bull frog swells his organ-note gong: the syllable of desire
Booms over the bog. And the River runs.
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Gelpi informs us in his introduction that Everson believed
"the poems of his third phase, after he had left the celibate monastery to marry
Susanna Rickson and begin domestic life with her and her young son,
lacked the raw tension and sublime reach of the Antoninus years."
I would disagree. Although poems from his Antoninus period include several masterpieces,
the poems that comprise The Integral Years constitute an apotheosis of his earlier themes,
and contain much of his finest work.
Grounded in the natural world as all his best earlier efforts had been,
the poet in this final period is a more humane being.
He loves a real woman in real time, not an unavailable ideal or a psychological
or religious projection in some dreamy eschatological realm.
Everson's libidinous rhetoric at times succumbs to the same exaggerated oratory
he employed in many of the Antoninus poems
("Crotch and thigh; she is reft. Let me break white flesh asunder to cock this woman."),
but there are glimpses of a tenderness that calms the rhetoric without reducing its forcefulness:
"I have fastened my heart on the stitch of your voice, little wince of delight in the thicket. /
Where the slim trout flick like a glint of tin in the pesky shallows."
Everson invoked "the Cosmic Christ" to support him in his new life:
"Dark God of Eros, Christ of the buried brood. . . Dark Eros of the soul,
Christ of the startled flesh /
Drill through my veins and strengthen me to feed /
On the red rapture of thy tongueless need."
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- To answer love's call.
-
There is a new humility in these final poems,
not the humility of an aesthetic who has given up the world for spiritual gifts,
but the humility of a man who has given up everything - security, identity - to answer love's call.
A ferocious tenderness marks the poems in The Integral Years,
and sets it as a fitting capstone to his trilogy.
Sexual imagery, still present in Storm-Surge
("The river-tongue in the sea's vulva, / The strength in the slot"),
and in Cutting the Firebreak
("The mad scythe / Hisses in the vetch, a snake denied, moans in the yarrow. /
Whumph! Whumph! Oh, the grunt of lovers biting each other, /
Stroke on stroke coupling through hell")
is somehow more domestic (though hardly domesticated) in these poems.
The High Embrace, Reaper and many other poems from this final period
are profoundly moving and beautiful, mature in every sense.
At over 400 pages,
Dark God of Eros
is a dense, satisfying read. Still, the book is a bit of a tease.
It's as if Everson lived not one life, but three, and in each incarnation his writing was prolific and profound.
Many readers of
Dark God of Eros
will no doubt be drawn to his critical books and to the three volumes of The Crooked Lines of God
to experience the full presence and measure of the bard. They won't be disappointed.
- At the end, angels.
-
One afternoon during his final illness, I sat with Bill while he rested in his cabin.
I thought he had fallen asleep when he suddenly squeezed my hand and whispered,
"Angels, angels."
I do not think this was delirium or hallucination,
but rather the fruit of a mind immersed in the Word, and a heart tied to a living God.
Copyright
© 2003-2016 by Gary Young.
This review originally appeared as
"Lust, Lyricism, and Liturgy"
in the Los Angeles Times Book Review,
on Sunday, August 17, 2003.
|
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