William Everson (poet)

William "Bill" Everson, also known as Brother Antoninus (September 10, 1912 – June 3, 1994), was an American poet, literary critic, teacher and small press printer.

He was a member of the San Francisco Renaissance.

Everson was born on September 10, 1912, in Sacramento, California.

His parents, both of whom were printers, raised him on a farm outside the small fruit-growing town of Selma, California.

He played football at Selma High School and attended Fresno State College (later known as California State University, Fresno).

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 great admirer of the work and life of poet Robinson Jeffers.

Much of his work as a critic was done on Jeffers's poetry.

Everson married his childhood sweetheart Edwa Poulson on Memorial Day weekend in 1938.

Edwa worked as a school teacher and they acquired some farmland.

The couple did not want children, and in February 1940 Edwa accompanied Everson when he had a vasectomy performed by the physician of a friend.

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, Vlad Dupre, 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.

More on this camp experience can be found in the book "Here on the Edge" by Steve McQuiddy.

During his time as a conscientious objector, Everson completed The Residual Years, a volume of poems that launched him to national fame.

During his time at Camp Angel, Everson's wife Edwa began a relationship with another man.

This led to an eventual divorce, when the two could not reconcile.

Everson married poet Mary Fabilli on June 12, 1948, separated from her on June 30, 1949, and divorced her years later on May 13, 1963.

Influenced by her religious devotion, Everson converted to Catholicism.

Everson joined the Catholic Church in 1951 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.

He joined as a donatus, a lay brother - "who is not under any particular vow and who may be asked to leave, or choose to leave, at any time; he is little more, from a theological standpoint, than a worker wearing a habit."

He printed the unfinished Novum Psalterium PII XII, an acknowledged masterpiece in American fine press printing.

A colorful literary and counterculture figure, he was nicknamed the Beat Friar.

The central motif throughout all of Antoninus' Catholic poetry is Incarnation, the central symbol of the Christian mystery.

In 1956, he met an English Dominican, Father Victor White, at St. Albert's Dominican priory.

White, of the English Dominican province and a longtime friend of Carl Jung, with whom he maintained a voluminous correspondence, was resident lecturer and theologian there.

It was through this relationship to Victor White that Antoninus learned to look at his dreams from an in-depth religious angle for meaning.

He devoured the Collected Works of Jung and began his psychological analysis of the unconscious as well as the analysis of many individuals who came to him for counseling.

Antoninus wrote the first draft of his long erotic poem River-Root / A Syzygy, which he considered to be his most prophetic work.

As Everson said in an interview for Creation magazine, with its founder and editor, the theologian and (at the time) fellow Dominican Matthew Fox, he saw "River-Root" as a kind of re-writing of the Song of Songs, bringing frank Eros back into the Psalms and undoing Christianity's longstanding separation of the sexual from the spiritual.

At St Albert's, where he had practiced as a spiritual counselor, Antoninus had given counseling to a young woman named Susanna Rickson.

On December 7, 1969 - the day after the disastrous Altamont Free Concert featuring the Rolling Stones - after a reading at the University of California at Davis, Antoninus removed his religious habit and announced that he was going to be married.

Susanna Rickson then became his young bride and William Everson became the stepfather of Susanna's son, Jude.

When Brother Antoninus wrote The Rose of Solitude, he saw it published in many magazines.

However, when he wrote The Veritable Years under the name William Everson, having left Antoninus behind, he couldn't even get his work reviewed.

He then assumed the mantle, and a buckskin vest and bear-claw necklace to signify it, of the poet-shaman to replace his religious habit.

Everson was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1972.

The 1974 poem Man-Fate explores this transformation from Brother Antoninus into William Everson, the West-Coast poet-shaman.