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There is a good story behind this book. Boston poet and contributing editor to Fulcrum magazine Ben Mazer discovered Landis Everson while editing the feature “The Berkeley Renaissance” for Fulcrum 3. Everson, having not written poetry since 1960, became inspired by Mazer’s interest in his early work and the resulting poems, more than a hundred of them written since 2003, brought about this book. What caused Everson to stop writing? He belonged to the Jack Spicer / Robert Duncan / Group in Berkeley, California in the late 1950s. It was a contentious lot and when the group broke up Everson found that friendship had been his motive for writing. With no group to give him focus Everson’s muse abandoned him for forty-three years.
Mazer thinks that this hiatus between poems may be a record. He could be right. Basil Bunting’s rediscovery by the nineteen-year-old Tim Pickard in the mid-1960s comes to mind, but Bunting did not dry up for as long as Everson. Abandoned and dry up are assumptions that may be way off base. The break-up of the Spicer / Duncan / Blaser group obviously caused the interruption but Everson’s book holds a tantalizing hint for what befell his muse.
In both Mazer’s Fulcrum feature “the Landis Everson story” and the 2003-2005 section of Everything Preserved “Hang Up” is the first poem.
Hang Up
The telephone Jean Harlow picked up
and slammed down three times in 1935
made the cock crow in our heads. The ringing
went on long after we fell asleep
in our beds. I swear
my heart beat faster on a long-dead mattress.
There’s still a chance
another day after
that I can be on the other end of a line,
someone worthy enough for her
to hang up on
on a dime.
Perhaps Everson’s muse mislaid his phone number. His friend and mentor Spicer believed that poets are catchers not pitchers. He imagined the poet as a radio receiving signals from out there. In 2003 the call came for Everson and even if Harlow hung up she had his number.
The title to Everson’s book is well intended but, to my ear, wrong. Very little of the Everson of 1955-1960 is preserved in his later efflorescence. The early work uses a long line, deliberate cadence and diction that is solemn, impersonal and somewhat forced—“How would the minstrels of Provence paint words / To hide the transmutation of such flight?” The nine early poems sound like Duncan with a dollop of Spicer. They are very much of their Berkeley moment. Fair enough. Duncan and Spicer dominated that group and Robin Blaser and George Stanley had to move to Vancouver to develop their own styles. It may have taken Everson forty-three years of not writing poems to develop his.
Everson begins “Coronado Poet,” his elegy to Jack Noble and to the time they spent on their suntans, “I am an old man who writes like the 40s.” That’s not the way I feel. The big difference between Everson’s early and recent poems is that, where he began by addressing poetry with the sort of escape from personality T.S. Eliot thought correct, he has, as an old man, addressed life. His early poems are self-conscious and not just in a youthful way. Their experience is bookish and they proceed as if imagination is separate from lived-life. In forty-three years Everson did not grow as a poet so much as totally change. If 1955-1960 was his chrysalis no one could have expected the butterfly he has become. In his elegy to Spicer “Jack Spicer in Berkeley: 1949” he writes:
He was in Berkeley on his way to Ghostland.
He was pissed off he wasn’t there.
He liked both kinds of joys
but couldn’t choose between them.
He didn’t know he was crossing town to invent,
despite the traffic in the streets
and the virginity of his sheets,
poetry no one else had seen.
He believed in La Bonne Fee—
the Good Fairy—but he never found him.
This has Spicer’s edge and directness, but Everson sounds like no one but himself. It is a poem arrived at inevitably—note the confident line breaks—after years with Spicer on his mind.
In the end the years do not matter nor does the time it took for Everson to write his new poems. It’s a good story, but the poems survive it. The unavoidable comparison between Everson then and now disappears in the jauntiness of the later poems. This is a poet enjoying himself, even in the many elegies and poems that remember like “Hang Up.” Everson writes with wit and verve and with an offhand charm that allows him to both say what he wants while letting the reader know how much he enjoys doing it. You feel his pleasure in writing these lively poems. Unlike the pissed off Spicer, Everson did not go to Ghostland. Here is “Coronado Poet” complete:
I am an old man who writes like the 40s.
My suntan is a period piece.
Young men then spent all day at the beach
to avoid reality.
I stay upright.
Nothing makes me go down dusty roads to change my style.
I don’t believe in love anymore, the foghorn
blasted it out of me.
Jack Noble
died of skin cancer, his life cooked out on the sand…
in his coffin waves will break.
Between his knees sandcastles fight back.
How many bathing suits did he wear out
in 70 years?
Among the valleys of the distant waves
we will eventually meet. Hi Jack, I’ll say.
Well it won’t matter who got the superior tan.
The orange sun will recognize us. It owes us.
It will be the sun from nineteen hundred and forty-forever.
O no cloud in the sky! O ocean full of fish hiding!
The sun seduced us before we could be virgins.
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