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Morton Marcus: Broadcasting in HD radio on 88.9 FM, this is Central Coast Public Radio KUSP Santa Cruz and KBDH San Ardo, streaming live and podcasting at KUSP.org. Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is Mort Marcus

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and this is the Poetry Show, and that music ushers in a very important date for people here in Santa Cruz and the Central Coast and that is September 10th, three days from now, which is the birthday of William Everson, who for years of

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course, was known as Brother Antoninus. He was born on September 10th, 1912, and died June 3rd, 1994 in Kingfisher Flat in Davenport. Usually, during the year I would present an interview that Joe Stroud and I did with Bill shortly before

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his death and I would play that for you, play his answers, and maybe the next year or maybe even the next show, would play the remainder of that historic interview with Bill, a wonderful person, a very thoughtful person, and someone who lives in

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the shadow of Robinson Jeffers to the point that people seem more willing to acknowledge Jeffers than Everson. But tonight, since I do not have those recordings, what I thought I would do is read you my remembrances of Billy Everson

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and then read some of his poetries. In fact, in the course of the first several pages of this memory is one of his wonderful poems, and so you will see right in the middle of what I'm reading you, the quality of his work. But what kind of a

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person was Will Everson, better known as Brother Antoninus, always considered one of the mainstays of the Beat Revolution. And certainly one of the people who made the San Francisco Renaissance along with Kenneth Rexroth, and Kenneth

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Patchen, such a vibrant literary site and time. So here from my memoir, "Striking Through the Mask," is my remembrances of Bill. Everything William Everson experienced in this world proved

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to him that another holier world existed, and that one could see signs, portance, and images of that world everywhere in this one. Toward the end, he saw angels dancing on the ceiling of his bedroom. It was nothing strange in that, since he was an

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angel himself, an avenging angel, who stalked back and forth from one side of a stage to the other in the 1950s and 60s, and called himself Brother Antoninus. In those days, he was lean, clean-shaven- his lean, clean-shaven face was caught

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between a sneer of loathing and a grimace of pain. His mouth was full of recrimination, disgust, redemption, and love. His most famous poem, and what he was always asked to recite was, "A Canticle to the Waterbirds." And he reminded me in those years of

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an angry stork, the hem skirts of his cowled, white Dominican robes, snapping like wings struggling to take flight as he prowled in front of his audiences. By the time he arrived in Santa Cruz in 1971, Bill had become another kind of

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angel. He had abandoned his monk's name, robes, and anger, and was wearing a smile, a full white beard, a mustard yellow fringe buckskin jacket, jeans, and a bear claw necklace; his new costume, as he liked to call it. But through all the years I

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knew him, Bill's vision of his God's handiwork being alive in our world remained as clear as a rain washed landscape. Every event, even the most trivial, had a metaphorical significance that was symbolic, mythic, and in the end holy, from the death

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of an elk in the forest to the flight of seabirds along the coast. Bill came to Santa Cruz at the invitation of the University. He had left the monastery two years before when he ran away with a

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pregnant woman thirty years younger than he, in whom he believed he had failed years before to read God's message to save her when she had come to him for advice. Now they were married with a young son, and several times a week, Bill would

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drive from his home in the woods of Northern county to instruct the University of California students on the craft of hand printing in one course, and to talk about the nature of the poet's calling in a series of spontaneous and very personal

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talks in another. No one could help but be impressed with Bill's intellectual brilliance and dazzling verbal reasoning, or escape the influence of his metaphorical connections that identified his God's presence in our everyday world, those

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connections would suddenly be everywhere. Even Bill's name, Everson, E-V-E-R-S-O-N. Introducing him at a reading once, I took that name apart and reassembled it, describing him as the archetypal son ever in search of his father. He growled

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behind me in response. When I turned, however, I saw that his eyes were twinkling. But Bill had another side many did not know. A mischievious boy crouched in the prophet's lean body. In the mid 1970s, Bill

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came to speak to a class on contemporary writers I had put together for the University of California extension program. This was the same course that Ray Carver had spoken to a year earlier. As then, in the morning, students would discuss

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a book I had assigned the week before, and in the afternoon the author would visit the classroom to talk about the book and answer questions. "What did you tell them?" Bill asked me at lunch. "Now, I said you'd probably come on like Isaiah

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ranting about the end of the world," I answered. Those eyes twinkled again but he said nothing. I should have known then, but I was as caught by surprise as the class when Bill proceeded to enchant them with a lamb-like gentleness I'd never

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seen in him before. "You old fox," I said to him afterwards, and he threw back his head, snorted once and cackled a crescendo of laughter. Bill and I shared the same birthday. One year we decided to celebrate together in his home in the

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wilds of Swanton Road. This was in 1972 before Parkinson's disease crippled him. Bill was 60 that day. I remember him about to read a poem standing between two huge redwoods in a shadowy cathedral of trees. When the 70 or so guests gathered

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around, he unexpectedly took off his shirt and stood bare-chested in the surrounding greenery. His body was marble white, translucent, not a gram of fat on it to obscure the sleek muscle groupings beneath the skin. It was, I realized with a

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start, the same body Michelangelo had given a reclining Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel where Adam, his index finger listlessly extended, is about to receive the jolt of life from the touch of his Heavenly Father.

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One night in the early 1980s, Bill, George Hitchcock, and I were sitting together in the front row of Santa Cruz's First Congregational Church for a reading by Robert Bly. There were several hundred people in the pews. Bly proceeded to

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berate Western Civilization's worship of an authoritarian father figure as its symbol of divinity. As he did so, Bill squirmed and grunted beside me for five minutes or so before he wrenched himself out of the pew and stocked up the side aisle

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toward the rear exit. Bly saw him out of the corner of his eye, stopped in mid-sentence and called abashed, "Why, Bill, are you leaving?" To which Bill snapped over his shoulder, "You're damn right I am." "But, Bill- " Bly started to say in

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confusion. "For heaven's sakes, Robert," Hitchcock interjected, "you have been insulting the man's God and everything he believes in for the past twenty minutes. What did you expect?" "Oh" said Bly, in sudden, embarrassed comprehension, "of

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course." A year after I published that anecdote as part of a tribute to Bill, Bly published his remembrance of the incident in the Robinson Jeffers newsletter, "Bill," he wrote, "stood up like a shot and was gone." That was it. There were

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no remarks on either side, and Bly continues in the article when members of the audience try to apologize for Bill's behavior he told them, "I thought his decisive action was fine. If someone says something you don't agree with and you can't correct

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it, just leave." Well, that was not what I remembered. And Bill and I never talked about the incident, and so our slightly different accounts stood until ten years later in 2005 when I came across Bill's account of the event in an interview he did

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with Lee Barton dated 1988. Bill said he had stomped out of the reading when Bly declared, "Christianity must renounce the doctrine of the one God." And when Bly asked if he was going, Bill had called over his shoulder, "you better believe

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it." Bill's concluding words, however, were most revealing: "I heard many reports that at the time Bly took the whole thing very well. But after a few days, he began to steam. I wrote him a letter the next day and sent it along with a book. I told him, I

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look forward to his appearance, and that I regretted what happened. Before he got that letter though, he wrote me a savage letter saying that if I differed with him, I should have stayed to fight. Further he said that I stood for the

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inquisition. And then a few hundred years back, I would have reported him to the priests and watched him burn at the stake in the plaza in Santa Cruz. So, I immediately wrote back and told him that it wasn't my place to dispute with him at his reading,

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and closed by telling him that he left me only two options: to leave or to punch him out. And I finished by saying that maybe I made the wrong choice." They patched up their differences, however, a year or so later.

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Another night Bill and I were seated together backstage as part of a troupe of poets at a benefit reading. I noticed Bill's left hand was trembling as if palsy. When I inquired about it, he told me it was a temporary condition, one of the

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signs of an inner ear infection. Well, I had had such an infection the previous year and knew that palsy was not one of its symptoms. I insisted Bill go to a doctor friend of mine. A week later, Bill phoned me. "I just wanted to thank you for

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insisting that I find out I have Parkinson's disease," he said. To this day, I don't know if he was being humorous or bitterly sarcastic, or rather, it was just his way of letting me know that the last great struggle of his life had begun. Bill's life

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in many ways was a series of struggles. One was between his body which loved women, nature, and Jack Daniels, and what he perceived to be the demands of his God's spiritual kingdom. In his last years, the struggle was with his disease-twisted body to

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make it perform as his still dagger-sharp mind wanted it to, so he could shape words with his mouth, write them with his fingers, and embrace those he loved with his arms. His mind remained sharp to the end.

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Despite our moments of camaraderie, most of the time Bill and I had difficulty communicating. As in my friendship with many others, Bill and I came from different worlds. He, the hard-bitten Scandinavian from the Central

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Valley of California; I, the East European Jew from the Atlantic seaboard; he was of the farm, I of the city. Bill even in his humor was tormented, whereas my humor was playful and meaningless, more a verbal babble that celebrated the world

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around me than a profound utterance. He seemed not to hear my wisecracking side-of-the-mouth puns, and I got his sly allusions and clever references minutes after he said them, but most of all, our orientations separated us. In

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his late thirtys, he had adopted the Catholic Church and all its belief systems, its legends, imagery, statues, saints, medals and rules, and never really abandoned them. His fervor was relentless, almost medieval, and let him to the brotherhood of

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the monastery. My orientation was also spiritual, well, but was aimed at a Dionysian lifeforce; I saw a pulsing in every living thing and rooted in this world. Denial of the body's desires propelled Bill's underlying seriousness, Eros

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propelled my joviality. As far as Bill - another follower of Eros, but at war with that part of his nature - was concerned, my outlook wasn't spiritual at all. And he once referred to it almost sneeringly as my "pursuit of secular vitality." But

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beneath these differences, Bill and I shared a bond that was deeper than family, although it was familial in its own way. I'm talking about our belief in the brother- and sisterhood of poets, a family beyond bloodlines, a family based on

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vision and commitment, which included in its membership all the world's shamans, witch doctors, medicine men, alchemists, prophets, rabbis, mullahs, and priests. I believe it was that sense of brotherhood that led Bill to the monastery,

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but I think he chose the wrong brotherhood, forgetting poetry's most important element when he donned the cloth, the complete commitment to the word. The word is primal source, the word is utterance made holy, the word is prayer and hymn, charm and

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spell. The word in its power to restore and lead us back to harmony with ourselves and the universe, the word as healing agent, and the poet as healer. And yet I must question my words, even as I write them, remembering that he wrote one of

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the great religiously-inspired poems of English or of any other language in: IN ALL THESE ACTS, which reads: Dawn cried out: the brutal voice of a bird flattened the

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seaglaze. Treading the surf hunch-headed fishers toed small agates, their delicate legs, iridescent, stilting the ripples. Suddenly the cloud closed. They heard big wind boom back on the cliff, crunch timber over along the ridge. They shook

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up their wings, crying; terror flustered their pinions. Then hemlock, tall, torn by the roots, went crazily down, the staggering gyrations of splintered kindling flung out of bracken, fleet mule deer bolted. But the great elk, caught midway

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between two scissoring logs, arched belly up and died, the snapped spine half-torn out of his peeled back, his hind legs jerking that gasp convulsion, the kick of spasmed life, paunch plowed open, purple entrails disgorged from the basket-work

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ribs, erupting out, splashed sideways, wrapping him, gouted with blood, flecked with the brittle sliver of bone. Frenzied, the terrible head thrashed off its antlered fuzz in that rubble, and then fell still, the great tongue that had

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bugled in rut, calling the cow-elk up from the glades, thrust agonized, out, the maimed member bloodedly stiff in the stone-smashed teeth... Far down below, the mountain torrent that once having started

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could never be stopped, scooped up that avalanchial wrack and strung it along, a riddle of bubble and littered duff spun down its thread. At the gorged river mouth, the sea plunged violently in, gasping its potholes, sucked and panted,

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answering itself in its spume. The river, spent at last, beating driftwood up and down in a frenzy of capitulation, pumped out its life, destroying itself in the mother sea. There where the mammoth sea-grown salmon lurk immemorial, roe in their

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hulls, about to begin. They will beat that barbarous beauty out on those high-stacked shallowsm, those headwater claims back where they were born. Along that upward racing trek, time springs through all its loops and flanges, the many faced splendor

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and the music of the leaf, the copulation of beasts and the watery laughter of drakes, too few the grave witnesses, the wakeful, vengeful beauty, devolving itself of its own constraint, erupting as it goes.

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In all these acts, Christ crouches and seethes, pitched forward on the crucifying stroke, juvescent, that will spring Him out of the germ, out of the belly of the dying buck, out of the father-phallos and the torn-up root. These are the

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modes of His forth-showing, his serene agonization. In the clicking teeth of otters, over and over, He dies and is born, shaping the weasel's jaw in His leap, and the staggering rush of the bass.

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Bill thought he had failed the church in the end and I remember in the fall of 1993, the year before his death, the joy that shone from his disease-wasted body as if it were a weightless paper lantern, the day after he had received communion for the

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first time in twenty-five years. But as I said, I think he chose the wrong brotherhood in the monastic life. When the church assailed him for writing his poems and warned him against the sin of pride, he must have known his mistake. I believe Bill's

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love of women was not just the love of Mary as spiritual mother, you see, but an adoration of the lifeforce and all its fleshly succulents, or it could have been. What he was looking for in his wife Susanna, but in the end did not find in

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her, was the final turning from spiritual agony in the name of the Father, to the celebration of the holiness of the life force in the name of the Mother. Anyway, his words grope toward that realization, like the hands of a blind man touching his way

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through the dark, and that's where the brother- and sisterhood of poets came in. That's where I came in. Bill thought of himself as a charismatic poet, one who was divinely called to transmit God's vision to the world.

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That's why poets comprised the sacred brother- and sisterhood to him, which explains why he was so generous with his time and counsel to young writers. Pursuing that line of reasoning, if living poets were sacred, dead poets were saintly. He

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referred to them once, as "those who go before and call us on." In his elegy to his mentor, Robinson Jeffers, he repeats the phrase, "the poet is dead" again and again, like a litany. When I was told of Bill's passing the day he died, I inadvertently

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murmured, "the poet is dead, long live the poet," and added, "Bill Everson is dead. Long live the poet in his words, and the man in my memories of him." So, that was a little bit of the personality and character of Bill Everson, an amazing man

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whose every single simple experience became a tortured but also treasured wonder at being. Let me read you an Everson poem and I will read Everson poems for the rest of the evening. As I said, if you just tuned in, as

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I said before, this is a celebration for the birthday of Bill Everson, who was born in 1912 and died in 1994. Certainly, along with Robinson Jeffers, probably the most important poet of the Central Coast of California and one of

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the important poets, not only of Catholic poetry, but of American poetry as well. Here is one of the works I refered to, his most famous work called, "Canticle to the Waterbirds." And what's so interesting about Bill's poetry is really as you could tell

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from, "In All These Acts," is a poetry of ecstasy and celebration. And so here is, "A Canticle to the Waterbirds." And again, its location is this very, very coast on which we live. And he was always asked to read this poem. It has been

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anthologized numerable times. CANTICLE TO THE WATERBIRDS Clack your beaks you cormorants and kittiwakes, north on those rock-croppings finger-jutted into the rough Pacific surge.

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You migratory terns and pipers who leave but the temporal clawtrack written on sandbars there of your presence. Grebes and pelicans, you comber-picking scoters and you shorelong gulls. All you keepers have a coastline north of here on the Mendocino

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beaches. All you beyond upon the cliff-face thwarting the surf at Hecaate Head. Hovering the under-surge where the cold Columbia grapples at the bar. North yet to the sound, whose islands float like sown flurry of chips upon the sea. Break

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wide your harsh and salt-encrusted beaks unmade for song and say a praise up to the Lord. And you freshwater egrets east in the flooded marshland skirting the sea-level rivers, white one-legged watchers of

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shallows. Broad-headed kingfishers minnow-hunting from the willow stems on meandering valley sloughs. You too, you herons, blue and supple-throated, stately, taking the air majestically in the sun-flooded San Joaquin, grading

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down on your belted wings from the upper heights of sunset. Mating over the willow clumps are where the flatwater rice fields shimmer. You killed their high night-criers far in the moon-suffusion sky, bitterns and waders, all shore-walkers, all

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roost-keepers, populate some of the 'dobe cliffs of the Sacramento, open your water-dartling beaks, and make a praise up to the Lord. For you hold the heart of His mighty fastness, and shape the

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life of his indeterminant realms, you are everywhere on the lonesome shores of His wide creation. You keep seclusion where no man may go, giving Him praise. Nor may a woman come to lift like your cleaving flight her clear contralto song to

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honor the spendthrift gifts of His soft abundance. You sanctify His hermitage rocks where no holy priest may kneel to adore, nor holy nun assist, and where His true communion-keepers are not enabled to enter.

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And well may you say His praises, birds, for your ways are verved with the secret skills of His inclinations, and your habits plaited and rare, with a subdued elaboration of His intricate craft. Your days intent with a direct astuteness

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needful of His outworking, and your nights alive with a dense repose of His infinite sleep. You are His secret of charges and you serve His secretive ends, in His clouded, mist-conditioned stations, in his murk, obscure in your matted

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nestings, immured in His limitless ranges. He makes you penetrate through dark interstitial joinings of His thickened kingdoms, and keep your concourse in the deeps of His shadowed world.

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Your ways are wild but earnest, your manners grave, your customs carefully schooled to the note of His serious mien. You hold the prime condition of His clean creating, and the swift compliance with which you serve His minor means speaks of the

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constancy with which you hold Him. For what is your high flight forever going home to your first beginnings, but much a testament to your devotion? You hold His outstretched world beneath your wings, and mount upon His storms, and keep your

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sheer wind-lidded sight upon the vast perspectives of His mazy latitudes. But mostly it is your way you bear existence wholly within the context of His utter will and are untroubled. Day upon day,

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you do not reckon, nor scrutinize tomorrow, nor multiply the nightfalls with a rash concern, but rather assume each instant as warrants sufficient of His final seal. Wholly in Providence you spring, and when you die you look on

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death and clarity unflinched, go down, a clutch of feathers ragged upon the brush, or drop on water, where you briefly lived, found food, and now yourselves made food for His deep current-keeping fish, and then are gone. Is left just the

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pinion-feather spinning a bit on the uproil where lately the dorsal fin cut clean air. You leave in silence. And this is for you suffices, who are not of the ceremonials of man, and hence are not made sad to now

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forego them. Yours is of another order of being, and wholly it compels. But may you, birds, utterly seized in God's supremacy, or austerely living under His austere eye. Yet may you reach a man, a necessary thing to know, which has to do

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of the strict conformity that creaturehood entails, and constitutes the prime commitment all things share. For God has given you the imponderable grace to be His verification, outside the mulled incertitude of our forensic choices. That you, our

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lessers in the rich hegemony of being, may serve as testament to what a creature is, and what creation owes. Curlews, stilts, beach-combers, gulls, wave-haunters, shore-keepers, rockhead-holders, all cape-top vigilantes, now

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give God praise. Send up the strict articulation of your throats, and say His name. And we are reading tonight and discussing the work of Bill Everson, who will have a birthday alas in death on

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September 10th, this coming Wednesday. Again, he was born in 1912 on September 10th and died on June 3rd, 1994. And we will now take a brief musical break. The Community Advisory Board of KUSP meets regularly and the

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public is invited to attend. The September meeting is tomorrow evening beginning at 6:30pm at the Agricultural History Project's Codiga Center and Museum at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds in Watsonville. Call the station during business

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hours for more information. Our numbers are 476-2800, that is 476-2800, or 800-655-5877, again 800-655-5877. The Community Advisory Board of KUSP meeting tomorrow at the Santa Cruz County Fairgrounds in Watsonville. So, do call the

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station tomorrow, Monday through Friday, well, to meet tomorrow because the meeting is tomorrow night and you will find out more about that. Well, we are discussing the work of Bill Everson and I'm going to end this nearly half hour reading a

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very rare poem, which I got my hands on because I asked Bill to make me a copy, and it was never in a book when I got it. I don't know whether it's in the collective poems even now, but we'll save that for last and that is when Bill really coming

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to the end of his days has a talk with God. But let us read some of the other poems of Bill Everson, and believe it or not, my favorite poems of Bill's are not his Catholic poems. They are two books, one is called, "The Residual Years," and takes in

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his earliest poems up to the time he enters the the priesthood, and that is 1934 to 1948. And let me just read you a few of these wonderful poems. And you can see that his language was really amazing. This book, by the way, "Residual

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Years," when it was published in, I believe, let's see, it was published- let me find when it was published, as I believe it was published in around 1948. Around that time, in 1948, he became an instant nationally recognized poet. Anyway, here

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are some of these poems, and they are short, which is very interesting, and this is called, "Fish Eaters." And what I'd like you to hear, as you may have heard in the others is, I stumbled through that long poem, is listen to the sound of these

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words and the rhythms, and especially the onomatopoeia, the- you know, the beginnings of consonant words, and how they strike each other and just the music that he gets out of this. So this is:

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THE FISH-EATERS. This blood has beaten a thousand veins and mingled readily in too many limbs to remember the source, a single spring, the fountain lost in the midst of the years, Nordic and Celtic is

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all I know. Pale haired giants roaring their mirth on the Norway coast. Somber Celts in the Irish fog under the edge of the weedy dunes, huddling the meager blaze and no singing. I think of the men behind the centuries, groping down to the

00:36:27.410 - 00:36:44.720

sea, fish-eaters, pickers of flesh from the salty shells, snuffling the wind of the water's edge, the black waves beating. I think of the withered women left in the stinking huts of the hills, no glimmer, nor a hope and knowing no strength,

00:36:44.870 - 00:37:03.260

but the lips held mutely over the teeth. Oh, you folk of the father dark. This bone in this blood are nothing of mine, but wrung from your flesh and fiercely born in the dimmest days, when to live was to lust, to reach for the axe and rise to

00:37:03.260 - 00:37:25.280

the fury, way to the roaring thick of it, shoulders hunched, and the long arms hacking. Yes, yet, trying my heart, I find no hunger for the sword. This blood drowsy and slow, wanting no war, glad for the peace of the hookless hills, glad for the

00:37:25.280 - 00:37:46.100

sleep in the sun. And that poem, if it confused you at all, is really a look back at his ancestry and where he's coming from, the norsemen, the vikings, and how he does not want the same violence and blood

00:37:46.310 - 00:38:07.940

that is in his blood, but wants to go on from there into a peaceful world. In many ways that expresses what will happen within six years after that poem was written because Bill will become a conscientious objector during World War II and refuse

00:38:07.940 - 00:38:24.710

to fight. He still had not found the church. And he just decided that the war and war in itself was not what he wanted of this world. So let us continue with some of these early poems by Bill Everson.

00:38:25.880 - 00:38:49.960

This one is a little longer and it's called, ATILLA, and of course, he's talking about Attila the Hun. On a low Lorranian knoll, a lean peasant sinking a pit meets rotted rock and a slab. The slab cracks and is split, the old

00:38:49.960 - 00:39:08.980

grave opened his spade strikes iron and keenly rings. Out of the earth he picks an ancient sword, hitless with rust and the blade a long double-curve, steel of no Roman or Teuton King but metal struck in the sleeping east and lost in the raids. He

00:39:08.980 - 00:39:26.590

turns it a while in his thick peasant hands, his thumb searching the eaten edge and throws it aside. The brown strip winks in the light and is sunk, winks once in a thousand years, in the sun and the singing air and is lost again in the ground.

00:39:28.550 - 00:39:44.240

Atilla, you rode your horse from the Asian slopes and swept to the west, roaring down Rome and the northern-born Goths. In the screaming dawns you struck the rich earth and left it smoking, struck and butchered and lived like the crimson arc of a

00:39:44.240 - 00:40:01.310

cutting knife. Through the reeling years you ran like a wolf, side-slashing blindly from border to border the length of the bleeding land till your own lust killed you and the dark swarm broke. In the nights the moon crawls to the west and is

00:40:01.310 - 00:40:23.480

hidden. The dawn's bloom in the east, the fogs gather. Atilla, in your frenzy of life you burned, but for nothing; you roared for an instant, shook the world's width, broke the fierce tribes. You are outdone: The earth that you raped has been

00:40:23.480 - 00:40:40.700

ravaged more foully, the cities you sacked have been burned and rebuilt a hundred times. From your day to this, the valleys you plundered have known killing and looting, the sharp violence, the running thunder shaking the night, a gasping moment of peace

00:40:41.600 - 00:41:01.490

and then at it again! Yet you struck deep: In the fields, the earth gives up a curious sword all these years later. The bright-haired folk of a German farm regard with doubt a baby born with oval eyes. In a

00:41:01.490 - 00:41:26.470

gusty hut, an old man hugs the hearth and tells an ancient story. And here is a poem close to his heart, called, "Bard," or the poet.

00:41:30.430 - 00:41:45.240

BARD Sing it! Out of the phrase, the fine word, make the syllable shout on the page. The letters form till the line glows and is ringing. Pursue the illusion, it is sweet to the heart to think

00:41:45.240 - 00:42:02.100

of them listening, to think of them thumbing the leaves, the eyes avidly drinking. You have in your nights the dreams of the older years, hearth-side bards in the great halls singing, shouting the tale, chanting a lusty word in the rhyme while

00:42:02.100 - 00:42:20.820

the warriors stared, the women hushed and not breathing. It is fine for the heart to think of oneself as the voice, the pointer of ways. It is warm in the chest to think of them listening, sing the phrase in the fashion, and fashion the

00:42:20.820 - 00:42:36.630

line. Hug the sweet dream and the lonely dusks when the far planes whine in the sky and the west deadens. It is good to the heart, it is fine in the chest, to think of them out there listening.

00:42:38.610 - 00:43:02.760

And I'm sure he would be happy to think of you out there listening, as I would since especially this is a radio show. What happened to Bill was that he went along, he was a farmer in the Central Valley and following farmers in his

00:43:02.850 - 00:43:21.600

[unintelligible] and he came across the poetry of Robinson Jeffers and Jeffers became his mentor. They never met, but Jeffers to him was the great voice of what California poetry could be. So I guess I should read a poem called "In That

00:43:21.600 - 00:43:39.320

Light." And we certainly have heard his sounds and words of the coast. But this is: LINES FOR THE LAST OF A GOLD TOWN: MILLERTON, CALIFORNIA. When they rode that hawk-hearted Murrieta down in the western

00:43:39.320 - 00:43:55.550

hills- oh, this is Joaquin Murrieta, the Mexican bandit he's talking about here. And so I just wanted to edit that. So let me start again and he's talking here about Millerton, California.

00:43:57.340 - 00:44:13.150

When they rode that hawk-hearted Murrieta down In the western hills, they cut his head loose to prove the bounty and carried it here to this slope on the river's rim where the town of Millerton sprawled, but no longer. In a jar on the

00:44:13.150 - 00:44:29.860

courthouse desk it lay for days, while the wide-wheeled wagon swam in the dust and the word ran. Upstate and down, the folk heard it in saying, and the head in the jar on the Millerton desk sneered through the glass, and all the faces come to look at

00:44:29.860 - 00:44:49.480

it. Now, the thick grass, the willow fringe on the water's edge drinks the March sun and has peace, takes the deep sky and bird singing, the low muddled music, but heavy with peace. On the low slope over the stream, with a roof of it thin

00:44:49.480 - 00:45:07.570

and the windows gone, the old courthouse alone in the middle squats in the drag of the years. Musty, floors fallen, and the smell of dead time on it, of the killed moment, the stifling accumulation of sheer existence thicken the air and the wind

00:45:07.570 - 00:45:28.990

takes it. There can be heard over the earth running in deep and vibrant gusts of broken music, blowing, the reverberation of uttered sound, of boards talk, and scores talk, and the male-throated laughter, primal and harsh and brutally

00:45:28.990 - 00:45:54.880

intense. The mind's eye fashions the picture, glare on the night and the shacks crowded, the congestion of flesh, of reeking animal flesh, blood burning, nerves blazing. And one turns to the years, through the soft disintegration thinking where

00:45:54.880 - 00:46:16.090

are the seekers and where are the whores? What has come of the roaring, the lewd language, the riotous lusts, and the acts, here, where our only slow-trees and the grass, and this empty hulk and symbol of an order jeered at, spat at, hooted and

00:46:16.090 - 00:46:59.630

scorned in the days of its birth. Crumbles the leaf, sags the youths stalk, softly, the alteration, the touch. It has been said often, tongues hating it. It has been said. This is called, "In the Shift of the Stars." Well, let me read

00:46:59.630 - 00:47:12.830

two shorter poems before I do that. Here is San Joaquin, where of course he was born and raised in the valley. SAN JOAQUIN This valley after the storms can be beautiful beyond the telling,

00:47:13.460 - 00:47:34.070

though our city folks scorn it, cursing heat in the summer and drabness in winter, and flee it. Yosemite and the [unidentified] them. They seek splendor, who would touch them or stun them? The nerve that is dying needs thunder to arouse it. I, in the

00:47:34.070 - 00:47:59.270

vineyard, in green time and dead time, come to it dearly and take nature neither freaked nor amazed. But the secret shining, the soft indeterminant wonder, I watch it morning and noon, the unutterable sundowns and love as the leaf does the bow.

00:48:01.490 - 00:48:20.330

And that sounds awfully interesting today when we need so much to stun us because our nerves are overloaded and dying, and they need thunder to arouse them. And if you go to any Hollywood film with all of its explosions and car chases and

00:48:20.330 - 00:48:35.200

car wrecks that's what he's talking about, a long, long time ago. Here's RAIN ON THAT MORNING. We on that morning, working faced south and east where the

00:48:35.200 - 00:48:55.270

sun was in winter at rising, and looking up from the earth perceive 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. The rain on that morning came like a woman with

00:48:55.270 - 00:49:13.780

love and touched us gently, and the earth gently, and closed down delicately in the morning so that all around with a subtle and intricate touchings the earth took them, the vines and the winter weeds, but we fled them and gaining the roof looked

00:49:13.810 - 00:49:33.110

back at time when a rain without wind came slowly and love in her touches. And more nature in THE SHIFT OF THE STARS. High in the West one falling stars streaks on the curve of

00:49:33.110 - 00:49:54.080

night. Jupiter glimmers the dark, the Dipper wheels on the pole as the world turns, wind over oat fields and the sight gone plunging up in the sky, thrown violently out for the mammoth flames and drowned in the dark. On a summer's night

00:49:54.080 - 00:50:14.240

and the shift of stars when it comes like that swiftly, the awareness, the realization thundering deeper than all the dreaming, life turns lonely and small, and all that has been done and thought of, nothing, the breed, nothing, the self and

00:50:14.240 - 00:50:35.930

the spirit wretched and whining. Well, weeper, the fault is not yours. Out of your parents' passion you came wondering, a healthy beast, your lusts and your limits and the saving grace of your ego, that you are lost in the scheme is no matter. Kiss

00:50:35.930 - 00:50:54.710

the flesh and finger the bone. Temper your lust with a mind's touch but cherish it dearly. Laugh and be hardy, the body is good and take on the flesh and the careless heart, the sun that is over this land.

00:51:02.750 - 00:51:20.550

And here's another poem which is called THE KNIVES. She goes more delicate and gentle than any I know, compassionate, sweet as the lark song, sweet as the wind song. She is one to be loved but scorning the flesh, you will go

00:51:20.550 - 00:51:41.310

lonely through life, straining to that ethereal detachment, the spirit's realm, the mind's garden, bruised on the right, and cut on the left, the body's coarseness drags, thinking behind to blight her forever. Oh, poor virgin, you forged your

00:51:41.310 - 00:52:01.350

own knives, and wet them too keen to be carried. The lusts that you loathe as the sole you adore were made by the God and nothing exists that needs praise nor condemnation but shines its own splendor. The way of your choosing life, sterile and cold,

00:52:01.530 - 00:52:19.820

the mind's steel harsh in the wincing flesh. You will go hurt, the wound and the bleeding, but the knives, the knives, they are yours. I always imagined him writing that to a woman who had said no

00:52:19.820 - 00:52:34.490

to him. Here's: SLEEP. The mind drifts warmly focused on farther dreams. There comes over the eyes a vast and immeasurable tide with no shore

00:52:34.490 - 00:52:58.520

breaking, the lift of a darkening sea, and the mind goes down to it gently, lapped in the low. Now, from the sunken brain, the freed flesh throbs the deep song, the bone and the fiber hark the same music, the blood pounds cleanly, pulsing wantonly

00:52:58.640 - 00:53:18.440

through the slack and indolent limbs, loosed from the mind's hand, the nerves' dominance, sprung to the secret joy of release. Sleep comes to the eyes as a moving tide with no shore breaking, the lift of a darkening sea. And the mind goes

00:53:18.440 - 00:53:38.040

down to the depth and the silence. The loose blood pounds the deep soul. Here's something probably all young poets out there wanted to write about, you see a ruin of some kind, and a ruin on

00:53:38.040 - 00:53:56.600

American landscape is usually an old barn or maybe an old schoolhouse. And here is Bill Everson's ELEGY FOR A RUINED SCHOOLHOUSE. The walls down, the beams shattered, all the false columns

00:53:56.660 - 00:54:16.370

opened like shells, that hulk of a schoolhouse, pretentious and ugly, spilled to the earth. To have spent years in the rooms under the roof between the stained walls, to have sprouted the earliest seeds of the mind's soil, to have shaped passions,

00:54:16.430 - 00:54:35.240

repressions, that cant and the leann of life– For the world, it is nothing. These things grow and come down marking the hub of every crossroad's village the land over. There are temples ancient with suffering, there are cities steeped in human

00:54:35.240 - 00:54:59.150

passion, generation on generation– Poems are for those, odes for the oldest! But for me– my life's in the brick, in the dust of the saw and chalk of the plaster, the brick on the brick of the schoolhouse. My life's in the heap, in the surge of the

00:54:59.150 - 00:55:24.280

sun and the night. And I would like to read this very rare poem that Bill wrote after he was afflicted with Parkinson's disease. And as I said in my memoir, his mind was always dagger-sharp, it became

00:55:24.280 - 00:55:43.810

more and more difficult for him to shape words. And he would struggle with his lips and his tongue to do the one thing he loved to do which was speak. And now in this poem called, "Mexican Standoff," and if you know what a Mexican standoff is,

00:55:43.810 - 00:56:01.180

it is two sides, just neither one can go forward or backwards, they're sort of stuck that way. And he calls this poem, "Mexican Standoff," and he confronts God and he thinks that God speaks to him and he is fighting this crippling of his body, this body

00:56:01.180 - 00:56:21.310

which he loves so much, and has always identified as part of his spirituality. And I remember the first time he read this, it was actually after the 1989 earthquake, when Joe Stroud and I had set up a poetry benefit reading for the two bookshops

00:56:21.310 - 00:56:38.740

downtown, which was at that time Plaza Books and Bookshop Santa Cruz. And he came and he had to be supported by two people, and he managed to read this poem, very, very palsied and having trouble getting the words out. And I got this some years later.

00:56:38.740 - 00:56:54.370

I don't think it's ever been in a book. Again, this is MEXICAN STANDOFF by William Everson, better known as Brother Antoninus, one of the great poets from the coast, who of course, as I just read, he was really born and raised in

00:56:54.370 - 00:57:19.300

San Joaquin, but found what was essential in life out here. So here's how he imagines this meeting between he and God. Innerspace, a rock cavern by the look of it, and I stand alone, facing the center. Air still and no sound, but a lampless light

00:57:19.360 - 00:57:45.160

fills the emptiness, tempers the darkness dimly. I stand in the dream's expectancy, my presence of purpose, I have yet to learn. But I wait to know. The voice, when it comes, has no gender, being either or neither. It is somehow not sexless, with subtly

00:57:45.400 - 00:58:13.750

enforces its oblique import. "It's up to you," the voice says evenly, "remember: what you use is yours, but what you don't use is mine." Nothing more. Nothing but the chill light and the still air. The implication is ominous. For eight years I have

00:58:13.750 - 00:58:32.710

endured it, the dread paralysis, agathons(?) unable to take up the mild calisthenics prescribed by doctors for its care. Some baleful blockage prevents it, some obdurate perversity of the will that frustrates every energizing impulse brings it to

00:58:32.710 - 00:58:58.480

nothing. I am my own keeper, my own arch enemy, my own denier. And I see in my mind, the insidious paralysis inch off my flesh, a neuropathic degeneration tracing my limbs and the joints of my bones. I think of my shrunken sex and my

00:58:58.480 - 00:59:26.800

stone cold seed in it's wrinkled sack, and I ponder the meaning of use, what use entails. Usage, the act, way or extent of using or treating, treatment, use. Definition is irksome and on the instant my heart retorts, "I am a poet for God's sakes, use

00:59:26.800 - 00:59:46.480

without passion is for the birds." And the thought sends me. I find myself chortling, "Atta girl," saluting the old inveterate female heart, which like the primal lizard, the base of man's being, never defers. Churning my blood, the heart

00:59:46.540 - 01:00:04.930

doggedly croons her litany of life. No use but ecstasy, passion alone clues consummation. Suddenly awake I eat myself up, stamp around the room in a hobbling dance, lamely cavorting, a cackling old man babbling in aimless

01:00:04.930 - 01:00:29.020

self-confabulation, crazy as a loon. I cease abruptly. Drawing myself to full height, I confront the emptiness, "You say," I demand, "that what I don't use is yours." My voice cracks, "Then take it, God damn it, take it." Getting no reply,

01:00:29.650 - 01:00:58.240

I smile benignly, blandly magnanimous, and whisper darkly, "I wish you well of it." Silence. Cocking my head like a teetering jay, like a magpie on an elderberry stem, suddenly I am solicitous. "Are you sure you can handle it?" Silence. Then,

01:00:58.390 - 01:01:21.200

licking my lips, I smile slyly. "What are you going to do with it? Use it?" Bill Everson, 1912 on September 10th, to June 3rd, 1994, one of our great poets, happy birthday. This is Mort Marcus, I'll see

01:01:21.200 - 01:01:22.280

you in three weeks.