William Everson: The Light the Shadow Casts: Five Interviews with William Everson Plus Corresponding Poems

by William Everson

In this collection of interviews with one of the central poets of the San Francisco Literary Renaissance (which preceded the Beat movement) William Everson/Brother Antoninus ponders the mystical dimensions of poetry. The interviews span the final fifteen years of his life and contain his final thoughts on the prophetic, the shamanistic and the aesthetic dimensions of his craft, as well as his own life, characterized by the Portuguese proverb that God writes straight with crooked lines. The interviews, accompanied by selected poems, were conducted, edited and introduced by Clifton Ross and were first published two years after the poets death by Stride Publications, UK, republished by Freedom Voices to honor the centennial of the poets birth.

120 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Also known as Brother Antoninus, William Everson was an American poet of the Beat Generation, San Francisco Renaissance and was also a literary critic and small press printer.
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 the camp at Waldport, Oregon, with other poets, artists and actors, 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.