William Everson: The Shaman's Call: Interviews, Introduction, and Commentaries

by Steven B. Herrmann

In 1991, author and Jungian psychotherapist Steven Herrmann was "called" by the poet-shaman William Everson to collaborate on writing a book. It is from that event that the subtitle of this book emerged, The Shaman's Call. Its aim is to instill in readers that if one follows one's calling from the shamanic archetype with the right attitude, it could culminate in true cosmic awareness. And, it would interconnect the psyche with nature, or what C.G. Jung called the "Self." Such awareness is made clear through the transfiguring power of American poet-shamans, who transmit what they are called by nature to That an experience of the Self is a life-altering experience. The calling can be transmitted by way of an animal power to a person through dreams, transformative relationships, in-depth psychotherapy, religious experiences, art, scientific endeavor, or through the hearing, reading or writing of shamanic poetry. During the conversations with Everson, emerged a vision of the way shamanism has been portrayed in American poetry, from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, to Emily Dickinson's The Complete Poetry, to what Everson achieved in his seminal poems, October Tragedy, The Encounter and Black Hills, and in his literature course at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The conversations form a link between the 80-year-old poet-shaman and the 35-year-old Jungian author Steven Herrmann, who was just beginning to find his own wings as a poet. Herrmann lives with his wife in the wooded hills of Oakland, California.

Genres: Poetry

307 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2009

Reviews

[Steven Herrmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

For interested readers, I'd like to add an additional Introduction written by Bill Hotchkiss, who edited this book, but it never found it's way into the printed edition.
"Steven Herrmann, PhD, is one of the relatively few people whom Bill Everson allowed to become genuinely close, virtually a family member during the latter portion of the poet’s life—the years when Everson was poet in residence at Kresge College, University of California, Santa Cruz, and the years following his retirement from the University faculty due to the progression of Parkinson’s syndrome from which he suffered. Steven, then an undergraduate student, was Bill’s teaching assistant for five consecutive quarters, winter 1980 through spring 1981.
It was during this period that Everson published The Masks of Drought (the amazing sequence of poems that publicly confirmed, so to speak, the identity of the poet-shaman), Earth Poetry (a selection of essays and interviews, including “The Poet as Prophet,” an interview of Everson conducted by Albert Gelpi), and American Bard (Everson’s re-arrangement into verse of Whitman’s preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a book hand-set and hand-printed by Everson and his students at the Lime Kiln Press). As poet, critic, and teacher Everson was at the peak of his powers, but the insidious and destructively progressive Disease forced him to turn away from the teaching he loved.
`In the aftermath of his retirement, Everson urged Herrmann to undertake the series of interviews (1985-1993) and the evaluative and interpretive discussions of which William Everson: The Shaman’s Call consists. The insights are significant and frequent as the Old Poet and the Young Jungian Psychotherapist interact during their time of exploration, their intellectual venture along a path that is both very new and at the same time as ancient as humanity itself.
I remember Everson and Gary Snyder meeting on the campus of Sierra College, meeting for the first time in years, both came to read and to pay tribute to Robinson Jeffers—the two figures of the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance shaking hands, and Snyder nodding, speaking quietly, as if bemused, “The old shaman,” and Everson grinning.
He was a lightning shaman, as Steven Herrmann calls him. He sought and found “The crystal prism, / The clear point of reconciliation” (from “The Challenge”). In the unfinished poem “Takes the Pipe,” a verse-retelling of Robert H. Lowie’s Crow Indian story of the same name, Everson has his crippled hero, aided by a titanic grizzly, achieve a powerful medicine vision, but only at the price of intense pain engendered by self-mutilation. As though crucified on the pinnacle of his extreme experience, Takes-the-pipe views the world around him:

Now the darkness was gone. As an eagle turns in its gyre
Takes-the-pipe hung at the pinnacle of the [ ]
All the world lay gleaming about him.
Glowing, a softly radiant visionary sheen,
A transparent shimmering luminescence.

Here the poem ends, incomplete, the manuscript dated July 1976. The man has ventured into the depths of psychic awareness, to the roots of religion itself, and has returned with the powers of the shaman."

Bill Hotchkiss

(I am the author of this book. I would be delighted if readers who feel moved would write reviews. Reviews of this book can be found at Amazon.com and at visionsofspiritualdemocracy.com)