The Veritable Years: Poems 1949-1966

by William Everson

This comprehensive scholarly edition gathers all the verse, including previously unpublished pieces, written by Everson during his eighteen years as a Dominican lay brother, Brother Antoninus. Taken together, these poems provide a passionate record of Everson/Antoninus's struggle to maintain strict vows of celibacy. That struggle is fraught with dramatic tension, as the poet strives to establish a fragile equilibrium between opposed psychic polarities of Spirit and Flesh.

Genres: Poetry

417 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 1998

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.

Reviews

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read most of the poems in this volume many times, but it had been years since I’d read the collection front to back. As the three volumes of Everson’s collected works go, this, to my mind, is the most difficult.
It would be ingenuous on my part to suggest that Everson opens the collection with this line, “My problem is primal.” It would certainly set up what follows. But instead we find it in one of the last poems where it functions as something of a summation.
Everson’s poetic language has always been that of the “Lord of the lorns of lost space.” Here, from “Canticle of the Rose” he acknowledges his propensity:

I know too well the accents of excess to be deceived by them,
As he who fashions speech knows better by far its procreant liabilities than any one who listens merely.

(Is it not plain I pile language up to check and impede the rising tide within me,
Containing in its plex the mastering flood, conserving the vowel-weft over against its consonantal check,
To hold the importunate crest of my elation, that I might touch the hidden nerve springing volition free,
And of its concentrated force perfectly specify the fierce insurgent reck, the absolute object of my attestation?)

All of that I offer by way of introduction to what this particular collections offers, an exploration of the “Meaning of myth.” These are the poems of Everson’s cloistered years as Brother Antoninus which he spent exploring to their mystic depths the words that have become the accepted codification of the Christian myths. Along the way he recasts the words in a way to accommodate them to the landscapes of the western United States even to particularities of places in California.

If I were to attempt to describe something akin to a plot line that might lead through the very chronological collection, I would suggest that these are the poems of the poet’s early commitment to a new faith which rise toward the crisis exemplified in the poem “The Poet Is Dead,” a memorial to Robinson Jeffers in which Everson contemplates his own life as a poet and conflates the poetic calling with that of priest of martyr and saint. Steeped as it is in the mystic, the volume reeks of sex and even more so as Everson begins to question, after Jeffers’ death, his own role as Man, celibate, cloistered, in a world of continuous creation in which sex plays the ultimate role.

This is a difficult collection to read through (it has taken me the better part of a year). It is simpler, as I have generally found over the years, to pick it up for the purpose of reading this poem or that. Contextually, in Everson’s life work, though, this may be the most important part of the collected works to read through as a vision of the poet’s long, dark night of the soul.

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection contains some great poems, such as Tryptich for the Living. Sometimes it's a little too easy to read his struggles with living in a monastery in these poems, which at times is a strength, but at others I find those struggles overpowering the poetry.

[Seth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contains my favorite poem, that I learned from Dead Raven Choir.

[Anne-louise]

my great uncle