#william everson

[theshatterednotes]

US poet William Everson

[uwmspeccoll]

It's Fine Press Friday!

Veteran letterpress printer and fine press publisher Richard Bigus founded Labyrinth Editions in 1977 in Torrance, California. He learned his craft under the tutelage of noted California poet and printer William Everson and printer and educator Jack Stauffacher at Cowell College, University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1980, Bigus designed, printed, and bound this exquisite edition of Everson's anthology of pacifist poetry, Eastward the Armies, in an edition of 250 copies illustrated with linocuts by California artist Tom Killion, another student of Jack Stauffacher, and signed by the poet and artist.

Bigus handset the type in 18-pt. Centaur, with Arrighi italics and Castellar initials and titling. Other text was set in 12-pt. Centaur and Arrighi italics. The illustrations are printed directly from Killion's linoleum blocks. The book is quarter-bound with leather-thong side stitch in linen and decorative paper marbled by Bigus over boards. Of the 250 copies, ours is one of 50 printed on handmade Japanese Hosho Professional and Suzuki papers. Our copy is another donation from the estate of our late friend, art professor, painter, collector, letterpress printer, and book artist Dennis Bayuzick.

View other posts on books by Richard Bigus.

View other posts on books illustrated by Tom Killion.

View other posts on works by William Everson.

View other books from the collection of Dennis Bayuzick.

View more Fine Press Friday Posts.

[uispecialcollections]

Inside the Cover: The Alder

This week’s Inside the Cover is looking at The Alder. The encapsulated poem by William Everson describes the felling of a tree. Peter and Donna Thomas used an alder from Kingfisher Flat, the location Everson felled a tree in his poem, to bind the pages. The illustrations were created by Donna Thomas using linoleum cuts and paper pulp pochoir images, and (of course) the paper was made by Peter and Donna Thomas. 

Everson’s words beautifully describe the process from selecting a tree to fell to the final moments as it falls. One of the final stanzas of Everson’s poem above describes that final moment before the tree falls: 

“Suddenly the stroke takes.  A Shiver runs up the stately frame. The yearning top, that had reached for the stars,  Begins to sway. A kind of raptor shiver Runs down it, a wince of anguish, then an awful agonization Possess it, a moment transfixed.”

William Everson, or Brother Antoninus, was an American poet and small press printer born in Sacramento, California. He is recognized as a part of the San Francisco Rennaissance in the 1940′s and as a part of the Beat movement of the 1950′s.[1]

Everson also served as teacher at UC Santa Cruz, that is where Peter Thomas met and studied under him. Peter describes his time as an apprentice, “No questions were asked and no answers were given. Everson led us through the mysteries of the Black Art in silences broken by cries to the gods for mercy. In the end we knew typography and printing and the desire for perfection.”  [2]

In the end, we thank Everson for teaching Peter how to print and make books because who knows if The Alder would exist otherwise. 

[1] “William Everson, Beat Poet, 81.” The New York Times, 6 June 1994, pp. 25.

[2] Thomas, Peter. California State Library Foundation Bulletin, Number 40, July 1992. pp. 12.

[melusinemuse]

These are the ravens of my soul, Sloping above the lonely fields And cawing, cawing. I have released them now, And sent them wavering down the sky, Learning the slow witchery of the wind, And crying on the farthest fences of the world.

William Everson, “These Are the Ravens”

[robertsmithsonlibraryandbookclub]

Untitled Project: Robert Smithson Library & Book Club [Everson, William, The Residual Years, Poems 1934–1948, 1968] Oil paint on carved wood, 2017

[mosheisaacson]

Anarchism is a visionary politics Mysticism is the anarchism of religion Mystics don't rely on structure

William Everson

[uwmspeccoll]

It’s Fine Press Friday!

This week we present In Medias Res: Canto One of an Autobiographical Epic: Dust Shall Be the Serpent’s Food by William Everson with a foreword by the author. It is illustrated with woodcuts by California printmaker Tom Killion. The book was designed and printed by Adrian Wilson at The Press in Tuscany Alley, San Francisco in a limited edition of 226 copies signed by poet, artist, and printer. The text was composed in Centaur and Arrighi type by the Mackenzie-Harris Corporation, San Francisco. The paper was handmade by Barcham Green & Company, Maidstone, Kent, England and bound by The Schuberth Bookbindery in San Francisco.

The prospectus reads:

“Canton One, In Medias Res, is the first poem of William Everson’s autobiographical epic tentatively entitled Dust Shall Be the Serpent’s Food.

The wolf and the lamb shall feed together;

The lion and the ox shall eat straw;

And dust shall be the serpent’s food.

Isaias LXV, 25 (Douay)

The concept of a summary of his life in the successive cantos was formulated while Everson was, for ten years, Poet-in-Residence at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He writes in his foreword, “The Latin appellation is clear enough: ‘in medias res’ means simply ‘in the middle of things.’ But in terms of the epic tradition it has come to mean the low point in the fortunes of the hero,” and in the poet’s life a major turning point.

The publication of this important new work by William Everson celebrates the renewal of an association begun in 1944 when Adrian Wilson was introduced to “the black art” by observing Everson bending over a press printing an early book of his poetry. Now with the production of In Medias Res a circle evolves as symbolic as that presaged in the poem itself.”

This book was a generous donation from our friend, Jerry Buff.

View more posts about Adrian Wilson.

View more posts about the artist, Tom Killion.

View more Fine Press Friday posts.

–Sarah, Special Collections Graduate Intern

[uwmspeccoll]

Monday Motivation Owl

This week we present a highly motivated Great Horned Owl from a new acquisition, Blackbird Sundown by the noted American poet William Everson (aka Brother Antoninus), with illustrations by Ron Sauter and letterpress printed as a broadside in 1978 by the California master printer Grant Dahlstrom for the Lord John Press of Northridge, California, in an edition of 175 numbered copies and 26 lettered copies, signed by both the poet and artist.

Everson’s poem is full of motion, a kind of winged ballet of life and death, the hunter and the hunted:

A sudden hush. In the suspension of sound Silence drops to a stunned terror. Then all explodes, every bird for himself, Up, down, out and away.

For over the ridge, Her shoulders of flight massively outstretched, Her hunched body tense with hunger, gravid with need, The Great Horned Owl glides implacably in, Wide staring eyes fixed on her prey.

And as day turns to dusk, and the recovering Redwings find their roosts:

Over the ridge the darkness shuts like a wing. The earth-chill tightens; the claw moon Talons the west.

View more motivated (and some unmotivated) owls.