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ben mazer
On Landis Everson
Landis Everson was born in 1926 in Coronado, California, and now lives in San Luis Obispo, CA. He was a member of the Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s and 1950s with his friends Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, and Robin Blaser. As an undergraduate he took classes with Josephine Miles, and was poetry editor of Occident. And early poem of his, written for Robert Duncan, was in part the impetus for Duncan’s The Venice Poem. Jack Spicer admired the ease with which Everson wrote poetry, and fell in love with him, later visiting him in New York in 1950. In 1951 Everson met John Ashbery in New York, while working toward a Master’s at Columbia. Ashbery admired his poems, asking to copy one of them out, which he had to do on the floor of Everson’s furnitureless Turtle Bay apartment. Later Ashbery would publish a selection of Everson’s poems in Locus Solus (1962). In 1954 Everson read at the San Francisco Poetry Center (a recording of which is in the Poetry Center’s archives). In 1955 he was Karl Shapiro’s teaching assistant at Berkeley, and had his first of four appearances in Poetry. In 1958 he impressed a younger crowd of San Francisco poets, including Joanne Kyger. In 1960s he participated in a private weekly workshop with Spicer and Blaser, during the period in which Spicer was writing his first fully “dictated” serial poetry. Everson wrote two sequences during that year, both of which Spicer considered to have been “dictated.” Everson then stopped writing poetry for 43 years.