#william everson

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.

The last settlement scraggled out with a barbed wire fence And fell from sight. They crossed coyote country: Mesquite, sage, the bunchgrass knotted in patches; And there the prairie dog yapped in the valley; And on the high plateau the short-armed badger Delved his clay. But beyond that the desert, Raw, unslakable, its perjured dominion wholly contained In the sun’s remorseless mandate, where the dim trail Died ahead in the watery horizon: God knows where.

And there the failures: skull of the ox, Where the animal terror trembled on in the hollowed eyes; The catastrophic wheel, split, sandbedded; And the sad jawbone of a horse. These the denials Of the retributive tribes, fiercer than pestilence, Whose scrupulous realm this was.

Only the burro took no notice: the forefoot Placed with the nice particularity of one To whom the evil of the day is wholly sufficient. Even the jocular ears marked time. But they, the man and the anxious woman, Who stared pinch-eyed into the settling sun, They went forward into its denseness All apprehensive, and would many a time have turned But for what they carried. That brought them on. In the gritty blanket they bore the world’s great risk, And knew it; and kept it covered, near to the blind heart, That hugs in a bad hour its sweetest need, Possessed against the drawn night That comes now, over the dead arroyos, Cold and acrid and black.

This was the first of his goings forth into the wilderness of the world. There was much to follow: much of portent, much of dread. But what was so meek then and so mere, so slight and strengthless, (Too tender, almost, to be touched)—what they nervously guarded Guarded them. As we, each day, from the lifted chalice, That strenghenless Bread the mildest tongue subsumes, To be taken out in the blatant kingdom Where Herod sweats, and his deft henchmen Riffle the tabloids—that keeps us.

Over the campfire the desert moon Slivers the west, too chaste and cleanly To mean hard luck. The man rattles the skillet To take the raw edge off the silence; The woman lifts up her heart; the Infant Knuckles the generous breast, and feeds.

Brother Antoninus

"Half obscured in drifting sheets of morning fog."