Everything Preserved

“Why did Landis Everson stop writing poetry for forty-three years?” asks the New York Times in a recent feature article. This question permeates Everson’s extraordinary first book, Everything Preserved, which collects poems written between 1955 and 1960 and, after a long silence, poems written between 2003 and 2005.

A friend of poets Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Jack Spicer, Everson became a significant figure of the Berkeley Renaissance in the 1940s and 1950s, which rebelled against the strictures of formalism to bring the poet’s unmediated mind onto the page. After the group disbanded, Everson stopped writing for over four decades, but at the prompting of editor and poet Ben Mazer, he began writing the vivid, spontaneous, and marvelous poems of the last few years. As John Ashbery has noted, Everson writes “lines that burn with a distant strange brightness.”

“This is a brilliant book—that is to say there is a shine in the poems—one after another. Read them for an intimate astonishment and hear the heart beat and the mind play in its search.” —Robin Blaser

“Real poets never vanish, their language is reborn to thrill us ‘in the wild zone’. Direct, intimate, magical, ‘honey washed’, Landis Everson’s words ‘purr’ before us. Verbs blush and run around naked. His skills are astutely dressed up, bones become poems. Which are constant and fulfilling, honestly shining in the unity time.” —Joanne Kyger