Everything Preserved [Paperback]

By now everyone has heard of the story of Landis Everson, the golden boy of the Berkeley Renaissance of the immediate postwar era, whose poems were sought after by all the top poetry magazines of the mid 1950s (Poetry, Kenyon, Hudson, etc); and then, after finishing up two extended "serial poems" (POSTCARDS FROM EDEN and THE LITTLE GHOSTS I PLAYED WITH, both included here) he stopped writing abruptly just as the serial poem was bringing him into a new arena of intelligence and sensuality. Everson turned instead to painting, and people pretty much forgot he was a poet until a few years ago when the young scholar and poet Ben Mazer, based in Cambridge Massachusetts but researching a feature on the Berkeley poets, cast a net out to San Luis Obispo and found Everson still alive and ultra-responsive--and perhaps looking for a challenge. Within a few months, Everson entered into a frenzy of new work, in which he was averaging nearly a poem a day.

The new material in EVERYTHING PRESERVED isn't as uneven as the Publishers Weekly review indicates; if anything, Everson's fifties material was the uneven corpus of work, and Mazer has whittled it down here to a mere handful of poems, whereas I could have stood to see a whole lot more from the 50s. Maybe they will appear in another volume. He definitely wrote more than nine worth preserving! But the newsflash is all about the seventy (or so) new poems written between 2003 and 2005 that Mazer chose for the heart of this volume. Some of the poems revive memories of long-ago lovers, friends, or colleagues (a few of the very best are written in homage to Jack Spicer and his theories of dictation and seriality); some are wry Ashberyan remixes of old movies from the glory days of Hollywood classic cinema--RED DUST, MY FAVORITE BLONDE.

Often Everson will pluck from the air a theme or two, entangle them like ribbons round a maypole within the first three or four lines of his poem, and then introduce a third, contra-contrapuntal theme in the second stanza, watching as these elements take on what almost seems like a life of their own in rondo. His is an elegant interchange of control and release, in which mistake, misunderstanding, the aleatory and the interrupted are each given a place at the table. In "Another Look at the Garden" the images of fairies, food, fabric, furniture and fire shift and interchange places like ceramic shepherdesses performing minuets inside a Faberge egg, continually revealing new relationality. "They were not asked to share our sofas,/ but once an idea is needed/ it spreads like salt and sugar. They are/ riding in our automobiles,/ eating our dinners." What makes the poems so delicious is a limpid, sunny sexuality; you haven't seen a writing so filled with kissing, flirting, cuddling, stripping off, since the "Goblin Market" of Christina Rossetti. Oh wait, that was kind of creepy wasn't it? Well, there's a fear factor here too. That's always the case when the fairy tale comes real.

"Everything Preserved" is a collection of poems by Landis Everson which were composed between 1955 and 1960, then supplemented by poems written between 2003 and 2005. A significant figure of the Berkeley Renaissance in the 1940s and 1950s, Everson was one of those who rebelled agists the strictures of formalism in bringing his word painted images to paper. Receiving the Emily Dickinson First Book Award from the Poetry Foundation, "Everything Preserved" is highly recommended and rewarding reading and an important addition to academic library American Poetry Studies reference collections. 'Landscape with Deer': The forest I step in has to be imaginary./Can you imagine me following you otherwise,/me a non-trail blazer? Even the deer/large-eyed, tawny with twitching tails/were misplaced from the zoo. Do you//wonder, when you hear the mountains/in my speech that I'll never penetrate those trees/because they have become real to me,/and why I shake so in retreat/fearing the snowdrifts, the avalanches, the/broken landscapes that have made you unreachable, a fable to tell to deer/before thy learn old ways to be wild.

Annie Dillard once wrote me a postcard years ago telling me that with the thousands of fan mail she receives, she couldn't be a "mentor" for my writing aspirations. The postcard ended with one of the best pieces of advise she could have given me: read only great books, and only the ones you love.

When I received another postcard in the mail a couple months ago, stating that Landis Everson won the Emily Dickenson Prize from the Poetry Foundation (a well regarded foundation and a well respected prize), I purchased the collection, titled Everything Preserved, ready to read this great book.

What I like most about these poems is Everson's use of imagery and internal rhyme. Emotion is hard to control in short and medium-length lines -- it's better off using emotion in long lines; however, Everson does a pretty good job. Good enough, that every poem in the collection is worth publication.

However, the collection is just that, a collection. I mention this tautology because, like every other book I read, I like books that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. I like books that surprise me, keep me reading with even the smallest amount of suspence to keep me turning the pages. I don't believe poetry books should be exempt from this idea, just because the poems are independent of one another. While every poem in the collection is worth publication, they should not all be published side by side in one book. It almost appears more like an anthology than of a collection of poems by a single author.

The monotony is exaggerated twice over. First by the fact that every poem is stylistically the same. It is true that there are some structured free-verse poems inside, but even those sound a lot like the unstructured free-verse poems that dominate the entire collection. The lack of variation in itself leads to mere mild disappointment, but once the second monotonous characteristic comes into play, it is almost painful.

While he does come up with some great imagery, it is clouded by the imagery of both poetry and moons. When a poet uses poetry as a metaphor within his or her poems, it is always interesting to read, because it is a rare metaphor, but it is also an unpredictable one. Poetry means different things to differnet poets. On the other hand, moons tend to have a more predictable metaphorical nature about them: passion, spirituality, dark subjects.

Everson uses both poetry and moons not once or twice, but often and as much as he can. Whatever the poem is saying is diminished by the "look there's another one" frustration by this reader. So much so I began craving for a metaphor other than moon and poetry. Again each poem was great in and of itself, but as part of the whole, and I'll say it again, the collection was just that, a collection.

Which brings me back to Annie Dillard and her postcard. I wanted to enjoy this book, but I couldn't. Debating whether I should finish the book or not, I came across Dillard's postcard, and read: Read only great books, and only the ones you love. I have not picked Everson's book up since.

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