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Favorite NYT story from today:
October 17, 2005
Poet, 79, Wins Prize and New Audience
By DINITIA SMITH
CHICAGO - Why did Landis Everson stop writing poetry for 43 years?
The question arose last week, after the Poetry Foundation awarded Mr. Everson its newly created prize for a writer over 50 who has never published a book.
Mr. Everson, 79, quiet, pixieish and a little frail after a cataract operation, answered, smiling, "Imagine, if you had written a letter to a friend in Chicago and you never had an answer, and you kept writing and writing and not getting any answer back, would you keep writing?" No matter. Mr. Everson will now receive the Emily Dickinson First Book Award of $10,000, with publication of his book underwritten by the foundation.
It was not that Mr. Landis's poetry had been rejected, but rather that, for him, poetry is a communication between friends, not a commercial enterprise. "I wasn't seeing my friends," he said simply.
Those friends were among the poets who became known as the Berkeley Renaissance writers: Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Robin Blaser. Although each poet's work was different, they were rebelling against East Coast formalism - their writing was full of symbolist imagery, colloquialisms, mythological and Biblical references; it was sometimes obscene, sometimes homoerotic. (Mr. Everson is the boy in Duncan's "Venice Poem": "his eye/ is fixt upon the boy's eye - / as if he saw all love was frozen there").
. . .
When Mr. Everson heard about the prize, he became depressed, he said. He didn't sleep, didn't eat. "I realized all the fun and games had gone out of poetry; it was becoming professional," he said. But his spirits have lifted. "Without Ben, I wouldn't be writing," Mr. Everson said. "I have an audience."
. . .
more.
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