Reviews for William Everson

The average rating for William Everson based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-01-18 00:00:00 Laura Kincaid For interested readers, I'd like to add an additional Introduction written by Bill Hotchkiss, who edited this book, but it never found it's way into the printed edition. "Steven Herrmann, PhD, is one of the relatively few people whom Bill Everson allowed to become genuinely close, virtually a family member during the latter portion of the poet's life'the years when Everson was poet in residence at Kresge College, University of California, Santa Cruz, and the years following his retirement from the University faculty due to the progression of Parkinson's syndrome from which he suffered. Steven, then an undergraduate student, was Bill's teaching assistant for five consecutive quarters, winter 1980 through spring 1981. It was during this period that Everson published The Masks of Drought (the amazing sequence of poems that publicly confirmed, so to speak, the identity of the poet-shaman), Earth Poetry (a selection of essays and interviews, including "The Poet as Prophet," an interview of Everson conducted by Albert Gelpi), and American Bard (Everson's re-arrangement into verse of Whitman's preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, a book hand-set and hand-printed by Everson and his students at the Lime Kiln Press). As poet, critic, and teacher Everson was at the peak of his powers, but the insidious and destructively progressive Disease forced him to turn away from the teaching he loved. `In the aftermath of his retirement, Everson urged Herrmann to undertake the series of interviews (1985-1993) and the evaluative and interpretive discussions of which William Everson: The Shaman's Call consists. The insights are significant and frequent as the Old Poet and the Young Jungian Psychotherapist interact during their time of exploration, their intellectual venture along a path that is both very new and at the same time as ancient as humanity itself. I remember Everson and Gary Snyder meeting on the campus of Sierra College, meeting for the first time in years, both came to read and to pay tribute to Robinson Jeffers'the two figures of the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance shaking hands, and Snyder nodding, speaking quietly, as if bemused, "The old shaman," and Everson grinning. He was a lightning shaman, as Steven Herrmann calls him. He sought and found "The crystal prism, / The clear point of reconciliation" (from "The Challenge"). In the unfinished poem "Takes the Pipe," a verse-retelling of Robert H. Lowie's Crow Indian story of the same name, Everson has his crippled hero, aided by a titanic grizzly, achieve a powerful medicine vision, but only at the price of intense pain engendered by self-mutilation. As though crucified on the pinnacle of his extreme experience, Takes-the-pipe views the world around him: Now the darkness was gone. As an eagle turns in its gyre Takes-the-pipe hung at the pinnacle of the [ ] All the world lay gleaming about him. Glowing, a softly radiant visionary sheen, A transparent shimmering luminescence. Here the poem ends, incomplete, the manuscript dated July 1976. The man has ventured into the depths of psychic awareness, to the roots of religion itself, and has returned with the powers of the shaman." Bill Hotchkiss (I am the author of this book. I would be delighted if readers who feel moved would write reviews. Reviews of this book can be found at Amazon.com and at visionsofspiritualdemocracy.com)

Review # 2 was written on 2014-05-24 00:00:00 John Holmes Notable claims: Greco-Roman deities and mythological cycles describe respiration and interoception. The labors of Hercules are really twilight-language to describe progressive jhana absorption. Hercules is a yogi. The Iliad is a terma. Druids and Celtic head-hunters were rishis, aware of a cosmic map in the bones and inlets of human skulls. ...Big if true. Sansonese, as he makes no effort to hide, is himself a tantrist arguing in support of an underlying tantric current beneath exoteric religious tradition, especially the hellene mystery schools which fed the monastic tradition of Orthodox Christianity. He defines the role of Greco-Roman deities as comparable, or equivalent, to the tantric symbolism of Hindu deities in the accomplishment of yogic exercises. While there are several, perhaps even valid parallels between Greek "navel-gazing", Orthodox hesychasm, Hindu tantra, the pagan rites of the British isles, and the I Ching, among other things, the scholarly rigor required to lucidly unify them is not presented here.