William Everson; Beat Poet Known as Brother Antoninus

William Everson, who won national attention as a Beat Generation poet of the 1950s under his religious name Brother Antoninus, has died. He was 81.

Everson, who was also a master handset printer, died Friday in his rustic cabin north of Santa Cruz. He had suffered from Parkinson’s disease for many years and was confined to a wheelchair.

“This is the last book I will handset,” he told the Times in 1981, discussing the limitations imposed by his illness. “I cannot continue printing.”

He was referring to the 115 copies of “American Bard,” a 40-page book that he created by reworking Walt Whitman’s 1855 preface to “Leaves of Grass” from prose into verse form. The entire printing--complete with woodcuts and bound in pigskin--sold out immediately at $450 a copy.

“Altering neither words nor word order, Everson charms its (Whitman’s preface) powerful rhythms into soaring poetry,” noted a Times reviewer after Viking republished the book.

Like Whitman, Everson was a rarity in the literary world as both printer and writer. One of the 58 copies of his classic book of psalms printed in the 1960s sold at auction in 1981 for $7,000.

Everson, whose mother was a typesetter and father was a printer, was born with ink in his blood. He began printing by hand during World War II when he was interned in a conscientious objector camp in Oregon.

Brought up in Sacramento as a Christian Scientist, Everson declared himself an agnostic by the time he was a teen-ager. He did not embrace Catholicism until his second wife began going to Mass. On Christmas Eve, 1948, he had a profound religious experience that he said eventually prodded him into joining the Dominican order as a monk.

For more than 18 years, Everson wrote under his religious name Brother Antoninus. He earned national recognition in the 1950s as part of the San Francisco Beat group surrounding poet Kenneth Rexroth. Everson then published his earlier little-known work in the book “The Residual Years: Poems 1934-48, the Pre-Catholic Poetry of Brother Antoninus.”

“This is a superb and powerful gathering of poems, the complete work of those years,” wrote then Times book editor Robert Kirsch. “These poems have the seeking quality of a man hungering for belief and meaning. They are religious in the deepest sense of the word.”

Everson’s writing, always reflective of his personal struggles, was considered too erotic by the church. In late 1969, he dramatically stripped off his monastic habit and announced that he was leaving the order to marry his third wife, 35 years his junior.

Everson spent his last active years at UC Santa Cruz teaching and creating poetry and handset printing. His popular class, “The Birth of a Poet,” attracted up to 300 students a quarter.

“Hopefully the class is not only an introduction to poetry,” he said, “but an introduction to themselves.”

Educated at Cal State Fresno, Everson published his first book of poems, “These Are the Ravens,” in 1935. His last, “Blood of the Poet,” was published earlier this year.