Landis Everson

Landis Everson Poems

Landis Everson Biography

Landis Everson (October 5, 1926 – November 17, 2007) was an American poet. In the late 1940s, he was a member of the Berkeley Renaissance along with his friends Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and Robin Blaser. Everson was the inaugural recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation. Everson was born and grew up in Coronado, California. He attended the University of Redlands in Southern California. Everson, Spicer, and Blaser participated in a poetry group that met on Sundays up until 1960. Duncan was excluded from this group. Around this time James Herndon published Everson's pamphlet Postcard from Eden. His work also appeared in John Ashbery & Harry Mathews's Locus Solus in 1962. Jack Spicer died in 1965; Robin Blaser moved to Vancouver; and Everson stopped writing poetry. The Boston poet, Ben Mazer, came across Everson's work while he was putting together a special feature on the Berkeley Renaissance for Fulcrum. Mazer's interest encouraged Everson to start writing poetry again. His collection, Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 (ISBN 1555974538), edited by Ben Mazer, was published in 2006. This volume collects the poems Everson wrote in his two periods of writing: between 1955 and 1960, and then his later poems written between 2003 and 2005. Towards the end of his life, Everson lived in San Luis Obispo, California.)

The Best Poem Of Landis Everson

Valentine, Valentine

Valentine, valentine you arrive
in a town car with a chauffered envelope,
scattered pieces of you enrolled in schoolyards
like a recess of paper vanity, litter, old
with red-rimmed 'loves,' red-rhymed lies in lace.

The verses come, rising as easily as long-stemmed snakes in
bloom where swamps settle down and drowse
by dawn, a night of secrets slid out of drawers like knives nesting, a choice of chimes and slums overrun
by bejeweled heartbreakers. What a lovely
winter, almost skipping February.

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