THE BEAT FRIAR BROTHER ANTONINUS
Getting ready to participate in the Annual Galway Kinnell Poetry Festival in which I will be presenting a workshop on the topic-- POETRY OF WITNESS. I committed to looking at Kinnell's work in this way and I will develop these connections in later blogs.
But another element and an exciting one has been added--an emphasis on THE BEAT POETS. Now I have already written in verse of my own self being influenced as a young teenager by the Beats. I wanted to be a BEAT, and I was impressed by the great poem HOWL written by one of the foremost BEAT POETS Allan Ginsberg.
That poem was selected as part of the POETRY IN MOTION contest and was placed on RIPTA buses in January-February 2019. That is old news on this blog.
I would like to speak about another BEAT poet--one whom I actually met at several of his poetry reading in the Boston area when I was in College there.
I am talking about Brother Antoninus who was a Dominican lay-brother. That is when I encountered him. I was going to college in Boston and there were many poetry readings at several colleges in the area. I was a poetry addict turned loose in a world of poets.
I went to see Brother Antoninus and he created a poetry reading that was more like an intense encounter. He took long pauses and often faced the wall, and he challenged the listeners to have a reaction to his work. He was dynamic and confrontational, and I was enthralled. He seemed to be wanting more from an audience: he wanted a real reaction not just a polite silence.
But don't take my word for this--some of his readings are now on YouTube and they are unique and seem to be trying to crack the veneer of polite appreciation that is the usual reading attitude. Go see for your self.
Brother Antoninus left the Dominicans because he wanted to marry.
After leaving the monastery, Everson turned his energies toward critical writing, printing, teaching, and editing the works of Robinson Jeffers--his early inspiration. While the body of his work expressed a sharp conflict between body and spirit, many of his later writings, collected in The Masks of Drought, bespeak a "reconciliation with the world of nature and his own place in it," noted Powell.
As always, the poems are autobiographical, concerning the poet's relations with his wife, his advancing age, and his continuing love of the land. They are very intimate revelations.
Remarking on Everson's dedication to intensely personal themes, Kenneth Rexroth wrote in his introduction to The Residual Years: "Everson has been accused of self-dramatization. Justly. All of his poetry, that under the name of Brother Antoninus, too, is concerned with the drama of his own self, rising and falling along the sine curve of life, from comedy to tragedy and back again, never quite going under, never quite escaping for good into transcendence. . . . Everything is larger than life with a terrible beauty and pain.
Life isn't like that to some people and to them these poems will seem too strong a wine. But of course life is like that."
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