Beat Poet Dominican

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."