Ben Mazer is a poet and the editor of Everything Preserved, a book of poetry written by the late Landis Everson. Everson’s poetry was initially acclaimed in the 1940′s and 1950′s. He was revered by the Berkeley Renaissance writers and seemed destined to shine as an American poet, with a long and rewarding career ahead of him. But then he stopped writing. Four decades later, inspired by his relationship with Mazer and a rekindled appreciation for writing, Landis returned to poetry. In an interview with Dark Sky Magazine, Mazer shares insights on Everson’s poetry, character and enthusiasms.  It’s a rich tale of triumph and struggle, made richer still by Everson’s lifelong passion for poetry.  — Kevin Murphy

DSM: How did you become involved in Everything Preserved?

Ben Mazer: Well, it’s a book I edited. I had been researching the Berkeley Renaissance, a loose term for all the poets who were writing in Berkeley in the late 1940s, for a feature in Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics. Then I ran into Dick Stone, who had known some of those poets, and offered to show me his collection of manuscripts, letters and photographs, which included a large sheaf of poems and letters by Landis. This was in about November of 2003, and I was already aware of Landis’ poetry from old issues of the Berkeley Occident which I had been looking at. I got in touch with Landis, we fell in thickly with each other, and very soon he began experimenting with writing poems again. He hadn’t written or been published in 43 years, nor had anyone asked him about his poetry, since about 1960. Except for tantalizingly mysterious references in Kevin Killian and Lewis Ellingham’s biography of Jack Spicer, he was pretty much completely forgotten, while his close friends Spicer, Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser had gone on to become cultural icons in the 60s.

At first, I was trying to track down the old poems in obscure literary periodicals. But when Landis really got going with the new poems–once he hit his stride he was writing between one and four poems a day–I could see where things were going. I started sending the new poems to literary magazines, and nearly every magazine wanted to print them, including Poetry, where Landis had made two appearances in the 50s. When Stephen Sturgeon and I found an ad announcing the Poetry Foundation’s first Emily Dickinson Award, for a manuscript by a poet over the age of 50 who had never published a book of poems, I instantly knew that if I edited a collection and submitted it, it would win the award. It almost didn’t happen, because I had a big paper due at school the day of the contest deadline. Landis told the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune that I submitted it without his knowledge, but that’s just because I told him that I didn’t know if I could pull it off, what with my paper and all (I think it later turned out that I failed the paper). All summer long (this was in 2005) I told everyone that Landis was going to win the award, and I really didn’t have any doubts about it. It still came as a complete shock when the Poetry Foundation called my cell phone to tell me that they wanted to fly us out to Chicago for the awards ceremony. I felt omniscient. Landis and I had the time of our lives in Chicago, walking around looking at the architecture, mingling with people on the streets. Originally he wanted to dedicate the book to me, but when I wouldn’t let him, because I was the book’s editor, he took a phrase from one of my poems for the collection’s title.

DSM: You got to know Landis Everson before he died. What can you say about him?

BM: Landis was the dearest, sweetest man I ever knew. Everybody had that reaction to him. He also was madly in love with me, and very demanding about my attention. He claimed he was writing all the poems for me, that I was the reason he was writing them. I can’t really describe how much fun it was to have him come alive that way, or how much he affected my life because of it. I was in graduate school, and had to drop nearly everything I was doing to keep up with the wave of enthusiasm and energy that swept over him. All my friends were affected by it. A day didn’t go by that Landis and I didn’t talk for hours on the telephone, and if it did, Landis would complain that I was ignoring him. He told me that all his friends in San Luis Obispo had become boring to him, and he only wanted to talk to me. They were a distraction from the poetry. It was overwhelming and fantastical. Conversing with him was strange because he remembered nearly nothing about his past. He claimed he had always had a bad memory. I had to tell him that he was published in Locus Solus, or that he had known Robert Creeley, for example. Landis was not shy, but he had some self-esteem issues. In the 50s he passed up opportunities to meet W.H. Auden and Frank O’Hara because he wasn’t sure he could hold his own in such company. He had a tendency toward depression, and in fact had been going to kill himself with sleeping pills when I first made contact with him. Then suddenly everything changed, and all he wanted to do was write poetry. He said I had saved his life. The key was that he had always needed someone, another poet, to write his poems for, to get a reaction from. He had lost that when Spicer, Duncan and Robin Blaser had stopped meeting as a group, something he had been intimately a part of. Suddenly he had found that kind of connection again, and it gave him a new life. The strange thing was that so many of his old memories and experiences underwent a kind of conversion, as if the new poems were something he had been storing up unconsciously for years, and became something rich and magical when the genie was released from the bottle.

One of the truly odd features of our relationship, though perhaps ordinary in a sense for poets, was the intense interest which Landis showed in the details of my life, and the way in which his reflections on my experience manifested themselves in the poetry. Many of the poems he wrote were sort of veiled letters of advice to a girl who I was seeing at the time. When she and I stopped talking to one another, Landis protested that he no longer had anything to write about, and he refused to write any more poems for about two months. Then one day he emailed me ten new poems, all playfully and harshly critical of the girl. He had found a new vein, and it was flattering and uplifting that he wanted to vindicate my honor. Landis sort of felt that she had betrayed both of us. The poems were miraculously good, too.

DSM: Everson stopped writing for four decades. Any insight on this? What inspired him to write again?

BM: After breaking from poetry he took up painting for ten years, and had considerable success in that department. He won some national prizes and exhibited in some illustrious galleries, such as Gump’s and the Cellini Gallery in San Francisco. Barbara Hutton, Farley Granger, and Vincent Price were among his clientele.

DSM: Can you give us a description of Landis’ early poems?

BM: In some of Landis’ earliest poems, this is in the 1940s, he told me he was trying to imitate Robert Duncan. One of the earliest, “Green Homage” (printed in the Landis Everson feature in Fulcrum 4) was dedicated to Duncan, though it demonstrates a precocious formal mastery that exceeds what Duncan was then doing, and which Landis gave me to understand Duncan and Spicer were somewhat in awe of. Duncan in fact claimed Landis as an influence in one of the late 40s numbers of Occident, and his own “Venice Poem” was an homage to Landis. (Duncan and Spicer later referred to Everson in letters as “The Poet King” and “a god”, respectively.) Landis quickly realized however that he couldn’t be Duncan, that no one could except Duncan, and he subsequently followed his own lights. He was influenced by one of his teachers at Berkeley, the poet Josephine Miles, who told him to always be professional, to be mindful that an effective poem would have readership. At a time when Jack Spicer was writing a very formal kind of poetry, under the influence of Eliot (again the late 40s), Landis began experimenting with form. He told me that he encouraged Jack to be more experimental, and that he felt he was an influence on Jack in this. Later, when Jack wanted to break into magazines like The Kenyon Review and Poetry, he asked Landis for advice on how to do it. Landis always had a knack for being able to easily assume a wide variety of formal techniques, and he never forgot Josephine Miles’ advice. Most of the early poems are as yet unpublished, and many are lost, and exist only as rumors. In Everything Preserved, we wanted to focus on the later stuff, the poems he was writing as the result of his friendship with me. Undoubtedly the masterpieces among the surviving early poems are the two sequences (Spicer referred to them as “dictated, serial poetry”) which Landis wrote in 1960 when he, Jack and Robin were meeting every Sunday at Robin’s apartment in San Francisco–The Little Ghosts I Played With and Postcard from Eden (both in Everything Preserved). These were written just a little too late to be included in Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry, but John Ashbery published selections from The Little Ghosts in Locus Solus (1962).

DSM: How do the earlier poems differ from his later ones?

BM: The later poems are the real gold. They just — everything came together in them. They leave me almost speechless. It will be years before I can write about them.

DSM: Everything Preserved won the Emily Dickinson First Book Award. What influence did this have on Landis?

BM: Well, Landis wanted to have a published book. I think he wanted to feel like part of the crowd of his friends who had made it in that way — Jack, Duncan, Robin, Ashbery. He had a lot of pride in what he was doing. But at the same time, he had a peculiar reaction to receiving a big award from a big institution like the Poetry Foundation. Guilt, shame, self-loathing. He had an attack of anxiety about what Jack would have thought about it. And I think that he felt that people should understand that the real pleasure was in writing the poems, not in who indicated official approval of them. He told the Chicago paper that publication had taken all the fun out of poetry. It runs against what he said about Josephine Miles, but he wanted to be honest about the fact that they were written for friends. The idea of being professional was more focused on an approach to language. I mean that he could be very experimental, to use a common shorthand term for being completely and originally oneself — despite the influence of ghosts and other spirits — and for breaking rules and undermining conventions, but at the same time he wanted the poems to have a certain clarity. He wanted to bring enough of an edge to his language that it wouldn’t be merely gibberish. Maybe it relates in some way to his obsession with crossword puzzles. At any rate, the morning before the awards ceremony, he had a kind of Citizen Kane-like attack and whacked himself as hard as he could on his right eye with the back of a hairbrush in his hotel room. When they introduced him at the ceremony he came out from behind a pallet dressed like Gary Cooper in High Noon, in a black suit, a thin black tie (ancient), and with an enormous black eye. His first words to the audience were, “I wasn’t in a fight. I did this to myself.” It registered ambiguity, because he might have been talking about how he had turned away from poetry for 43 years.

DSM: You are a poet. What do you find most compelling about Landis’ poetry, and has it influenced your own writing?

BM: I find a great deal compelling about Landis’ poetry. In my opinion it is some of the best American poetry we have seen. There is an almost fantastic (no, that is understatement–just plain fantastic) sense of discovery and openness, and of being visited and informed by what we might call ghosts, the wealth of the unconscious. There is also an enormous sense of play, and of an easy willingness to recognize and spin myths out of reality. The poems are haunted by a sense of loss, but also by a vitality of hope — the sense that all is really redeemable in the life of the imagination. A great deal of the poetry has a shocking effect of reprisal akin to Landis’ own surprising return to poetry after 43 years. They induce cold sweats and quicken the blood, like waking nightmares, and make me think of some moment of revelation in a tense and classic Western. Landis was like the sheriff who returns to town after a long time to execute overdue justice. The ensuing shootout was violent and quick.

The things we care about become a part of us. In that sense Landis was an influence on my whole being. Though his ghost makes an occasional appearance in my poems, I’m not sure that the actual styles and methods of his poetry have had an influence on my own poetic or imaginative agendas, conscious or unconscious, though perhaps they have. He permeated my dream life, sleeping and waking, and affected the way I thought about my relationships. He undoubtedly stirred my imagination. I am enamored of what he wrote and what he said, the things he made me think about. He likely stimulated me to become more in touch with myself, and to penetrate a certain sense of serendipity and destination in the world and in the imagination of the world. He set a certain level of belief in the power to draw upon one’s inner resources, and he made all of us I think feel to some extent that we had been visitated by ghosts and spirits from the deep (not that we didn’t already). He did unintentionally get me to write poems that were responses to poems he was writing about events in my own life. There was quite a bit of dialogue in that sense. I would estimate that I myself was a bit of a shock to his system. We were deeply mixed up in a drama that we were living together. We exposed ourselves to each other thoroughly, except in the banal sense, and we thrived off of each other’s energy. My own convictions and enthusiasms seemed to affect Landis to mythic dimensions, and there was a kind of shock of recognition for both of us, of seeing the self laid bare. Yes, it’s influenced me.

DSM: Did Landis share with you his thoughts on contemporary poetry?

BM: Incessantly and exhaustively. He had a daunted respect for the poetry and intelligence of Philip Nikolayev. He was immensely impressed by Katia Kapovich, and he was in love with Stephen Sturgeon. He was effusively excited by the poetry of Richard Siken, and very fond of Jason Zuzga and John Hennessy. He also liked Edwin Frank, Kevin Killian, and Peter Gizzi. Ashbery he always followed with a careful eye; I think he felt maybe he was doing better than that. He was excited, satisfied and proud when John wrote to him, praising his new poems. Robin Blaser’s opinion above all, I think, was important to him, as it had been for nearly sixty years. And he couldn’t write a poem without wanting to know what I thought about it. Landis also subscribed to and read more literary periodicals than anyone else I knew, including Internet publications, once he had made up his mind to become involved with poetry again. He especially favored the little magazines, and the really little magazines, and his reaction was “Hot damn! Ben Mazer I love you!” when he got into The Poker. There wasn’t any question but that Fulcrum commanded the most respect in his eyes. He thought that that should be obvious to anybody. He met many younger poets on his trips East to visit me, and on our visit to San Francisco, which he just loved. Many of them he stayed in touch with. He thought it was funny that so many of the poets weren’t gay, just the opposite of how it had been for him in the old days. I should also say that some of our best adventures were with Steve Dickison in San Francisco, and that when Landis was in the hospital in Boston, after his stroke, he was visited every day by Stephen Sturgeon (others who visited were Bill Berkson, Don Share, John Hennessy, Philip Nikolayev, Jason Zuzga and Dick Stone). It isn’t exactly contemporary poetry, but his favorite poet was John Wieners. Of course, with Landis everything was contemporary.

DSM: Everything Preserved demonstrates Landis’ command of language, his sense of imagination, candidness and, at times, sadness. Was writing for him a catharsis or a burden?

BM: Well, you can imagine it was a catharsis, from reading the poems, deeply so. The other truth is that he expressed over and over that it was just sheer pleasure to be writing, and indeed the humor and obvious pleasure in invention in many of the poems are apparent and infectious. As I say, it was all he wanted to do in the daytime, and then we would talk at night. The only times it was a burden was when it wasn’t going well, and he got stuck, or wrote something that didn’t satisfy him, which wasn’t really all that much of the time. Then he would express a certain amount of frustration with himself, though he mostly had the humor to laugh it off. I think he knew what he was trying to do, though perhaps more pertinently the poems often seemed to come from a deep and mysterious place. Jack Spicer used to admire the ease with which Landis wrote poetry. I’d have to agree with that.

DSM: What else should readers know about Everything Preserved and the poetry of Landis Everson?

BM: There is a lot more poetry by Landis Everson that hasn’t been published yet. Besides the early poems, which date from about 1947 to 1961, there is an entire volume of poems which Landis wrote after Everything Preserved, which Landis wanted to call Book of Valentines. I haven’t yet been approached by a publisher about that book, but I expect someone will come knocking soon. There are also a strange series of poems that Landis pretended were written by an invented seventeenth-century poet he called Sir William Bargoth, which he submitted as part of his Masters thesis at Columbia University in 1951. Those also deserve publication. He wrote an entire thesis of commentary to go along with them, reflecting on their relationship to various modes of poetry in the seventeenth-century. The poems were supposed to have been discovered by an American G.I. in an antique shop in Paris during the Second World War. Then there are the hundreds of pages of letters that he wrote to me, most of them by email. 23 of the last poems are included in the new issue of Brian Henry’s Verse magazine. They are well worth getting a hold of. There are many other poems besides. At one point Landis was writing so many poems that I just had to put many of them aside, and I still haven’t carefully gone through them all. For all we know, perhaps he is still writing them.

_______________________________________________

Ben Mazer’s poems have been widely published in international periodicals, including Verse, Jacket, Harvard Review, Stand, Agenda, and Fulcrum. His poetry collections include The Foundations of Poetry Mathematics (Cannibal Books), Johanna Poems (Cy Gist Press), and White Cities (Barbara Matteau Editions). He is the editor of Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (forthcoming from Harvard U. P.), Collected Poems and Selected Prose of John Crowe Ransom (forthcoming), and Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 (Graywolf), which collects the poems of Landis Everson. He lives in Boston, where he is a contributing editor to Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics.

Tagged as: Literature in the Media, New Literature Online, Poetry, Rest in Peace

1 comment