Landis Everson

Landis Everson was born in 1926 in Coronado, California, and now lives in San Luis Obispo, California. He was a member of the Berkeley Renaissance of the late 1940s, and greatly admired by his friends Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser. While doing a Master's at Columbia in the early Fifties, he encountered John Ashbery, who also admired his poetry, and would later print some of his poems in Locus Solus. In 1960, he participated in a weekly poetry group with Spicer and Blaser in San Francisco, during which time he wrote two sequences, both of which were printed in their entirety for the first time last year in Ben Mazer's anthology of the Berkeley Renaissance in Fulcrum 3 (Everson's first appearance in print in over 40 years). Since his rediscovery in Fulcrum, Everson has broken four decades of silence to write more than 150 new poems, which have recently begun appearing in such periodicals as Poetry, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Harvard Review, Chicago Review, Jacket and Fulcrum. A volume of new and collected poems, Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005, edited by Ben Mazer, is forthcoming.

Landis Everson's work featured in PN Review comprises one contribution of poetry.