Man-Fate; The Swan Song of Brother Antoninus

by William Everson

Book by Everson, William

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Hardcover

First published March 28, 1974

About the author

Also known as Brother Antoninus, William Everson was an American poet of the Beat Generation, San Francisco Renaissance and was also a literary critic and small press printer.
Everson registered as an anarchist and a pacifist with his draft board, in compliance with the 1940 draft bill. In 1943, he was sent to a Civilian Public Service (CPS) work camp for conscientious objectors in Oregon. In the camp at Waldport, Oregon, with other poets, artists and actors, he founded a fine-arts program, in which the CPS men staged plays and poetry-readings and learned the craft of fine printing. During his time as a conscientious objector, Everson completed The Residual Years, a volume of poems that launched him to national fame.
Everson joined the Catholic Church in 1948 and soon became involved with the Catholic Worker Movement in Oakland, California. He took the name "Brother Antoninus" when he joined the Dominican Order in 1951 in Oakland. A colorful literary and counterculture figure, he was subsequently nicknamed the "Beat Friar." He left the Dominicans in 1969 to embrace a growing sexual awakening, and married a woman many years his junior. The 1974 poem Man-Fate explores this transformation. Everson was stricken by Parkinson's Disease in 1972, and its effects on him became a powerful element in his public readings.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 1 out of 5]

This may be the single most loathsome book of poems I have ever seen. Ariana and I ripped the old library copy I ordered to shreds together.

It is like an old disgusting man rubbing his moist ballsack on your face while you are sleeping.

It is the book that chronicles the grocery bag-fleshed Brother Antoninus in his decision to leave his monastery of 20 years for a young woman, and to reinstate his former name (William Everson). Just look at that cover. It is magic. Look at his teeth.

I bought this book because I thought the narrative was compelling. I somehow had the impression that he was going to deal in an honest, interesting, frank, and high way with the intersection of sex and god. Instead he says things like "Let me tear white flesh asunder and cock this woman," and compares all of his "little woman's" previous lovers to snails that have crawled across her belly and left the viscous trails of their "seed."

Ariana said that it made her believe in reincarnation. I thought that that was an interesting new angle for metaphysical apologetics. Everson is so monstrous and repulsive that what but the length and agony of another several lifetimes could burn the derivative, conflicted, high-modern, semen-drenched bombast from his little soul? Another metaphysical question: And were this even possible, what really is the likelihood that, after the purifying course of several horrible lives, there would be something more interesting left there than the manner in which Everson justifies to God whether he puts his little purple cock inside of his granddaughter or leaves it in a mason-jar for Jesus?

"Both offensive and stupid at the same time. That's hard to do. Usually, a thing is either offensive or stupid. Some small part of me admires him for it."
-Pony Knowles

[Michael Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is difficult book, not because the poems are hard to read, but because the conflicts the poet addresses in here are difficult to watch and read about. And I suspect most readers cannot "relate to" (how I've grown to loath that phrase!) the mental and emotional difficulty of turning one's back on religious vows, especially since he does not turn his back on the religion. But such difficulty should not presume that the subject is not worth writing about. Even when the poet gets into uncomfortable territory (particularly frank discussions of sex), I was thoroughly engaged.

Some of the passages were a bit prosy for my tastes. Yet for every awkward line, there are two remarkably beautiful ones.

In some poems, the speaker addresses his lover. In some, God is implored and praised. In many, the poet weaves narratives and observations concerning his arduous wrestling matches with his soul. The poems do not carry the theological impact of St. John of the Cross or the raw power of John Donne, but they reach into similar hemispheres to reveal what are modern (albeit neglected) dilemmas.

[Interzonatron · Rating 2 out of 5]

The swan song of Brother Antoninus, or by the time this was released - William Everson. The poems contained within this book show the revolutionary turning point in Everson’s life from the religious to the secular. For 20 years Everson, a convert to Catholicism, was a Dominican monk and leading Catholic poet. The poems here show Everson at a crossroads as he left the order and took up a sexual relationship with a far younger female who also had a son. The first poem, “Tendril in the Mesh”, was Eversons last poem and poetry reading as a Dominican monk. Following his departure from the order he became a pillar of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance & Beat Generation of poets. The man was certainly of an exceptional caliber of intelligence & very grounded in the Catholic tradition. If you want to make sense of these poem’s definitely have a dictionary at hand and an open mind.

[Patricia N. McLaughlin · Rating 3 out of 5]

“These are the poems of a man undergoing a major break fairly late in his years,” explains William Everson in the preface—and falling to pieces, like many of these poems, in little itty-bitty shards. “For he bears in his groin his most precious jewel,” not in his heart or mind, and in his hands he molds “idols of flesh” for his fate to turn on the body of “a woman.” This after decades of contemplative life as a monk in the Dominican Order: a “Man of God” turned “mad man of ignorant causes.” And yet these lines from the religious poet:

“And the sea falls,
Falls. Its sigh, the long whisper of mortality,
The syllable of consummation,
Pensive with understanding.”
—“A Time to Mourn”

Favorite Poem:
“The Black Hills”