William "Bill" Everson, also known as Brother Antoninus (September 10, 1912 – June 3, 1994), was an American poet, literary critic, teacher and small press printer.
Everson was an influential member of the San Francisco Renaissance in poetry and worked closely with Kenneth Rexroth during this period of his life.
[2] In Camp Angel at Waldport, Oregon, with other poets, artists and actors such as Kemper Nomland, William Eshelman, Kermit Sheets, Vlad Dupre, Glen Coffield, George Woodcock and Kenneth Patchen, 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.
White, of the English Dominican province and a longtime friend of Carl Jung, with whom he maintained a voluminous correspondence, was resident lecturer and theologian there.
As Everson said in an interview for Creation magazine, with its founder and editor, the theologian and (at the time) fellow Dominican Matthew Fox, he saw "River-Root" as a kind of re-writing of the Song of Songs, bringing frank Eros back into the Psalms and undoing Christianity's longstanding separation of the sexual from the spiritual.
At St Albert's, where he had practiced as a spiritual counselor, Antoninus had given counseling to a young woman named Susanna Rickson.
On December 7, 1969 - the day after the disastrous Altamont Free Concert featuring the Rolling Stones - after a reading at the University of California at Davis, Antoninus removed his religious habit and announced that he was going to be married.
However, when he wrote The Veritable Years under the name William Everson, having left Antoninus behind, he couldn't even get his work reviewed.
[8] Black Sparrow Press released a three-volume series of the collected poems of Everson, the last volume was published in 2000.