Landis Everson

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Landis Everson (born 1926) is a United States poet. In the late 1940s he was a member of the Berkeley Renaissance along with his friends Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser. He was the inaugural recipient of the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Foundation.

Everson was born and grew up in Coronado, California which at that time was still an island, connected to San Diego by a ferry. He attended the University of Redlands in Southern California.

Everson, Spicer and Blaser participated in a poetry group that met on Sundays up until 1960. Duncan was excluded from this group. Around this time James Herndon published Everson's pamphlet Postcardu from Eden. His work also appeared in John Ashbery & Harry Mathews's Locus Solus in 1962.

Jack Spicer died in 1965; Robin Blaser moved to Vancouver; and Everson stopped writing poetry.

The Boston poet Ben Mazer came across Everson's work while he was putting together a special feature on the Berkeley Renaissance for Fulcrum. Mazer's interest sparked Everson to start writing poetry again.

Everson now lives in San Luis Obispo, California. His collection, Everything Preserved: Poems 1955-2005 (ISBN 555974538), edited by Mazer, was published in 2006. This volume collects the poems Everson wrote in his two periods of writing: between 1955 and 1960 and then his late poems written from 2003 to 2005.