William Everson: The Shamans Call

Excerpt-Steven B Herrmann

In 1991, it was suggested to me by the late Jungian analyst, Donald F. Sandner, that I conduct a series of interviews with Everson, on the topic “Shamanism in American Poetry.” This suggestion arose during my analysis with Sandner, following a series of dream experiences that led me, in turn, to write a paper on the poet-shaman, as I remembered him from our days together in Santa Cruz. When I sent the paper to Everson to read, he was amazed. The idea of looking at his life from a Jungian analytic and shamanic standpoint was a revelation to him. It was at this point that Bill called me down to Kingfisher Flat to “collaborate” with him—as he said enthusiastically on the phone—on “the writing of a book.” Coincidentally enough, Sandner’s encouragement of my pursuit of these interviews came at a point in time when he was engaged in the process of writing his own book on analytical psychology and shamanism, The Sacred Heritage. Thus, in writing this book, I found myself at the center of two great currents of spiritual thought, with two of the foremost authorities on shamanism in America as guides, and it became my responsibility to bring these two currents together in my own way, to form a union of these two streams of an old riverbed. Analytical psychology and American poetry, in their attempts to investigate the unconscious, are an attempt to reconnect the psyche with its roots.

While the idea of looking at poetry from the point of view of analytical psychology and shamanism can be traced to Everson’s Birth of a Poet: The Santa Cruz Meditations, the process a person typically goes through in becoming a poet-shaman has not been sufficiently investigated.12 No one, to my knowledge has explored the concept of shamanism in American poetry at any great depth, and for this reason, the implications of the poet-shaman’s world-view have not been sufficiently understood. With an analytical approach to the problem of interpretation, however, an examination of the full range of its phenomenology is now possible. Not every person has a calling to embody the shaman’s way of life. It is only a few who can hear the shaman’s call and answer it. Everson was a poet who not only answered the shaman’s call; he lived it out experientially from the ground of his being, like a spiritual man who is also aware of his instinctive foundation in the animal world…