FABILLI, Mary 1914-

PERSONAL: Born February 16, 1914, in Gardiner, NM; daughter of Vincenzo (a farmer) and Giacinta (Pone) Fabilli; married William Everson, June 12, 1948. Ethnicity: "Italian-American." Education: Attended San Francisco State College, c. 1932; earned A.B. at University of California—Berkeley.

ADDRESSES: Home—2445 Ashby Ave., Berkeley, CA 94705.

CAREER: Poet and artist, 1933—. Worked at various jobs, including a steel-checker at Kaiser shipyards in Richmond, CA; art teacher, Bentley School, Berkeley, CA, and at the Oakland, CA, Y.W.C.A., 1946-47; Oakland Public Museum, Oakland, educational assistant, beginning 1949, associate curator, 1966-77.

WRITINGS:

(And illustrator) The Old Ones (poetry), Oyez Press (Berkeley, CA), 1966.

Aurora Bligh and Early Poems, 1935-1949 (poetry and prose), Oyez Press (Berkeley, CA), 1968.

The Animal Kingdom: Poems, 1964-1974, Oyez Press (Berkeley, CA), 1975.

Aurora Bligh 2000 (prose), 2000.

Pious Poems, edited by Stephen Ronan, Beat Books (Berkeley, CA), 2001.

Also author of self-illustrated and self-published poetry, including Poems 1976-1981, 1981; Winter Poems, 1983; Pilgrimage, 1985; and Shingles and Other Poems, 1990. Contributor of poetry to anthologies, including New Directions 8, New Directions (Norfolk, CT), 1944. Contributor to Perspectives on William Everson, privately printed, 1992; Dark God of Eros: A William Everson Reader, edited by Albert Gelpi, Heyday Books (Berkeley, CA), 2003; and Light Dark Wind Moon, edited by Father Aventine Drew, 2004. Contributor to periodicals, including Occident, Circle, Talisman, Epitaph, Berkeley Miscellany, Ritual, and Experimental Review.

illustrator

Robert Duncan, Heavenly City, Earthly City, 1947.

William Everson, Triptych for the Living: Poems, Seraphim Press (Oakland, CA), 1951.

Saints: Nine Linoleum Blocks, Peregrine Press, 1960.

Also illustrator of published poems by Everson, including "A Primacy of Speech," 1949; and "In the Fictive Wish," 1967, both reprinted in Dark God of Eros: A William Everson Reader, 2003.

other

(Compiler) Ray Boynton and the Mother Lode: The Depression Years, Oakland Museum, History Special Gallery (Oakland, CA), 1976.

SIDELIGHTS: According to Brenda Knight in Women of the Beat Generation, poet and artist Mary Fabilli "is a quiet voice amid the howls, raps, and roars of the Beat Generation. She wrote poetry but never read publicly during the heyday of the Beats, although the purity of her work inspired such well-known poets as Robert Duncan." "Her closest association with the San Francisco Beat scene," Knight continued, "came during her marriage to William Everson, a local Beat poet. William encouraged Mary to write, and her linoleum-block art accompanied two of his poems." "Some of my poetry," Fabilli once wrote in her Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series (CAAS) essay, "is formal and straightforward and rational, not deranged like the other stuff (language poetry) out of a dream world." "I am not a Beat poet," she went on to explain. "I was invited to contribute because I belonged to the 'generation,' like Josephine Miles and others, also because of my friendship with Bill Everson and Robert Duncan." Neither Duncan or Everson were Beat poets, according to Fabilli, although they were associated with the Beat scene.

Fabilli's work is informed and inspired by her Roman Catholicism and her Italian heritage. "Many of the religious aspects are subtle but always present," wrote Knight. "'You may have to search,' she claims, 'but you will always find my love for God in my work.'" "If my readers don't know what I'm talking about, it's no wonder," Fabilli continued in CAAS. "All I'm trying to do is explain how I became a poet through the various experiences of my life. They are not the same as purely WASP experiences, though I was affected by some of those too." "The languages I was brought up with were Pacentrano dialect, Italian, Latin, and English," she added. "Nowadays I write in American English, and that's what I speak, when I have a chance to say anything…. Withpenand paper there's a free flow of words and how I love them! Especially the Latin words of Gregorian chant which I hear as music."

More recently, Fabilli commented to CA: "I continue to write at the age of ninety. I am crippled with arthritis and cannot print or type…. What I think about now and write about is Death; not as an ending but as a new beginning.

"I may not have long to live on Earth. At the moment of my death (this is what I believe) Christ will judge me and I will accept His judgment. My soul will go to where it belongs—to Hell, Purgatory, or Heaven! I hope it goes to Purgatory for purification, a fierce experience like no fire on Earth, and then to Heaven, so I can see God face to face. But God is a spirit and cannot be seen with bodily eyes; the soul has leapt its body and its eyes. It too is a spirit. How will it see God face to face? I do not know, but I believe it will. He who created images and sight and seeing will certainly provide!"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 29, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Contemporary Poets, St. Martin's Press, 1970.

Knight, Brenda, Women of the Beat Generation: The Writers, Artists, and Muses at the Heart of a Revolution, Conari Press (Berkeley, CA), 1996.

periodicals

Talisman, fall, 1994; winter, 1995.