Philip Lamantia (NY Times)
Hyfler/Rosner
Philip Lamantia, 77, Surrealist Poet, Is Dead
By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Philip Lamantia, the rapturous San Francisco poet who
embraced Surrealism and later associated himself with the
West Coast Beat community, died on March 7 at his apartment
in San Francisco. He was 77.
The cause was heart failure, a spokesman for his publisher,
City Lights Books, said.
"Philip Lamantia's poems are about rapture as a condition,"
the poet Tom Clark wrote in a review of Mr. Lamantia's
"Selected Poems, 1943-1966" (City Lights, 1967) in The New
York Times Book Review. "They are spiritual and erotic at
the same time. Bright and dark, the enclosed polarities of
devotion. St. Teresa and Rimbaud."
Mr. Lamantia's path to these poetic extremes was serpentine.
Born in San Francisco on Oct. 23, 1927, to Nunzio, a produce
broker, and Mary Tarantino Lamantia, both of whom immigrated
from Sicily as children, he began writing Poe-like poems in
elementary school and promoting social revolution in junior
high, from which he was briefly expelled for "intellectual
delinquency."
In his freshman year in high school, he saw a retrospective
exhibition of Dali and Miró, which made such a powerful
impression that he embraced the fantastical artistic and
literary movement Surrealism.
At 16, Mr. Lamantia dropped out of school and moved to New
York City. He worked as an assistant editor at View: A
Magazine of the Arts, which had published poems he had
written at 15, and he continued to write and publish. He met
several expatriate Surrealists, including André Breton, the
prophet of the movement, who declared Mr. Lamantia "a voice
that rises once in a hundred years."
After publishing his first book at 19, "Erotic Poems" (Bern
Porter, 1946), Mr. Lamantia grew disillusioned with the New
York scene and returned to San Francisco. He completed high
school and enrolled in the University of California,
Berkeley, where he became part of the revolutionary left and
studied subjects pertaining to Gnosticism, mysticism,
eroticism and heretical thought. All the while he continued
writing and publishing poems and articles.
He never graduated from Berkeley. In the 1950's, he began to
explore altered states of consciousness through
hallucinogenic drugs, attending peyote rituals with various
American Indian tribes. He traveled in France and Morocco,
returning now and then to the United States, where he
plunged himself into urban night life. He became associated
with the Beat movement, although his work remained distinct
from the Beats' concerns with homosexual themes and everyday
minutiae, continuing his own quest for the heterosexually
erotic and the mystical.
By the time his "Selected Poems, 1943-1966" was published,
he was living in Spain, fighting depression, studying
mathematics and writing intermittently.
In the remaining decades of his life he returned to San
Francisco, lectured on poetry at San Francisco State
University and San Francisco Art Institute, and took up
American Indian and environmental causes.
In 1978, he married Nancy Joyce Peters, who became his
editor at City Lights and who survives him.
His distinctive surrealistic poetry was collected in four
more volumes "The Blood of the Air" (1970), "Becoming
Visible" (1981), "Meadowlark West" (1986) and "Bed of
Sphinxes: New and Selected Poems 1943-1993" (1997), making a
total of nine published in his lifetime.
His work commanded respect for inhabiting the realm of what
he called "King Analogue/Queen Image/Prince Liberty. ..."
And he was, as Yves le Pellec, a French critic, put it, "a
living link between French Surrealism and the American
counterculture at its beginnings."