Philip Lamantia (UK obituary)

[mar...@myrealbox.com]

Philip Lamantia

Surrealist poet who influenced the Beats

15 March 2005

Philip Lamantia, poet: born San Francisco 23 October 1927; married 1978 Nancy
Peters; died San Francisco 7 March 2005.

Philip Lamantia was a poet whom André Breton, leader of the Surrealist
movement, described as "a voice that rises once in a hundred years".

He was born in 1927 in San Francisco, the son of Sicilian immigrants. As a boy
he worked at the Embarcadero market, where his father was a grocer. He
discovered Surrealism through seeing the paintings of Dali and Miró at the San
Francisco Museum of Art and by reading the work of the French Surrealists. In
1943, at the age of 16, he published his first poem in View, the review edited
by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler.

Lamantia moved to New York to meet Breton and other exiled European artists and
poets, including André Masson and Max Ernst. He became an editorial board
member at View in 1944 and had poems published in Breton's magazine VVV in the
same year. The poem "Touch of the Marvelous" brought a radical, new language in
poetry, unlike any other American writer before. It begins:

"The mermaids have come to the desert
They are setting up a boudoir next to the camel
who lies at their feet of rose"

The title of this poem (also given to a collection of his poems published in
1966) pays tribute to the passage from Breton's 1924 Surrealist Manifesto:

Let us not mince words: the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous
is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful . . . only the
marvellous is capable of fecundating works . . .

In his writing of this period Lamantia made use of what was called by Breton
"pure psychic automatism", the spontaneous form of writing which created poetry
as a train of mental associations whilst in a trancelike, hypnotic state.

Lamantia's first volume of poetry, Erotic Poems, was published in 1946 by Bern
Porter, a disillusioned nuclear physicist who had previously worked on the
Manhattan Project and who turned to writing and publishing poetry. However, in
that same year Lamantia parted with View, Breton and formal Surrealism to
embark on further studies at Berkeley and to travel in Mexico, France and North
Africa.

He was one of the five poets who read at the now famous Six Gallery event on 7
October 1955 in San Francisco, which was to be the first public reading of
Allen Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl", a work brought to trial in 1957 for
"obscenity". Rather than reciting his own poems, Lamantia chose to read pieces
by his friend John Hoffman, who had recently died in Mexico of a peyote
overdose.

A fictionalised account of the reading can be found in Jack Kerouac's The
Dharma Bums (1957), where Lamantia appears as the character "Francis DaPavia"
and is described as reading

in a delicate Englishy voice that had me crying with inside laughter though I
later got to know Francis and liked him.

Like his contemporary Kenneth Rexroth, Lamantia was a significant influence on
the Beat movement and one of the developers of poetry and jazz, at around the
same time as Rexroth, Howard Hart and Kenneth Patchen were experimenting with
this art form.

The use of drugs was an important feature of Lamantia's life during the 1950s
and early 1960s. The title page of Narcotica (1959) cries out:

I DEMAND EXTINCTION OF LAWS PROHIBITING NARCOTIC DRUGS!

The cover of this same book features photographs of Lamantia injecting heroin.
Earlier, in the 1950s, Lamantia had also experimented with the hallucinogen
mescalin, derived from the peyote cactus, whilst with the Washo Native
Americans of Nevada and the Cora people in the mountains of Nayarit, Mexico.

However, in the poem "Astro-Mancy", published in Selected Poems (1967), he
publicly disavows the use of drugs in the creative process, stating:

"I'm recovering
from a decade of poisons
I renounce all narcotic
& pharmacopoeic disciplines"

He said of this decision, and of his work at the time, that he was returning to
his original inspirations "like an act of nature". Selected Poems appeared in
"Pocket Poets", from City Lights of San Francisco, which also published several
of his later collections. City Lights' owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti described
him as

a brilliant talker, a non-stop associative talker like Robert Duncan. He would
talk in a continuous stream. One word would set him off in one direction, and
another word would get him on another trip. He was a real polymath. And he had
an encyclopaedic memory.

Lamantia's poetry was published in the UK in 1969 as part of the Penguin Modern
Poets series, sharing a volume with Charles Bukowski and Harold Norse.

The 1970s and 1980s saw him return to Surrealism with the publication of his
collections of poetry The Blood of the Air (1970), Becoming Visible (1981) and
Meadowlark West (1986). In 1978 he married Nancy Peters, and from that year
onwards had lectured on poetry at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Whilst Lamantia's work was never particularly well known, he acted as an
essential conduit in bringing the Surrealism of France to America in the 1940s
and was the only American poet of his generation to have fully embraced both
Surrealism and the Beat movement.

Marcus Williamson

Independent, UK, 15 March 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obituaries/story.jsp?story=620128