Philip Lamantia
pa...@perfectmail.com
robertc...@yahoo.com
Is Lamantia dead or not?
Bob Champ
pa...@perfectmail.com
> Is Lamantia dead or not?
Philip Lamantia -- S.F. Surrealist poet
Visionary verse of literary prodigy influenced Beats
- Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, March 11, 2005
Philip Lamantia, the blazing San Francisco poet whose embrace of
Surrealism and the free flow of the imagination had a major influence
on the Beats and many other American poets, died Monday of heart
failure at his North Beach apartment. He was 77.
A San Francisco native born to Sicilian immigrants, Mr. Lamantia was a
widely read, largely self-taught literary prodigy whose visionary poems
-- ecstatic, terror-filled, erotic -- explored the subconscious world
of dreams and linked it to the experience of daily life.
"Philip was a visionary like Blake, and he really saw the whole world
in a grain of sand,'' said poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose City
Lights Books published four of Mr. Lamantia's nine books from 1967 to
1997.
"He was the primary transmitter of French Surrealist poetry in this
country,'' said Ferlinghetti, who first met Mr. Lamantia here in the
early 1950s. "He was writing stream-of-consciousness Surrealist poetry,
and he had a huge influence on Allen Ginsberg. Before that, Ginsberg
was writing rather conventional poetry. It was Philip who turned him on
to Surrealist writing. Then Ginsberg wrote 'Howl.' "
That epochal poem made Ginsberg's name and set off a revolution in
American poetry and culture. Ginsberg first read it aloud at San
Francisco's Six Gallery on Oct. 13, 1955. The other four poets on the
bill that night were Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen and
Mr. Lamantia.
Rather than reading his own works -- his first book, "Erotic Poems,''
had been published in 1946 -- Mr. Lamantia read the prose poems of his
friend John Hoffman, who had recently died in Mexico.
"Philip was one of the most beautiful poets I've ever known. He was a
poet of the imagination,'' said McClure, who lives in Oakland. "He was
highly original -- I'd call his poetry hyper-personal visionary
Surrealism -- and he was thrilling to be around. Everybody would sit
around and listen to him all night. The flow of his imagination was a
beautiful thing. ''
A man of ecstatic highs and deep, deep lows, Mr. Lamantia suffered from
depression, friends said, and had become a recluse in recent years,
rarely leaving home.
But in his younger days, he was a dashing figure who conversed
brilliantly on a wide range of subjects. An omnivorous reader, he
delved into astronomy, philosophy, history, jazz, painting,
ornithology, Egyptology and many other subjects that informed his
expansive vision.
"He was very handsome, like a real Adonis,'' Ferlinghetti said. "He was
a brilliant talker, a nonstop associative talker like Robert Duncan
(the late San Francisco poet with whom Mr. Lamantia was associated on
the pre-Beat San Francisco poetry scene of the late 1940s and early
'50s). "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 encyclopedic memory.''
Born in San Francisco's Excelsior District, Mr. Lamantia worked as a
boy in the old produce market on the Embarcadero, where his
Sicilian-born father was a produce broker. He began writing poetry in
elementary school and fell under the spell of Surrealism after seeing
the paintings of Miro and Dali at the old San Francisco Museum of Art
on Van Ness Avenue.
He started reading the poetry of Andre Breton, the so-called pope of
Surrealism, and other writers in the movement. In 1943, when he was 15,
some of Mr. Lamantia's poems were published in View, a
Surrealist-leaning New York magazine. Breton gave the young poet his
blessings, describing him as "a voice that rises once in a hundred
years.''
Some months later, Mr. Lamantia dropped out of Balboa High School and
moved to New York City, where he lived for several years. He associated
with Breton and other exiled European artists such as Max Ernst and
Yves Tanguy, and he worked as an assistant editor of View.
Returning to San Francisco after World War II, Mr. Lamantia took
courses at UC Berkeley in medieval studies, English poetry and other
subjects while continuing to write and publish poetry. In 1949, he
began traveling the world, staying for extended periods in Mexico,
Morocco and Europe.
Coming back to the United States every few years, Mr. Lamantia became
part of the underground culture blossoming on the east and west coasts.
Like other poets who felt estranged from mainstream culture in the
atomic age, "he found in the narcotic night world a kind of modern
counterpart to the gothic castle -- a zone of peril to be symbolically
or existentially crossed,'' wrote Nancy Peters, who later married Mr.
Lamantia in 1978 and edited some of his books for City Lights. "The
apocalyptic voice of 'Destroyed Works' is witness to that experience.''
Published in '62 by Auerhahn Press, "Destroyed Works'' was Mr.
Lamantia's fourth book. The San Francisco house had also published the
poet's two previous collections, "Narcotica'' and "Ekstasis,''
both in 1959.
Ever searching to expand his vision, Mr. Lamantia spent time with
native peoples in the United States and Mexico in the '50s,
participating in the peyote-eating rituals of the Washoe Indians of
Nevada. The poet, who taught for a time at San Francisco State and the
San Francisco Art Institute, also embraced Catholicism. In later years
he attended the Shrine of St. Francis in North Beach.
"He had a vision of the world that was completely unique,'' said
Peters, who later separated from Mr. Lamantia, but they remained good
friends. She edited three of his books for City Lights, "Becoming
Visible" (1981), "Meadowlark West" (1986) and "Bed of Sphinxes: New and
Selected Poems, 1943- 1993.''
Andrei Codrescu, a poet and NPR commentator who knew Mr. Lamantia well,
called him "one of the great voices of our subconscious for the last 50
years.
"He was a very pure poet in the sense that he was one of the very few
American poets who continued to pursue the Surrealist investigation of
dreams and the unconscious -- and he connected those explorations to
civic American life.''
A memorial is pending.
-------------------------------------------
Bill Schenley
> > years." - Andre Breton
> Is Lamantia dead or not?
He died yesterday.
Bill Schenley
> He died yesterday.
Oops ... He died on the 7th.
mar...@myrealbox.com
On 11 Mar 2005 15:15:44 -0800, "robertc...@yahoo.com"
<robertc...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Is Lamantia dead or not?
Sadly, yes.
robertc...@yahoo.com
> robertc...@yahoo.com wrote:
> > Is Lamantia dead or not?
>
> Philip Lamantia -- S.F. Surrealist poet
> Visionary verse of literary prodigy influenced Beats
> - Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer
> Friday, March 11, 2005
Thanks for the obit. I really didn't know what to make of the blank
message.
For anyone interested in sampling some of Lamantia's work, visit this
page:
http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/lamantia.html
If you want a vivid account of the famous Six Gallery reading mentioned
in the article, you will find one in Jack Kerouac's novel, _The Dharma
Bums_.
Interesting that both Lamantia and Kerouac embraced Catholicism in the
end. Behind the hectic lives they led, I think there was all along a
thirst for order and beauty.
Bob Champ
robertc...@yahoo.com
robertc...@yahoo.com wrote:
> pa...@perfectmail.com wrote:
> > robertc...@yahoo.com wrote:
> > > Is Lamantia dead or not?
> >
> > Philip Lamantia -- S.F. Surrealist poet
> > Visionary verse of literary prodigy influenced Beats
> > - Jesse Hamlin, Chronicle Staff Writer
> > Friday, March 11, 2005
>
And here, incidentally, you will find a couple of photos of
Lamantia--taken in 1999:
http://www.emptymirrorbooks.com/keenan/m1999-2.html
Lamantia was a very passionate poet.
Bob Champ
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
R H Draney
>
>
>Philip Lamantia
>
>Surrealist poet who influenced the Beats
Is anybody besides me having trouble every time you try to pronounce his
name?...I keep getting "Hear me now, oh thou bleak and unbearable world: thou
art base and debauched as can be"....r
marilyn...@aol.com
MJ