Philip Lamantia (Independent)
Hyfler/Rosner
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