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Bed of Sphinxes
Bed of Sphinxes offers a selection of poems from Philip Lamantia’s books and from recent work, representing five decades of impressive poetic achievement, from his early years of association with Surrealists-in-exile through the Beat Generation era to the present. The poems range from visionary apocalypse to a lyrical fusion with nature. By turns nightmarish, erotic, hermetic, they create an astonishing world charged by Lamantia’s energy and imagination.
- GenresPoetry
141 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
101 people want to read
About the author
Philip Lamantia
36 books33 followersPhilip Lamantia was an American poet and lecturer. Lamantia's visionary poems were ecstatic, terror-filled, and erotic which explored the subconscious world of dreams and linked it to the experience of daily life.
The poet was born in San Francisco to Sicilian immigrants and raised in that city's Excelsior neighborhood. His poetry was first published in the magazine View in 1943, when he was fifteen and in the final issue of the Surrealist magazine VVV the following year. In 1944 he dropped out of Balboa High School to pursue poetry in New York City. He returned to the Bay Area in 1945 and his first book, Erotic Poems, was published a year later.
Lamantia was one of the post World War II poets now sometimes referred to as the San Francisco Renaissance, and later became involved with the San Francisco Beat Generation poets and The Surrealist Movement in the United States. He was on the bill at San Francisco's Six Gallery on October 7, 1955, when poet Allen Ginsberg read his poem Howl for the first time. At this event Lamantia chose to read the poems of John Hoffman, a friend who had recently died. Hoffman's poetry collection Journey to the End (which includes the poems that Lamantia read at the Six Gallery) was published by City Lights in 2008, bound together with Lamantia's own Tau, a poem-cycle also dating from the mid-fifties. Tau remained unpublished during Lamantia's lifetime.
Nancy Peters, his second wife and literary editor, quoted about him, "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."
The poet spent time with native peoples in the United States and Mexico in the 1950s, participating in the peyote-eating rituals of the Washo Indians of Nevada. In later life, he embraced Catholicism, the religion of his childhood, and wrote many poems on Catholic themes.
The poet was born in San Francisco to Sicilian immigrants and raised in that city's Excelsior neighborhood. His poetry was first published in the magazine View in 1943, when he was fifteen and in the final issue of the Surrealist magazine VVV the following year. In 1944 he dropped out of Balboa High School to pursue poetry in New York City. He returned to the Bay Area in 1945 and his first book, Erotic Poems, was published a year later.
Lamantia was one of the post World War II poets now sometimes referred to as the San Francisco Renaissance, and later became involved with the San Francisco Beat Generation poets and The Surrealist Movement in the United States. He was on the bill at San Francisco's Six Gallery on October 7, 1955, when poet Allen Ginsberg read his poem Howl for the first time. At this event Lamantia chose to read the poems of John Hoffman, a friend who had recently died. Hoffman's poetry collection Journey to the End (which includes the poems that Lamantia read at the Six Gallery) was published by City Lights in 2008, bound together with Lamantia's own Tau, a poem-cycle also dating from the mid-fifties. Tau remained unpublished during Lamantia's lifetime.
Nancy Peters, his second wife and literary editor, quoted about him, "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."
The poet spent time with native peoples in the United States and Mexico in the 1950s, participating in the peyote-eating rituals of the Washo Indians of Nevada. In later life, he embraced Catholicism, the religion of his childhood, and wrote many poems on Catholic themes.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
April 13, 2008
Lamantia has no equal in American surrealism. He is a true visionary of amazing intensity.
July 30, 2007
Luminous and completely over the top. Lamantia's work has always grabbed me by the short hairs, and this selection is no exception. It's hard to beat the extremity of his language. If extremity is a virtue (it is), then Lamantia should be lauded for a vision that unrelentingly kicks ass. The only american surrealist to earn the backing of Breton himself, and that at a tender age, Lamantia's poems are uncompromising, and intense in a way that most modernists would avoid like the plague. Deeply personal and wildly political at the same time, simply unforgettable. I had the privilege of hearing Lamantia read at the Poetry Project a few years back, and he read for over an hour. However uncool that gesture was, and however intolerable I would find it in ANY other poet's reading, I could have listened for another hour at least. I was enthralled, as most of us were that night. He read from all periods, including the mermaids and the heroin and the birds and the pyramids and all of it.
Want to read
March 25, 2011My library lists almost all Lamantia's volumes except this one. However, none of them may be checked out ("REQUEST DENIED") so it makes little difference how many they have. Why even list them, library? I don't get why you persist in taunting me in this way.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews