Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia, 1943-1966: Pocket Poets No. 20

by Philip Lamantia, Garrett Caples (editor)

Physical description; 100 p. 17 cm. Subject; Poetry.

Genres: Poetry

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

About the author

Philip 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 Tau remained unpublished during Lamantia's lifetime.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.

Reviews

[Brendan McKee · Rating 2 out of 5]

There is a story in Bukowski’s Hot Water Music where his literary alter ego Henry Chinaski goes to a poetry reading with his girlfriend. Everyone there is enthralled by the poet, taken in by his dramatic reading and the beautiful lyricism of his words, but Chinaski observes repeatedly that under the surface the poet is shallow and his works are saying nothing at all. If you told me that the poet in the story was Lamantia I would believe you. Though the poems are beautiful, the focus is entirely on emotional surrealism and little else. You could argue that he is trying to move beyond material meaning to abstractly invoke raw emotion in an almost mystical sense (and I believe that is his intention), but I felt that the elevation of the work past material concerns leaves it untethered to reality and without much to say. After all, what is love or hate without the object of those feelings?…or perhaps that is simply why it didn’t ‘click’ for me.

Still, these pieces aren’t entirely without merit. For example, the word choices are purposeful and there is some elegant lyricism to the works that can be appreciated when read aloud. I also do appreciate that he is trying to do something different here, and I think that there is something worthwhile in pushing the envelope. It is just a pity that, at least for me, it all felt as though it wasn’t in service of much.

[mwpm mwpm · Rating 4 out of 5]

Selected Poems 1943-1966 is divided into three parts: "Revelations of a Surreal Youth", "Trance Ports", and "Secret Freedom".

"For the first section of this books, Revelations of a Surreal Youth, I have chosen poems from the following limited editions of my work: Erotic Poems and from an extensive collection of early poems, Touch of the Marvelous " (P.L.)...

The sun has drowned
virgins are no more
there is no need for undertaking
but there is so much to see

So come with me
down the boulevard
of crawling veins
Don't be afraid
blood is cheap!

A paradise song?
A dirty song?
A love sonnet?
Scream it out!
Then we'll have the human walls
tumbling down to meet our march
into the raw-meat city!

The velvet robes are strewn
across the landscape
We step upon the sidewalk
that goes up and down
up to the clouds
down to the starving people
Don't ask me what to do!
Keep on going
we'll end up somewhere fast
on the moon perhaps!

Rainbow guns are dancing
in front of the movie queens
Everyone is laughing
flying dying
never knowing when to rest
never knowing when to eat

And the fountains come falling
out of her thistle-covered breasts
and the dogs are happy
and the clowns are knifing
and the ballerinas are eating stone

O the mirror-like dirt
or freshly spilt blood
trickling down the walls
the walls that reach the stars!

O the flock of sheep
breaking their flesh open
with bones sucked
from the brothels!

O the grave of bats
sailing through shops
with the violent hands!

When will these come?
When will these go?

The sun is riding into your eye
virgins are bursting
from under my flaming palms
and we are slowly floating away
- Automatic World, pg. 16-17

*

I am following her to the wavering moon
to a bridge by the long waterfront
to valleys of beautiful arson
to flowers dead in a mirror of love
to men eating wild minutes from a clock
to hands playing in celestial pockets
and to that dark room beside a castle
of youthful voices singing to the moon.

When the sun comes up she will live at a sky
covered with sparrow's blood
and wrapped in robes of lost decay.

But I am coming to the moon,
and she will be there in a musical night,
in a night of burning laughter
burning like a road of my brain
pouring its arm into the lunar lake.
- I Am Coming, pg. 33

The "second section, Trance Ports, is selected from Ekstasis and Destroyed Works " (P.L.)...

RED DAWN clouds coming up! the heavens proclaim you, Absolute God
I claim the glory, in you, of singing to you this morning
For I am coming out of myself and Go to you, Lorn of the Morning Light
For what's a singer worth if he can't talk to you, My God of Light?
These lines should grow like trees to tie around yr Crown of the Sky
These words should be strong like those of the ancient makers,
O poet of poets
Ancient diety of the poem -
Here's spindle tongue of morning riding the flushes of NIGHT
Here's gigantic ode of the sky about to turn on the fruits of my lyre
Here's Welcome Cry from heart of the womb of words, - Hail, Queen of Night!
Who giveth birth to the Morning Star, Here's the quiet cry of stars broken among crockery
Here's the spoon of sudden birds wheeling the rains of Zeus
Here's the worshiping Eye of my soul stinging the heavens
Here's Charmed Bird, zepher of High Crags - jugs of the divine poem
As it weaves terrestrial spaces, overturning tombs, breaking hymens
From where cometh this first cry
that my hands go into for the wresting of words
Here's my chant to you, Morning of Mornings, God of gods, light of light
Here's your singer let loose into the sky of your heaven
For we have come howling and screaming and wailing and I come SINGING
To You who giveth forth the song of songs that I am reborn from its opulence
That I hold converse with your fantasy That I am you beauty
NOT OF THIS WORLD and bring to nothing all that would stop me
From flying straight to your heart whose rays conduct me to the SONG!
- Morning Light Song, pg. 55

*

O beato solitude! where have I flown to?
stars overturn the wall of my music
as flight of birds, they go by, the spirits
opened below the lark of plenty
ovens of neant overflow the docks of Veracruz
This much is time
summer coils the soft suck of night
lone unseen eagles crash thru mud
I am worn like an old sack by the celestial bum
I'm dropping my eyes where all the trees turn on fire!
I'm mad to go to you, Solitude - who will carry me there?
I'm wedged in this collision of planets / Tough!
I'm ONGED!
I'm the trumpet of King David
the sinister elevator tore itself limb by limb

You can not close
you can not open
you break yr head
you make bloody bread

- High, pg. 62

"The third section, Secret Freedom, is published here for the first time anywhere" (P.L.)...

It's one of those days when the moon jumps
out of its skin and the walls of the sky
crash down with a thud
of Saturn's ring: from the wind
that drops its eggs to the gull
who hatches them from its gullet

It's one of those days govern
ments war on the earth's dinner tables
& heads of state are venus fly traps
eating the scum of their slaves
from cisterns of all the phony capitols
of King Mob

It's one of those days I'd as soon the electrons
fell out of their atoms
or never move across my room except
to play endlessly The Ants
of the Fugue since it's on a day like this
the planetary aspects are so bad if
anyone at all is not a Taoist - Be Still
& Act Not - an age of karma is set going so that
all future cranes & paradise birds
over bleed on the crests of all the seas
of our world, to the degree that on
Another One of These Days the air itself
shall strike down the citizens like a plague!

For it was on one of these days
the Perfect One degenerated into a
crocodile and the Sylphs of old
mated with the baboons who oozed up from
the Crash of the Eighth Moon!
- Gork! Or, My personal Minute Reading On the Calendar of Emblems Proclaimed From the Principality of Weir Which is Constantly SomeWhereElse, Therefor Unreachable by Machines & Beyond Any Psycho-Physical Analysis, and Conjuncts Only Relatively With the Phantomatic Distortions & Material Encumberances SOcially Projected by Over Proliferating Mobocracies, Murderous & Degenerate Sciences, Retrograde Religions & Politics At This Time Increasingly Oppresive & Horent Perpetuating Their Arbitrary Prerogatives Our of Certain Atavisms of Thought & Operation - Steeped in Integral Errors - Known to Corrupt and Destroy Our Humanity, pg. 82-83

[Maj.]

"Your whole body is a wing,
daughter of half-seen worlds;
together we fly to rocks of flesh
beneath the ashes of ancient lovers.

There is no rule here,
no seasons and no misery;
there are only desires
revealed in the mist.
Here ghosts are reborn every moment
in the spider webs of your face."

"Solitude is your violence."

Achingly, verily so.

"My love
my gypsy
among the fallen, you are luminous.
You wander with those who are mystery
with a naked heart upon your breast."

"The priestess maps apocalypse."

"I'm mad to go to you, Solitude."

Reminding myself why and how I am endlessly falling in love with his poetry each time I'm reading him.

[māris šteinbergs · Rating 3 out of 5]

some parts good, some parts not. lands in the absolute middle

[Dylan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A second rate stream-of-consciousness poetry.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This reissue of City Lights’ 1967 Pocket Poets #20 spans the itinerant, reclusive Lamantia’s journey from surrealist prodigy, to demiurgic force among the Beats, returning to the playful psychedelia of his native San Francisco on the eve of the Summer of Love. The ardent first section of this triptych teems with the striking juxtapositions of abstruse images that so impressed André Breton, mapped across atemporal dreamscapes reaching ‘beyond the soiled curtain of space’ into realms of sublime rapture. More diverse in style and scope and darker in mood, the middle section introduces mythic and liturgical elements – ‘undeciphered glyphs, stones of the immortals’ – woven into the dynamic incantations that helped inspire Ginsberg to howl. Lamantia’s return to a looser surrealism is more specifically counter-cultural, yet cosmic in its New Age longings, its ecstatic shrines freely strewn with symbols and talismans from many traditions. Garrett Caples’ new afterword includes text and facsimiles of surviving correspondence between Lamantia and Lawrence Ferlinghetti from the time. A true visionary, Lamantia helped spark a revolution in American letters, only to be eclipsed by those he influenced. Although the weighty posthumous Collected Poems (2013) is definitive, this landmark selection offers a potent dosage, easily pocketed by anyone headed ‘out into the world to watch the cataclysm begin.’

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A small book, don't overlook it.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

4 1/2 stars