What do you think?
Rate this book
Blood of the Air
Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso
- GenresPoetry
56 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 1970
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 Tau remained unpublished during Lamantia's lifetime.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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
October 8, 2014
Supposedly the only American surrealist "approved" by Breton, and that when Lamantia was a teenager. He was a poetry prodigy who continued to explore and expand his range and go his own way throughout his life.
This book came out in 1970 and was a return to his surrealist life-blood after a period of fairly heavy drug use and emphasis of his Beat creds. This is poetry deeply infused with alternative forms of knowledge (mystical, caballistic, magickal, etc.) and propelled by the belief that words have very powerful properties that aren't regularly acknowledged. There's a late quote by Breton as epigraph that says in effect that surrealism actually reached the living root and source of language through various methods, primarily automatic writing, so from that the reader knows that Lamantia isn't using his words lightly, he's involved with some deep things.
This book came out in 1970 and was a return to his surrealist life-blood after a period of fairly heavy drug use and emphasis of his Beat creds. This is poetry deeply infused with alternative forms of knowledge (mystical, caballistic, magickal, etc.) and propelled by the belief that words have very powerful properties that aren't regularly acknowledged. There's a late quote by Breton as epigraph that says in effect that surrealism actually reached the living root and source of language through various methods, primarily automatic writing, so from that the reader knows that Lamantia isn't using his words lightly, he's involved with some deep things.
May 5, 2012
serious, lyric, surrealist knives thrown into the darkness... an American savant, my grandfather, Lamantia...
October 22, 2018
I have trouble figuring out what surrealism is trying to achieve.
While i'm used to the jarring imagery, which seems to be a consistent theme, the 'music' of the language is another thing.
While i hated the 'sound' of Becoming Visible (a later work), in this book there is a certain music to the words, even if it doesn't make much sense.
However, Breton's excerpt included at the beginning of the book i believe is one of the important keys for unlocking the mystery and magic in Lamantia's work. We need to trace words back to their roots.
While i'm used to the jarring imagery, which seems to be a consistent theme, the 'music' of the language is another thing.
While i hated the 'sound' of Becoming Visible (a later work), in this book there is a certain music to the words, even if it doesn't make much sense.
However, Breton's excerpt included at the beginning of the book i believe is one of the important keys for unlocking the mystery and magic in Lamantia's work. We need to trace words back to their roots.
March 4, 2023
Cussing
the men are going home to work
on sleeping horses
and automobiles come alive
and return to the factories
wearing lingerie and makeup
Steering wheels chrome fenders and gears
leer at the computers
in the outer offices
and the engines —ah those seductive engines—
get into black boots and thrash the clouds
rushing through gargantuan windows the pistons eating
with anthropoid teeth
July 5, 2023
For the words, germinated out of silence, to leave the mouth and take form is to transmute the speaker in speech, is to revive the subtle heart whose "PUREST LIFE" is poetry: the air therefore that in-cantation becomes the blood.
"I vanish to start the sun to roll its eyes from the subterranean chant that is and knows no name, Mystery of the clock that prunes the transmutative glance..."
"I vanish to start the sun to roll its eyes from the subterranean chant that is and knows no name, Mystery of the clock that prunes the transmutative glance..."
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews