Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia

by Philip Lamantia, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Foreword), Garrett Caples (Editor)

The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia represents the lifework of the most visionary poet of the American postwar generation. Philip Lamantia (1927-2005) played a major role in shaping the poetics of both the Beat and the Surrealist movements in the United States. First mentored by the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, the teenage Lamantia also came to the attention of the French Surrealist leader André Breton, who, after reading Lamantia’s youthful work, hailed him as a “voice that rises once in a hundred years.” Later, Lamantia went “on the road” with Jack Kerouac and shared the stage with Allen Ginsberg at the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, where Ginsburg first read “Howl.” Throughout his life, Lamantia sought to extend and renew the visionary tradition of Romanticism in a distinctly American vernacular, drawing on mystical lore and drug experience in the process. The Collected Poems gathers not only his published work but also an extensive selection of unpublished or uncollected work; the editors have also provided a biographical introduction.

Genres: Poetry

504 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

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

[Eric]

Lamantia is a savagely under-rated, under-read and important 20th century counter-cultural writer. This book has all of his major work and has a fascinating and lengthy introduction and biography of Lamantia whose life was as fascinating as his writing. This is the guy that inspired Ginsberg to write Howl, this is the guy who was a beatnick a decade before it existed, quitting high school to work with Andre Breton's surrealist government in exile in New York, searching out Antonin Artaud's peyote initiators in Mexico, become initiated into the peyote religion of the Washoe when Allen was probably hanging out at the malt shop. Lamantia was a character in Kerouac's The Subterraneans as a kind of hip preist figure and it was Lamantia who turned Kerouac on to Peyote. Lamantia and Bob Kaufman were two genuine visionary writers from San Farncisco that had much to do with not only poetry but helping kickstart bohemian counter culture in America and elsewhere. But Lamantia goes very deep into esoteric spirtuality, he was a mystic Catholic for much of his life and incredibly widely read, studied Egyptology in Spain with some of the top people in the field. His later poetry such as Meadowlark West weave a life time of travels an esoteric studies into meditations ofn the landscapes of the western United States. More people should read and know Philip Lamantia, he was extraordinary writer and person.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philip Lamantia , on his birthday October 23
Surrealism, eroticisms and terrors, rapture and despair, Philip Lamantia's poetry was inspired by the art of Dali and Miro and mentored by his friends Andre Breton and Max Ernst, and in turn directly inspired Allen Ginsberg's Howl. As the American champion of French Surrealism and Joycean stream of consciousness writing, Philip Lamantia influenced the Beat poets, but his was a spiritual quest as well.
He believed in the power of words and of language as a code of the universe by which its organizing principles and creative forces can be shaped; his poems are conjurations, summonings, hymns to elemental powers and prophecies of becoming. Like Breton and William S. Burroughs, he pursued ecstatic visions and poetry as a magician's path of secret gnosis, a seizure of power over one's own evolution to a higher state.
For this is what sets Surrealism apart from its antecedent and subsequent literary forms; not a concern with dreams as such, but the practice of dream navigation and other means of ecstatic trance as a spiritual path.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 2 out of 5]

I suppose I read about a hundred pages, not counting the lengthy informative introduction, which is quite good. BUT this is simply not my cup of tea: if you like the logorrheic flow of Beat poetry or the cascading, disconnected imagery of surrealism, Lamantia is your man. He’s not mine: for me, poetry needn’t necessarily “make sense,” but it has to be more disciplined than this, less like the uncontrolled overflow of a tumbling waterfall of words.