Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia

“Philip Lamantia’s ‘Collected Poetry’ is beyond scale, weight, or measure. There is no proportion in this intertwining of soul-buildings. These are the inexorable and ineffable projects of an inspired consciousness set at full tilt in raging protest, kisses, prayers, blessings and outraged demands. All from the deepest silence and farthest travel. The reader’s excitement is carried by Lamantia’s spiritual and physical beat. This surreal and mantic project drives farther than anything before or after. Breathtaking! These works are of synesthetic beauty to the eye, the ear, and the open interior of the heart. They come from the peaks and herbs and forests where the meadowlark speaks.” —Michael McClure



"Philip Lamantia's poems are about rapture as a condition. They are spiritual and erotic at the same time. Bright and dark, the enclosed polarities of devotion. St. Teresa and Rimbaud."—Tom Clark, author of Light & Shade: New and Selected Poems



"The blade-flash of Lamantia’s word lode strikes the owl stone, arcs to inspire. A quotidian American surrealism? Sudden array of Lemmy Cautions dashing through a hundred identical hotel doors. Visions for sure. Quick! Akhamatova in Lemuria!" —Clark Coolidge

 

List of contents

Foreword, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Acknowledgments

High Poet: The Life and Work of Philip Lamantia

Editorial Note

Touch of the Marvelous (1943–1949)

The Touch of the Marvelous

Plumage of Recognition

The Islands of Africa

I Am Coming

Apparition of Charles Baudelaire

The Ruins

By the Curtain of Architecture

There Are Many Pathways to the Garden

Automatic World

Hermetic Bird

Moments of Exile

Beneath this bed the caverns gather me like water

I am a criminal when your body is bare upon the universe

A Civil World

Invisible

The Enormous Window

Mirror and Heart

Infernal Landscape

A Winter Day

Awakened from Sleep

The Diabolic Condition

Celestial Estrangement

Submarine Languor

You and I Have Nothing to Fear

The Image of Ardor

To You Henry Miller of the Orchestra the Mirror the Revolver and of the Stars of Stars

From Erotic Poems (1946)

Upon the earth eyes opened in wonder

You flee into a corridor of stars

Scenario

From Dark Illusion to Love’s Reality

I open for you an ancient book

Nativity of Love

Autumn Poems

Answer from a Place of Waiting

I am forlorn

Sorrow

Night Vision

Unable to move and hardly breathing

Spring’s Entry

Two Worlds—1946

A Simple Answer to the Enemy

Poems 1943–1955

Ages in the Wind

Symbols

Another Autumn Coming

The New Year

Revelations of a New Order

Break of Day

This Room Is My Cosmos

Descent

Inside the Journey

Animal Snared in His Revery

Elementals

Beneath occidental peripheries

From Tau (1955)

To see this evil from its core

The Owl

Shot into the Sun

Going Forth by Day

Ground grade guard the crucible

Out of crystal beginnings

In a garden that isn’t, but will be

Flame gates open to water gongs

She sped to me a winter word

To the Music

Question

To the flat lands by the hills of Suum Nar

18 beings and The Other

Broken language hisses

Ekstasis (1959)

Preface

Christ

Fragments from an Aeroplane

Interior Suck of the Night

Iguana iguana

Les Langueurs Allongées

Sheri

What gift to bring

Ball

Mysterium Mysticus Ecclesia

Dead Smoke

Deirdre

In a grove

Confirmation

John Hoffman

Ah Blessed Virgin Mary

Man is in pain

As some light fell

The Poor Paradoxes

Scorpion Bite

Our Lady of the Snow

The New Evil

Boobus

PUT DOWN

McClure’s Favorite

Observatory

What made tarot cards and fleurs de lis

Terror Conduction

Intersection

It’s summer’s moment in autumn’s hour

It was a time I didn’t see the beast

Binoculars

From Narcotica (1959)

I Demand Extinction of Laws Prohibiting Narcotic Drugs!

Bones

Opium Cocaine Hemp

Opium, Put Down of Laws against Opium!

Memoria

Poems 1955–1962

Scenes

1. Füd at Foster’s

2. Immediate Life

For Real

Rest in Peace

Inscription for the Vanishing Republic

Orphic Poem

The Call

Politics Poem

Lava

That I burned by the screech owl castle in Berkeley Hills

New York Blank Poem New York

Cool Apocalypse

Apocalypses

Blank Poem for Poe

Visions

The marvelous unveils its face

Did I appear in angeltime

Last Days of San Francisco

34 Words Six Lines

Time Is as Eternity Is: On the White Road: The Muse

Witness

Advent

All Hail Pope John the Twenty Third!

A Poem for John Wieners Written on His Paper

Shooting down to L.A. in an open car

The Juggler in the Desert

Scat

In every way i am dazzled by you

Jet Powered Suicide

My Labyrinth

Why write about “things”?

Chrism Song

Make a poem your heart contained in mine

It is because i cannot have you i have you

Poem for Indians

Ceylonese Tea Candor (Pyramid Scene)

Rompi

Crystals

Kosmos

Year of Weir

Origins of Weir

Destroyed Works Typescript (1948–1960)

Destroyed Works (1962)

Hypodermic Light

It’s absurd I can’t bring my soul to the eye of odoriferous fire

That the total hatred

Old after midnight spasm

They shot me full of holes

U.S.S. San Francisco

Immense blank void

In camera of sempiternity you walk

This World’s Beauty

Resurrections

It is I who create the world and put it to rest

A theater of masked actors in a trance

I have never made a poem

Mantic Notebook

Apocamantica

Fin del Mundo

The poem says the bombs of America went off

At the sleeper of inveterate cars

The Apocalyptic

The gods made a circle

A gazelle fixated in clock work

Lost in a crowd

I’ve come to the time of brain crashed stars

This is the night holding gum

Sick of you, owl, talking nonsense in my head

Empty visions blur my soul

Secret Weapons

Table of Visions

Opus Magnum

Deamin

From the Front

Still Poems

Vacuous Suburbs

This is the grey limit

There’s a mountain of houses upside down

The night is a space of white marble

There is this distance between me and what I see

I have given fair warning

Spansule

Jeanlu

Morning Light Song

High

Infernal Muses

Crab

The Bride Front and Back

Till the End of Time

Peroxide Subway

Subconscious Mexico City New York

How depressing here I am

Parades melt eternally

I cut out, I mean there was no proper head to the time

A Note on DESTROYED WORKS and later

Poems 1963–1964

Song for the Intellect

Babbel/Is a lanaguage extending the sonic level

Babbel/Ali ben buri de asalium

New Babbel

J. Weir

Mumbles

Bloody Neons

From My Athens Terrace Ruin

Going west east directionless pack to Indis

At Random

She’s Appeared and Disappeared at Once

From Selected Poems (1967)

The Third Eye

Blue Grace

The Sun Is Bleeding over the Sky!

The Ancients Have Returned Among Us

She Speaks the Morning’s Filigree

Gork!

Voice of Earth Mediums

What Is Not Strange?

Gothic Games

Towers of the Rose Dawn

Capricorn Is a Wounded Knee

Astro-mancy

After the Virus

Coat of Arms

Difficult First Steps

Poems 1965–1970

Without Props

There is no death, only sempiternal change

Thorn of the Air

The Flying Fix

Poem for John Hoffman the Poet

Interjections

Let the tree shaped minion pinion the wonder of drugged dogs

The Blood of the Air (1970)

To the Reader

The Libran Age

I Touch You

You wait you wail

Altesia or the Lava Flow of Mount Rainier

Blue Locus

The Talisman

Flaming Teeth

Open your head of cisterns

San Francisco melts as I come together

The maginot line of poetry has not been invented

With the opening of light in my soul

Ephemeris

Out of My Hat of Shoals

Smile Berries

Fantast

The Faery Chambers

Seattle

Little hole of black hallucination on the wall

The mosque of your eye has exploded

Horse Angel

The Comics

Tonight Burned with Solar Slime

Flaming Teeth

Penetrant Tumors

The Analog

World without End

Poems 1970–1980

A Little Washington DC Dream

3 Poems

On the plain/of the angels

A gorgon of the language cabal

Flying beasts/are riveted on the air’s toiling

The Hand Moves the Word Flies

Liberty

Luminous Lady

Only Creative Violence Reveals the Beauty of the Marvelous

With the opening of light in my soul

Panty Hose Stamped with the Head of the Medusa

Between Sleep and Waking

Tobacco of Harar

Weight

Becoming Visible (1981)

Redwood Highway

The Romantic Movement

Bed of Sphinxes

Primavera

Becoming Visible

Visibilities

In Yerba Buena

Oraibi

Bile Nature

Drama Set

Ultima Thule

Mask of Geometry

Beyond This Trail of Crystal Rails

Poe-Baudelaire, one echo-in-two

Dissolving Lead

The Erotic Limned

Vibration

Below the Surface

Oneiric Reversal

Openers

Violet Star

This Moment Eternal Medusa

Precipitous Oracle

Modular Prey

Pulsate with stoppages

Radiant Opal

To Begin Then Not Now

Life Sciences

The Curtain of Magic Turns over Motors of Sleep

The Fulcrum Loaded

At the Emu’s Domain

The Jewels of the Vatican Board the Atlantic Cipher

The Days Fall Asleep with Riddles

The Uncertain Sciences

Green Lion

Oblique and Direct

Hypochondriac Weather

A Slice of the Atmosphere

The Element You Love

Time Traveler’s Potlatch

Notes

Poems 1981–1985

Willow Wand

Meadowlark West

Sentiment for the Cordials of Scorpions

Birder’s Lament

Poetics by Pluto

Itinerary of Drift Bane

Mexico City Central Moon

Bird: Apparition of Charlie Parker

Elegy on the Migrating Nightingales Massacred by Nuclear Physics at Chernobyl

Meadowlark West (1986)

Isn’t Poetry the Dream of Weapons?

Native Medicine

Tree

Surrealism in the Middle Ages

West

Ship of Seers

Haven Root

Invincible Birth

Black Window

America in the Age of Gold

Wilderness Sacred Wilderness

Sweetbrier

The Romantist

Reverie Has Its Reasons

Virgo Noir

Irrational

Game’s the Right Title

Words I Dream

Phi

The Marco Polo Zone

Zanoni A Western Border Town

Buncombe

Death Jets

Fading Letters

The Mysteries of Writing in the West

Spring

An American Place

Fourth of July

The Geometric Hallucination

Reached the Turn

Exorcist Exercises

Other States

There

Shasta

Poems 1986–1993

From No Closure

Haiku for Satie

Once In A Lifetime Starry Scape

From Triads

From Bed of Sphinxes: New and Selected Poems (1997)

Poem for André Breton

Ex Cathedra

Unachieved

Diana Green

Egypt

Egypt II

Passionate Ornithology Is Another Kind of Yoga

From Symbolon (1998–2001)

To be served continually with this platter of nothingness

Ultimate Zone

Seraphim City

Theoria

Recall

Pure Automatism

Not with the cerebrating head

Echo of St. Therese of the Child Jesus

Facing branches of a flowering tree

Hyper Sleep

Humans Have Just a Few Genomes More Than Fruit Flies

Today and yesterday are fusing

Triple V: The Day Non-surrealism Became Surrealist

Hidden Truth

Selected Bibliography, Steven Fama

Index of Titles and First Lines

About the author

Garrett Caples is a poet and editor for City Lights Books and the editor of the American poetry series, City Lights Spotlight. Andrew Joron is an award-winning surrealist poet and translator. Nancy Joyce Peters is the co-owner of City Lights Books; for much of its history, she served as its executive director and publisher, until her retirement in 2008. She is co-author, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of Literary San Francisco and has edited countless books for City Lights.

Summary

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.

Additional text

"A touchstone and stage upon which you can chart, as you desire, and as your desire finds, in Lamantia’s words, “desire’s desire,” the arc of a life given to the sirens."

Product details

• Authors: Philip Lamantia
• Assisted by: Garrett Caples (Editor), Garrett T. Caples (Editor), Caples Garrett (Editor), Andrew Joron (Editor), Joron Andrew (Editor), Nancy Peters (Editor), Nancy J. Peters (Editor), Nancy Joyce Peters (Editor), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Foreword), Ferlinghetti Lawrence (Foreword)
• Publisher: University Of California Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 06.09.2013
• EAN: 9780520269729
• ISBN: 978-0-520-26972-9
• No. of pages: 512
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; POETRY / General, Poetry by individual poets