Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia

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 The Collected Poems gathers not only his published work but also an extensive selection of unpublished or uncollected work; the editors have also provided a biographical introduction.

The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia

Literature & Fiction

Lamantia, Philip

History & Criticism

University of California Press

An early collection of poetry from the much praised American surrealist poet, Philip Lamantia, "discovered" by Parker Tyler and Charles Henri Ford.

Touch of the Marvelous

Small Pr Distribution

Becoming Visible (Pocket Poets Series)

Poetry

City Lights Books

. 16mo pp. 84 Brossura (wrappers) Molto Buono (Very Good)

Becoming Visible

This magical poetry creates a contemporary urban bucolic in its electric transitions between city and wilderness, human design and the natural world. Lamantia combines savage satire with a intense lyricism. These poems open the coiled dream door of the labyrinth to apocalyptic terrors, catastrophes of the political world, old myths of the earth, the sublimity of birds, the wild West, the commune of anarchs and the regenerative power of love.

Meadowlark West

City Lights Publishers

<div> 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. </div>

Bed of Sphinxes

Two long-lost volumes from the classic Beat period. Tau is Philip Lamantia’s mystical second collection of poems, originally slated for publication in 1955, but suppressed by the poet due to his evolving religious beliefs. Journey to the End contains the poems of the legendary John Hoffman (1928–1952), whose poems were read by Lamantia in 1955 at the 6 Gallery reading where Allen Ginsberg debuted “Howl.”
Lamantia’s closest friend, a character in Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, and the inspiration for two lines of “Howl,” Hoffman moved between San Francisco and New York before his death in Mexico at the age of twenty-four. This volume includes biographical notes and Lamantia’s commentaries on Hoffman’s poetry.

Tau & Journey to the End (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)

Hoffman, John

The original American surrealist returns in a new edition of the 1967 classic. "I am eager to do a book of yours," Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote to Philip Lamantia in Nerja, Spain in 1966. "What about SELECTED POEMS OF PHILIP LAMANTIA?" The missive came at the right time, as Lamantia had recently reembraced the surrealism of his youth and sought to publish his current work alongside his key poems of the 1940s, when the then-15-year-old poet was published by war-exiled leader of the Surrealist Movement, André Breton. For Breton, the young poet was a new Rimbaud, but Lamantia also became known as a poet of the Beat Generation, participating in the 1955 Six Gallery Reading where Allen Ginsberg debuted "Howl." A pioneer of San Francisco's psychedelic culture, Lamantia reemerged through City Lights at the crest of the Summer of Love. Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia reflects each facet of the poet's development up to the point of its publication. "Revelations of a Surreal Youth (1943-1945)" includes the incendiary poems from his teenage years which brought him early avant-garde fame, including his signature "Touch of the Marvelous." "Trance Ports (1948-1961)" covers the Beat years, evincing increasing involvement with mysticism, esoterism, and religion. Finally, "Secret Freedom (1963-1966)" heralds his return to surrealism, cementing his countercultural bona fides with the LSD-fueled "Blue Grace," the zig-zagging Kundalini-inspired "What Is Not Strange?" and the Aquarian Age ode "Astro-Mancy," which prefigures his later engagement with Native American culture. This new edition includes an afterword by poet and editor Garrett Caples, recounting the book's genesis through correspondence between Lamantia and Ferlinghetti and including archival images. A much-needed restoration to the Pocket Poets Series of today, Selected Poems of Philip Lamantia glows like a red-hot coal still burning with the revolutionary fervor of its time.

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

Blood of the Air

Four Seasons Foundation

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Books by Lamantia, Philip