Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Philip Lamantia Day -- 2024

Today’s  the 97th anniversary of the birth of the great poet Philip Lamantia.  

Let’s celebrate, and cerebrate on, his poetry — shall we?  Yes! 

The image above was an early symbol of San Francisco’s Auerhahn Press.  Auerhahn used it at the  top of its 1959 announcement for upcoming publications, which included Lamantia’s Ekstasis and Narcotica, both published later that year.  The image – some sort of headless, bagpiping bird – is unusual and, with its mixed array of elements, seems at least potentially menacing (the image was collaged by the great artist Bruce Conner).

I share the image here because it gave rise to a May 1960 comment by the great poet Lew Welch that I came across earlier this year, which references Lamantia and got me thinking.  Welch, in pertinent part, wrote Auerhahn’s publisher (italics added for emphasis):

. . .  your colophon [ . . .] that headless, bagpiping bird [. . .] has a weird ferocity (like Mickey Mouse and Lamantia) . . . so comes on like your best poets.
(Lew Welch, Letter to Dave Haselwood, May 25, 1960 [in Letters from Lew Welch (Beat Scene Press, 2010].)    

I read “a weird ferocity” as Welch’s take on Lamantia’s poetry, and the characterization fascinates me.  It seems an apt way to describe certain key qualities of Lamantia’s poetry, maybe especially that from the 1940s and 1950s.  At the least, the term offers an interesting concept with which to re-read and think about those poems.

Before considering the poetry, how about Welch’s unexpected pairing of Lamantia and Mickey Mouse?  The coupling may puzzle if one knows only the modern anodyne Disney mascot and not the early-cartoon Mickey.  Steamboat Willie (1929), for example, features much slapstick-ish or odd violence, including Mickey throwing a bucket of water on a guffawing parrot’s head and later, as the bird mocks him from a porthole, nailing it square with a hurled half-potato, sending it into the river.  There’s also music made by cranking a goat’s tail like an old phonograph, and playing a duck like a kind of bagpipe and the teeth of a hippo as of they were bars on a xylophone.  This is a weird ferocity, I think, even if, as you may agree, it is relatively mild when considered against Lamantia’s work.

As for Lamantia’s poetry, Welch most likely was responding to the work in Ekstasis and Narcotica, which as indicated above Auerhahn had very recently published.  Ekstasis is full of marvelous, mystical, unusual  poems, many very intense.  Consider for example, the following section from “Fragments From An Aeroplane”, the book’s second poem:


Here, the repeated  “I sing,” while Whitmanesque (the phrase is used more than forty times in Leaves of Grass) — is worlds (or is it universes or dimensions?)  from ol’ Walt:  Lamantia celebrates not “one’s-self” or the “body electric,” etc., but “the far country of beasts window dust,” “the whorl of spaces,” “immensities and flowers entangling in a steel fountain / minerals” as well as “ladders to God / turning the unleveled EYE”. 
 
 

This all is most strange or extraordinary, or, to use Welch’s term, weird.   That is not a pejorative.   Rather,  as with the best stories in the old Weird Tales magazine (such as those of H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith), the term denotes an outrĂ© work in which the writer’s imagination has had free rein.

This section of “Fragments From An Aeroplane” also has a powerful intensity and wildness.  There is  passion, and undeniable momentum, the letter greatly aided by the thrice-repeated “I sing” and the second appearance, in the fifth line, of  “the far country!” with an added mark of exclamation. There are also “beasts,” “lions,” “houses of blood,” and “graves”  and thus the implied fierceness, violence, and death. There is,  to use Welch’s word, a ferocity to the poem, along with the weird.     
 
Narcotica – with its alternate title “I Demand Extinction Of Laws Prohibiting Narcotic Drugs” might be the ne plus ultra of Lamantia’s poetic ferocity.  In the pamphlet’s opening piece, Lamantia declares “fuck yr safety” and grandly and poetically inveighs:
you, turds, fuckedup middleclass liberals and notsoliberal intellectuals DROP DEAD WITH YR ASS HOLE MAMMON MOLOCH MONEY MOTIVATED LAWS ! ! !  It is I WHO AM THE LAW! I DEFY YOU TO SAY IT IS NOT MY HUMAN RIGHT TO USE ANY GOD GIVEN HERB PLANT AND POWER FOR MY PHYSICAL AND PSYCHIC WELL BEING . . .

[. . .]

I DECLARE WAR on your lack of intelligence, socalled lawgivers and arbiters of every man’s pain!  I say ABOLISH THE PROHIBITIONS ON THE SACRED NARCOTICS . .

Should you care to read it, the entirety of this ferocious political tract is available in Lamantia’s Collected Poems, published in 2013 by the University of California Press.

There are also a handful of lineated Lamantia poems in Narcotica, and, natch, they include much that is goodly strange or extraordinary (aka weird).  “Memoria,” for example, includes a stanza relating to hashish, which includes an alliterative line that goes and goes and goes: “Flying fingers flail flagons of fabulous flamingos floating flamboyant farewells / on the fabled City’s Gate”.  Further, that poem ends with a touch of ferocity: “Marijuana seeress sibyl sentences silver and cut the throats of time!”

Welch’s “a weird ferocity” descriptor also likely took into account Lamantia’s first poems, written and published in 1943 and 1944, when he was but 15 years old.  Many of those poems, written from what Lamantia, quoting Andre Breton, called “the zone of ‘pure psychic automatism’” (see Preserving Fire: Selected Prose, Wave Books 2018, at 143) feature images of aggression and violence that remain deeply startling to this day, as well as much that is otherwise impressively strange or extraordinary.  

Here, for example, are the final two stanzas of “The Ruins,” one of the poems featured in Lamantia’s first national publication, the June 1943 issue of the New York magazine View:
    Here is a hot wind of knives
    cutting my breath for sport,
    and leaving behind a limpid song
    heard by a million murdered stars.
    
    Balls of arson charge a flood of rats
    going down to pray with the blizzard bone
    and the sound burns through a tower,
    the highest light of forbidden magic.
There is plenty similar in other early poems.  For example, “I Am Coming” features a “valley of beautiful arson” and a sky covered with sparrow blood.  In  “Hermetic Bird” Lamantia declares, “here is a landscape on fire” and “the children will come out to murder.”  There’s also “the boulevard / of crawling veins” – “Don’t be afraid / blood is cheap!”  Lamantia writes – and  knifing clowns (“Automatic World”), floating corpses, “bleeding eyes of murder,” “two girls / raped at sunrise” and “wounded boys” (“The Enormous Window”), “burnt flesh” and a “bracelet of animal entrails” (“Infernal Landscape”), filicide and incestuous  rape while “a clown’s laugh is heard in church” (A Civil World), a hanged girl (“I am a criminal bare upon the universe”), the “hot bite of dogs” (“Awakened from Sleep”), a “goblet of suicide” (“Touch of the Marvelous”), and “the corpse of a dog” along with “a sublime bucket of eyes” (“There are Many Pathways to the Garden”).  This all is truly a weird ferocity.  

Arising from the disinterested play of imaginary thought, these are – to use terms used by Lamantia at the time or later – poems of dreams, vertigo, madness, and rebellion, which reveal that which is concealed (see Preserving Fire at 3, 6-7, and 94-95).  In this regard, recall that physical aggression is well-recognized as normal in dreams.
 
These first poems, products of a preternatural surrealist instincts, also relate to Lamantia’s experience listening to radio serials as a child and young teenager.  As he later wrote, those serials resulted in “audial reception of violence, mayhem, murder and terror” which “were generally salutary for children” because, among other things, they were necessary for psychological development, had a dream-like intensity, and were fantastically poetical and had an imaginary grandeur (see Preserving Fire at 105-120).

I’m also reminded of a poem Lamantia wrote in the 1970s, with a title that also serves as its final line: “Only Creative Violence Reveals the Beauty of the Marvelous.”  While others likely understand this better, I believe Lamantia considered “Creative Violence” essential to break through the crass, mechanistic, stifling, even enslaving pervasive rationality of much of everyday life, metaphorically depicted in the poem as “this corrugated barnyard” and “this nausea of prosaic noise.”

 
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Philip Lamantia -- February 1999