tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-839237518990847452024-03-15T18:09:09.020-07:00the glade of theoric ornithic hermeticaSteven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.comBlogger152125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-15585472419183195112023-10-23T00:00:00.014-07:002023-10-23T00:00:00.134-07:00Philip Lamantia Day -- 2023<p><br /> <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJp56Eu3ZyMUdIdhNK7hgnJN7UblNJAxvHxlZzKAutVlIbqU6IhZv-r2Q1jhZ44gLnq9BqkG1UkVuAvhmdko1twF0f4_CzoFh-xm9ykNRyO7MWC8cEED1P8I1HdDleu7h0VPT7tYyKXp0GWTW_uY8_vVW2vWzIeKJNC9YiRlmWdLXaNLZXrunzjFKkAnuu/s400/Lamantia%20--%20daydream.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="400" height="480" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJp56Eu3ZyMUdIdhNK7hgnJN7UblNJAxvHxlZzKAutVlIbqU6IhZv-r2Q1jhZ44gLnq9BqkG1UkVuAvhmdko1twF0f4_CzoFh-xm9ykNRyO7MWC8cEED1P8I1HdDleu7h0VPT7tYyKXp0GWTW_uY8_vVW2vWzIeKJNC9YiRlmWdLXaNLZXrunzjFKkAnuu/w640-h480/Lamantia%20--%20daydream.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">“and isn’t it with daydreams that poetry begins to dance?”</span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3wQOWob_e-6kAuS8fuMvIXEmKlAfaAb-d9HhjqOpBdZwMIeM0Mv0u9iWJj3eeKpwX2sEO7d6WEpa35bGtfdfDJgU7RheH86Epn7PlturAo4T6EKkOORD9HiBBEmB1Tl8_xufSNNiUFwMrecIRD-y_KikACKPsPigPEqj_QNH32gre7v-ZHgQDchm9boH_/s1920/Lamantia%20--%20dance.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="833" data-original-width="1920" height="278" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi3wQOWob_e-6kAuS8fuMvIXEmKlAfaAb-d9HhjqOpBdZwMIeM0Mv0u9iWJj3eeKpwX2sEO7d6WEpa35bGtfdfDJgU7RheH86Epn7PlturAo4T6EKkOORD9HiBBEmB1Tl8_xufSNNiUFwMrecIRD-y_KikACKPsPigPEqj_QNH32gre7v-ZHgQDchm9boH_/w640-h278/Lamantia%20--%20dance.jpg" width="640" /></a></div> </span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Ah yes! And aha! <br /><br />Today’s the 96th anniversary of the birth of Philip Lamantia, in 1927, in San Francisco! <br /><br />Let’s celebrate! <br /><br />How about we luxuriate in and cerebrate on the rhetorical question pinned between the photos above?<br /><br />The question – permit me please to repeat it –</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>“and isn’t it with daydreams that poetry begins to dance?”</b></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">– is a line near the end of Lamantia’s “Diana Green,” a major poem first published in 1987 and included in <i>Bed of Sphinxes</i> (City Lights, 1997) and <i>Collected Poems</i> (University of California Press, 2013). It’s a marvelous example of Lamantia directly and evocatively suggesting, in verse, what seems to me to be a key element of his poetics. <br /><br />Daydreams and creativity – free and wild creativity – have long been linked. See, for example, Alfred Lord Tennyson, <i>The Day-Dream</i> (1842) – <br /><br /> “. . . I too dream’d . . . And ordered words asunder fly” <br /><br />– and Sigmund Freud, C<i>reative Writers and Day-Dreaming</i> (1908), which ties reveries and creativity back to childhood play. And there has been – click each of the five words that follow, if you please – <a href="https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780670864034 ">plenty</a> <a href="https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/schooler/jonathan/sites/labs.psych.ucsb.edu.schooler.jonathan/files/pubs/0956797618820626.pdf">similar</a> <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/the-virtues-of-daydreaming#entry-more ">in</a> <a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/idle-minds-intelligence/">recent</a> <a href="https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/analysis/2012/07/09/daydreaming-is-good-try-not-to-think-about-it">decades</a>. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><div style="text-align: left;">In the half-dozen lines that follow, from his “Bile Nature” (first published in 1976), Lamantia seems to present that which came from a daydream and also suggest much about the particular poetic dance of his imaginative reverie, including its wondrous movement, power, evanescence, drama, energy, fire, speed, weirdness, mystery, and magic:</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div></span><div style="margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">the rainbow leaps onto the gorge of daydreaming be it</span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">ever the sandy castles</span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">fleeting as mental blowtorches</span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">into the crashing water</span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">quicker than a chipmunk’s chess game</span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">reverses the coyote’s invisible dart </span><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I enjoy here how the first verb in these lines – “leaps” – brings to mind <i>gr</i></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>and jetés</i> and the like, and thus the dance of poetic association-al daydream-y thought.</span><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqpn9Z2b5RvmQzJeg_5NerK5nOspl6vI5F1_YrplMPMdjiTv2tHr-EF2_TnS4W4qx-oZ6dWUwwznR4XwzFo5PvQIabrMVGnCAr_g7VnQmQ6NHQWBLpAH9YXosB_7QM9z8zeYqEpnF3fljz-71jOxxVCl9EI5dfyM5m1rT3NsxRjRNiG3wxeg5H6rRwSdev/s186/Lamantia%20--%20grand%20jete.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="160" data-original-width="186" height="172" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqpn9Z2b5RvmQzJeg_5NerK5nOspl6vI5F1_YrplMPMdjiTv2tHr-EF2_TnS4W4qx-oZ6dWUwwznR4XwzFo5PvQIabrMVGnCAr_g7VnQmQ6NHQWBLpAH9YXosB_7QM9z8zeYqEpnF3fljz-71jOxxVCl9EI5dfyM5m1rT3NsxRjRNiG3wxeg5H6rRwSdev/w200-h172/Lamantia%20--%20grand%20jete.jpg" width="200" /></a></div></span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-left: 40px; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;"><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">In the following lines from “Redwood Highway,” first published in 1981, Lamantia exults reverie – the “dream wide awake” – evoking via an image a drummed rhythm (dance again!) and, in this instance, a marvelous harmonic vision:</span></div><blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-weight: normal;">Chance to dream wide awake<br />With the antelope-necked tom-toms<br />Whose sinews of silence project<br />The perfect Edenic Reunion</span></blockquote></blockquote></span></b><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">+++++</span></b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></b></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Lamantia’s suggestion that “with daydreams poetry begins to dance” reminds me of a marvelous biographical detail concerning his maternal Sicilian grandmother that he mentioned when talking on February 27, 1999 at the Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California. Calling her a “special woman</span><span style="font-size: medium;">,</span><span style="font-size: medium;">” Lamantia remembered his Nonna, age 70, tarantella-ing at a huge gathering – hundreds of people – in a forested grove, winning first prize in a dance contest. </span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></b><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEH7KWqsTqmlRXTI5Wp0pR_ZAcFQthgJftR-0e4GU9Ag_7_sxtXWQKVThRsXFLergvFgDjT7K-SWS4aeWU45I2fMjrWE_d3YnmLzRGGHmUspBkooIKZ6oFqxSGvqGCvxQZ4gGZghmS_fIEVb8yZ8xdaA_oRK2E4020sbQLi1DIbSaCZdgcfQ6qgOqovINH/s612/Lamantia%20--%20tarantella%20photo.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="482" data-original-width="612" height="315" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEH7KWqsTqmlRXTI5Wp0pR_ZAcFQthgJftR-0e4GU9Ag_7_sxtXWQKVThRsXFLergvFgDjT7K-SWS4aeWU45I2fMjrWE_d3YnmLzRGGHmUspBkooIKZ6oFqxSGvqGCvxQZ4gGZghmS_fIEVb8yZ8xdaA_oRK2E4020sbQLi1DIbSaCZdgcfQ6qgOqovINH/w400-h315/Lamantia%20--%20tarantella%20photo.jpeg" width="400" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I also remember how Lamantia, in a 1975 essay available in <i>Preserving Fire: Selected Prose </i>(Wave Books, 2018), described the surrealist dance of Alice Farley as “<i>poetry itself moving visibly</i>” (italics in the original) and how, in the notes to his poem “Redwood Highway” in <i>Becoming Visible </i>(1981), he praised “the surpassing poetic beauty of the Kachina dance” which he had seen in the Hopi village of Walpi.</span><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxmco6zfBCbpQcLG2EeasQqtsKFtgcjmWc-5yPgxwh3-lnGy6AXJ6lKFsr1scAfm9JtDzLHvP8w4ojxrpXnLvL-heZvOH5HY-z-3b-lmjnCpjH343hXNuSN79L2EmvaLC8WxrcmvmnMauCXgoOmb8B3i8_h1jo-N7spWZCXZ0Wwary6-uIzAAHjrVtJwsK/s1500/Lamantia%20--%20Kachina%20Dance.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="1500" height="256" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgxmco6zfBCbpQcLG2EeasQqtsKFtgcjmWc-5yPgxwh3-lnGy6AXJ6lKFsr1scAfm9JtDzLHvP8w4ojxrpXnLvL-heZvOH5HY-z-3b-lmjnCpjH343hXNuSN79L2EmvaLC8WxrcmvmnMauCXgoOmb8B3i8_h1jo-N7spWZCXZ0Wwary6-uIzAAHjrVtJwsK/w400-h256/Lamantia%20--%20Kachina%20Dance.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /> <b><span style="font-size: medium;">+++++</span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Let’s end with these beautiful lines, from “Pure Automatism” (a late poem, from circa 1999), which as I read them marvelously enact and describe, as they move across and down the page, the daydream dance of poetry – here an enthusiastic dendrologic / arboreal manifestation of that </span><span style="font-size: medium;">– while</span><span style="font-size: medium;"> rightfully insisting that it don’t, to say the least, come easy:</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-left: 80px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">words coalesce: sudden seed<br /> “thought”<br /> into<br /> trunk, branches, then, up a whole<br />solar splendiferic Tree!<br /> (diffusion)<br />effervescence A quality of<br /> subsumed quantum—<br /> there’s nothing harder to do<br /> like true love<br /> — like automatic<br /> pilot. </span> <br /></div><p style="text-align: center;">+++++</p><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvIU0Kogk_PltovRbB8wFbVv-6DRgGeNwfjVTOR4mTHtxIelbS8-LXsmFDcwbHN9pI_gig-96w77aC5numPyiQmOKa1SJU2QbrJpnbbY-y9T3OG8ds1b6iCvnaZ-gtdy2AnjQPKAOmKVkD9dJBzFN7fHvG_mErWv71BMQNZLHyjxk1r2FQmi5uMFyod7qf/s400/Lamantia,%20Philip%20--%20at%20Beyond%20Baroque%20February%201999%20(Michael%20Hacker%20photo).jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="269" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvIU0Kogk_PltovRbB8wFbVv-6DRgGeNwfjVTOR4mTHtxIelbS8-LXsmFDcwbHN9pI_gig-96w77aC5numPyiQmOKa1SJU2QbrJpnbbY-y9T3OG8ds1b6iCvnaZ-gtdy2AnjQPKAOmKVkD9dJBzFN7fHvG_mErWv71BMQNZLHyjxk1r2FQmi5uMFyod7qf/w430-h640/Lamantia,%20Philip%20--%20at%20Beyond%20Baroque%20February%201999%20(Michael%20Hacker%20photo).jpg" width="430" /></a></div>Philip Lamantia </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">at the <br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Beyond Baroque <span> Literary Arts Center</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">Venice, California </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">February, 1999</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">-- photo by Michael Hacker --</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">+++++</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">¡¡¡ VIVA LAMANTIA !!!</span></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">+++++</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">+++++++</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">+++++<br /></div><p></p></div>Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-35962876740104772712023-06-04T00:00:00.106-07:002023-06-04T08:15:45.661-07:00Harry Crosby Day!<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXs2b7Bi-D9XhWo_AyfM1IV8qiavjGa4GbySLctmKGbYewecDpPIqO1lwz4OHF1n3zZNVkCnsPpyp0wDXzlhGTyOyFL82rztgK1F8M7ZYNimSM0f5Gq_upiDuMw8HdiSV9ChvQm19ZT9ByNr7i4aoWqhNe6lAIc9ZP6NVo_JCZSISRc6Far6WZcfdG3g/s4032/Garden%20summer%202017.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiXs2b7Bi-D9XhWo_AyfM1IV8qiavjGa4GbySLctmKGbYewecDpPIqO1lwz4OHF1n3zZNVkCnsPpyp0wDXzlhGTyOyFL82rztgK1F8M7ZYNimSM0f5Gq_upiDuMw8HdiSV9ChvQm19ZT9ByNr7i4aoWqhNe6lAIc9ZP6NVo_JCZSISRc6Far6WZcfdG3g/w480-h640/Garden%20summer%202017.JPG" width="480" /></a></div><p></p><p>Yes oh Yes on this day in 1898 <a href="https://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2018/06/harry-crosby.html">Harry Crosby</a> was born and Yes oh Yes we here celebrate the oh Yes quasquicentennial oh Yes of his birth and oh Yes oh Yes please do join the party!</p><p>Here is a short poem by Crosby from <i><a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/library/Crosby_Harry_Transit-of-Venus.pdf">Transit of Venus</a></i>, his fourth collection. First published in 1928 by his and his wife Caresse’s Black Sun Press, the book was republished in 1929 and again in 1931, with a preface by T.S. Eliot, as a part of the posthumous Crosby<i> Collected Poems</i>. This particular poem -- “All That Is Beautiful” -- is the third in the book. It most definitely lives up to its title. It is convincingly positive, a lovely love poem, and, in the end, a supremely Crosby-confident affirmation and celebration of the remarkable power of desire and passion. So Yes oh Yes here it is for you: <br /></p><p></p><p><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6Q0AFhZs29QZNkxqgiVSrjn1cU1A3o1z1fvg3IqDEbEcgGPFP8jxaGnAitr0q0cgbxhnnkExACKJXBFpYtQNw9xWE64_95EkVQhnhYAaW1XvJfieReMtX0a-75fm35fafHyime9xFdxCdQ6Mjajr-B2y2TfqcaAFgL9Iz63ACew-lV6RUjDJJxxn_Dg/s2644/Crosby,%20Harry%20--%20All%20That%20Is%20Beautiful.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2571" data-original-width="2644" height="622" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6Q0AFhZs29QZNkxqgiVSrjn1cU1A3o1z1fvg3IqDEbEcgGPFP8jxaGnAitr0q0cgbxhnnkExACKJXBFpYtQNw9xWE64_95EkVQhnhYAaW1XvJfieReMtX0a-75fm35fafHyime9xFdxCdQ6Mjajr-B2y2TfqcaAFgL9Iz63ACew-lV6RUjDJJxxn_Dg/w640-h622/Crosby,%20Harry%20--%20All%20That%20Is%20Beautiful.jpg" width="640" /> </a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">Eliot, in the preface mentioned above, asserted that Crosby’s poetry was “consistently . . . the result of an effort to record as exactly as possible to his own satisfaction a particular way of apprehending life” and that what interested him the most was Crosby’s “search for a personal symbolism of imagery.” If there is wisdom in these critical judgments -- and I think there is -- then “All That Is Beautiful” is a wonderful example of why that is so, and, more to the point, a most excellent example of Crosby’s wondrous way with words. May the poem serve you well, especially today, the 125th anniversary of Crosby’s birth! <br /></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLsipB-h-vX9dC9UaSRRFtwvMu4aN_7tGY3jP8ypIo3XUfK0weelO_BobVxkwgilASa4SWiYiqNABmDngLRsXLuyxHxGcnbae_0TiqjlymQDa-vZzeOGjma9tvkVdwxparQUyrhiGtrRzoWR3oDH1ER-nABxN8XPkucgC7vRlvNXAKFKvtP7jUg2pDog/s640/Crosby,%20Harry%20--%20photo%20sitting%20in%20The%20Sun.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="593" data-original-width="640" height="594" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLsipB-h-vX9dC9UaSRRFtwvMu4aN_7tGY3jP8ypIo3XUfK0weelO_BobVxkwgilASa4SWiYiqNABmDngLRsXLuyxHxGcnbae_0TiqjlymQDa-vZzeOGjma9tvkVdwxparQUyrhiGtrRzoWR3oDH1ER-nABxN8XPkucgC7vRlvNXAKFKvtP7jUg2pDog/w640-h594/Crosby,%20Harry%20--%20photo%20sitting%20in%20The%20Sun.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Harry Crosby, sitting in the Sun</i></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i></i></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0x-zlAhh4acUgxwxd5ZSMxNsoCy3dU4DaAfbXeDDVAKq9TBb-CPxvriVj593hGQ9gIxdFPbe_IuH98y1-A0qIcZLO535dTSAboooypzF66hLtBvDhu62UGrayuObG3DbkzJSjyRDJsYr_uRthNZ_NHVvafy1oVtn2BgEqZHobwPkHXK_l98ILpUq14Q/s4032/Garden%20Duo.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0x-zlAhh4acUgxwxd5ZSMxNsoCy3dU4DaAfbXeDDVAKq9TBb-CPxvriVj593hGQ9gIxdFPbe_IuH98y1-A0qIcZLO535dTSAboooypzF66hLtBvDhu62UGrayuObG3DbkzJSjyRDJsYr_uRthNZ_NHVvafy1oVtn2BgEqZHobwPkHXK_l98ILpUq14Q/w480-h640/Garden%20Duo.jpg" width="480" /></a></i></div><p></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i><br /> </i><i>While deep within our hearts . . . </i></p><p style="text-align: center;"><i>Strange fire growing young . . . <br /></i></p><p style="text-align: center;">+++++++</p><p style="text-align: center;">+++++++++++</p><p style="text-align: center;">+++++++<br /></p>Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-7027383261675853772022-10-23T00:00:00.010-07:002022-10-23T09:48:06.420-07:00Philip Lamanta Day --- 2022<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin-left: 40px; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-0c12SXtlwXimmN2nBWsDDumPYIU39m0QvmjPLWDTKmvUrQqeY373XrO2cNX4ASGGg0dukXrzcbb9ocJMHDOtrsyjVV21GKTx-06z81JUPH-hd98HMhX3O6pDJW1rUWW_o75wpIjCKbb43wPJlLE0XwMpYk3gAYz8XmMlLEOAyuQicD-MKjXVj6oCkg/s2432/Lamantia%20--%20Touch%20of%20the%20Marvelous%20VVV.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1777" data-original-width="2432" height="468" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-0c12SXtlwXimmN2nBWsDDumPYIU39m0QvmjPLWDTKmvUrQqeY373XrO2cNX4ASGGg0dukXrzcbb9ocJMHDOtrsyjVV21GKTx-06z81JUPH-hd98HMhX3O6pDJW1rUWW_o75wpIjCKbb43wPJlLE0XwMpYk3gAYz8XmMlLEOAyuQicD-MKjXVj6oCkg/w640-h468/Lamantia%20--%20Touch%20of%20the%20Marvelous%20VVV.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>“Touch of the Marvelous” may be the best known of Philip Lamantia’s poems. It’s certainly one of his earliest. It was written in 1943, at age 15 (!) and published—as seen above—in the February 1944 final issue of <i>VVV</i>, the surrealist magazine edited in New York by David Hare with André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Max Ernst. The issue also included two other Lamantia poems, an ardent letter by him to Breton (“To rebel! That is the immediate objective of poets!”), a striking cover by Matta — </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9HVFmmyujzPfLfm0i5BBsmuNTLTnLMBfj61Ajv9MhwfDEYHgGsbdHnys_1dsOWyEt4JS2xZC8_G1IJCcr48Md5wv3EDSuLts8bj2StDgQTz_4uoFWmiwSBZhVbYirb4HlAKymKeqXEusXzX-D9eSvv3wASgdnBEX7dKC_OlDlDGs35hmLT2ZbNbZWuA/s2646/Lamantia%20--%20VVV%20cover%20February%201944.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2646" data-original-width="2063" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9HVFmmyujzPfLfm0i5BBsmuNTLTnLMBfj61Ajv9MhwfDEYHgGsbdHnys_1dsOWyEt4JS2xZC8_G1IJCcr48Md5wv3EDSuLts8bj2StDgQTz_4uoFWmiwSBZhVbYirb4HlAKymKeqXEusXzX-D9eSvv3wASgdnBEX7dKC_OlDlDGs35hmLT2ZbNbZWuA/w498-h640/Lamantia%20--%20VVV%20cover%20February%201944.jpg" width="498" /></a></div><p></p><p>— writings by such luminaries as Benjamin Peret, Aimé Césaire and Leonora Carrington, and art by, among others, Carrington, Enrico Donati, Duchamp, Ernst, Wilfredo Lam, Jacqueline Lamba, Yves Tanguy, and Dorothea Tanning. </p><p>Even among the stellar array of writings and art in <i>VVV</i> no. 4, “Touch of the Marvelous” shone bright, and still does today. Here again is how the poem looked on the page (go ahead, read it again!):</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUFCXxjGnXxw-dThaF_-2iIAasE91wghjNn1qHVOEdxugcH87bdxtzdkZKZMIVUJIBGndUhdq4DBiIkLlQX8gzAfuA4LBJFffd-0dtcOSXPcIsNeI_VSrodEvyQ1yl6ICxAbhfx5y3WnjIvG_LJHL_esodpgxiedmBxNS8B5yior915gQI2-XizNdvZg/s2432/Lamantia%20--%20Touch%20of%20the%20Marvelous%20VVV.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1777" data-original-width="2432" height="468" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUFCXxjGnXxw-dThaF_-2iIAasE91wghjNn1qHVOEdxugcH87bdxtzdkZKZMIVUJIBGndUhdq4DBiIkLlQX8gzAfuA4LBJFffd-0dtcOSXPcIsNeI_VSrodEvyQ1yl6ICxAbhfx5y3WnjIvG_LJHL_esodpgxiedmBxNS8B5yior915gQI2-XizNdvZg/w640-h468/Lamantia%20--%20Touch%20of%20the%20Marvelous%20VVV.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><p>The energy in this poem is—yes, I will say it—marvelous. <a href="https://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2013/10/philip-lamantia-collected-poems.html" target="_blank">I wrote about it about ten years ago, when it appeared in the lead off spot in Lamantia’s <i>Collected Poems </i>(University of California Press, 2013)</a>. <br /><br />But I’m compelled to write about the poem again today, on —yes, I said yes — the 95th anniversary of Lamantia’s birth, in 1927, in San Francisco, because I recently finished— <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje7mKyfbQHV2qW5wej571eeVj0nYZobXpD3-MTaoAf5tOC49I3cTOpKUDrMD_d12BbcuEmqzFzyvtUHII7Fg6qSDlL9-QddyrBlIgg6DMtcD3MrLC1RT3lywDT1jL0eaNGQhgETUh-OVqHB59kSqxBvsBqaKgwQEoy1bCFY7iLQCeqXXjv4GaPdElGqg/s3546/Penguin%20Book%20of%20Mermaids.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3546" data-original-width="2535" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEje7mKyfbQHV2qW5wej571eeVj0nYZobXpD3-MTaoAf5tOC49I3cTOpKUDrMD_d12BbcuEmqzFzyvtUHII7Fg6qSDlL9-QddyrBlIgg6DMtcD3MrLC1RT3lywDT1jL0eaNGQhgETUh-OVqHB59kSqxBvsBqaKgwQEoy1bCFY7iLQCeqXXjv4GaPdElGqg/w458-h640/Penguin%20Book%20of%20Mermaids.jpg" width="458" /></a></div><p>—<i>The Penguin Book of Mermaid</i>s (2019), “a treasury of . . . tales about merfolk and water spirits from different cultures, ranging from Scottish selkies to Hindu water-serpents to Chilean sea fairies,” as the publisher puts it on the rear cover. Edited by University of Hawaii professors Cristina Bacchilega and Marie Alohalani Brown, the book’s a delight, including the general introduction as well as the head- and endnotes for the sixty tales (some are excerpts), including 20 translated into English for the first time. These editors know their stuff, and share it extremely well. <br /><br />Reading <i>The Penguin . . . Mermaids</i>, I got to thinking on Lamantia’s mermaids in “Touch of the Marvelous” and how they fit with, extend, or differ from the centuries-old folk and literary traditions about the sea-creatures. Shall we, er um, swim around in that for a bit? <br /><br />Lamantia’s poem fits the folk and literary traditions in its depiction of what Bacchhilega and Brown call “a fleeting interspecies encounter,” which they identify as one of three a common plots in merfolk tales (the others are the taking of a mer(maid)-wife, or the abduction of a human into the water.) In “Touch of the Marvelous,” the mermaids arrive, they depart, and despite trying to hold on to one, the speaker–who I’ve always considered to be Lamantia—ends up “lost in the search to have,” “looking for,” “recalling memories of,” and “looking beyond the hour and the day to find” the mermaid. <br /><br />However, different from essentially all traditional mer-tales, Lamantia in his poem encounters mermaids not in water or at its edge, but in “the desert.” A desert with a <span style="font-size: medium;">“</span>camel” and <span style="font-size: medium;">“</span>sands,” details which make it seem genuine, and also of course very dry, with all that such metaphorically evokes in terms of—as I read it—a desiccated creative zone. This bringing of sea creatures to dry land suggests the kind of resolution of opposites the Surrealists (and others, including Heraclitus) explored and pondered. It’s also a compelling visual image, and that it happens in the first line of “Touch of The Marvelous” is a high-power verve-charge.<br /><br />Lamantia’s mermaids also embody the traditional notion that such creatures’ are able to transform themselves; as Bacchhilega and Brown say, “like water, they are shape-shifters that resist being contained.” In “Touch of the Marvelous” the ch-ch-changes begin almost right away, with mermaids described with “feet of roses” instead of the typical tails. But it is with BIANCA, first named in the fourth stanza, that the shape-shifting becomes a<i> tour de force</i>—or is it a <i>chef-d'œuvre</i>? (I say both). The mermaid first turns into two giant lips and then, in the eyes of the poet who seeks her, “the angelic doll turned black,” “the child of broken elevators,” “the curtain of holes / that you never want to throw away,” and, ultimately, “the first woman <i>and first man</i>” (italics added, to emphasis the shape-shifting). These transformations reverie-rev the imagination.<br /><br />“Touch of the Marvelous” also reflects the relationship between mermaids and Sirens. Professors Bacchhilega and Brown remind that Sirens, in Homer’s <i>Odyssey</i>, and on ancient Greek vases and funerary monuments, were human/bird creatures, with “the power of their song and music— rather than their appearance” their primary trait. Over time, Sirens morphed into human-piscine beings, the professors teach, based on their power, shared with mermaids, to seduce; thus, as early as the 14th Century, Chaucer, as quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary, wrote “[t]hough we call them mermaids here . . . Men call them sirens in France.” But while both seduce—“lead astray, divert, lead elsewhere,” Bachhilega and Brown clarify that the Siren’s lure is not entirely sexual, but “had to do with life and death, or knowing the future . . . .”</p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Only “mermaids” are explicitly mentioned in Lamantia’s “Touch of the Marvelous,” but I believe “Sirens” are in the poem too. First, BIANCA is said to turn “with the “charm of a bird;” this invoking of the avian leads me right to the bird-women Sirens of antiquity. And I hear the seductive song of Homer’s Sirens when Lamantia writes he is looking for the region where BIANCA’s “eardrums play music . . . .” </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span><br />In addition to those semi-direct associative references, Sirens are intuitively evoked given that Lamantia’s pursuit of BIANCA is not simply a desire for physical contact, although the references to “boudoir” in the early stanzas do point to a sensual experience, as does the “the mermaid<span style="font-size: medium;">’s nimble fingers</span>”<span style="font-size: medium;"> going through the poet</span><span style="font-size: medium;">’s hair. </span>He wants “the secrets,” to go to a yet unknown region where there conflagration, ascent (“where the smoke of your hair is thick . . . climbing over the white wall”) and music. He believes BIANCA might be found out past all time (“beyond the hour and day”). BIANCA may be a named mermaid in the poem, but she attracts, as do the Sirens, with knowledge and much, much more. <br /><br />If I had to give BIANCA’s allure and essence a name, I’d say “creative energy”—but of a certain kind, one that’s directly related to Lamantia’s poetics: that which brings on or allows access to <span style="font-size: medium;">“the Marvelous.”</span> In this regard, consider what he wrote in the magazine <i>Arsenal Surrealist Subversion</i> (1976): </p><blockquote>I have always dreamed of the ultimate triumph of the Sirens who, it was said, were ‘defeated’ in their poetic combat with the Muses, and who can be deciphered to typify imaginative freedom from the restraints of rationally controlled poetry, whose spokesmen, like all good bourgeoisie, must always recommend that we ‘plug our ears’ against the enchantresses heard by the inspired poet on his voyage to the unknown.</blockquote><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiMIECQYwOndmXQmDthtylznfTtsM4hx6XdYvpqnKKoieaKpBSxeOvWaMjt2mvBF3DA7iKfjaAzakc3LDk1wnJMIwPaoeMGoQ5SUc-3P38F-uQuC-tx3IynVWaWPsiqp2PD7fpsjGzmVU5BkvTw-gokL_MHBko7SmqWvAsy6h1VMGPAw9PWO_oAK1neQ/s2056/Mosa%C3%AFque_d'Ulysse_et_les_sir%C3%A8nes.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1121" data-original-width="2056" height="348" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiMIECQYwOndmXQmDthtylznfTtsM4hx6XdYvpqnKKoieaKpBSxeOvWaMjt2mvBF3DA7iKfjaAzakc3LDk1wnJMIwPaoeMGoQ5SUc-3P38F-uQuC-tx3IynVWaWPsiqp2PD7fpsjGzmVU5BkvTw-gokL_MHBko7SmqWvAsy6h1VMGPAw9PWO_oAK1neQ/w640-h348/Mosa%C3%AFque_d'Ulysse_et_les_sir%C3%A8nes.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;">Roman mosaic: Odysseus and the Sirens (Bardo National Museum, Tunis, Tunisia)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4um6Cg_WhoKv9LwHFYKS8NJToBNfGa8BMAqxo5yKUmEZYlKwAYQcEeovkrOms4WpcF-XmP4SvgXeVaa6guBcLsSzpqWgAR7JMddlQD8_htyB5wEToGDczGQ3-mI1tF6ncGtHepsalYXnew2x8p7AITtghWTZS1ca3xFbodFcABJ-JEArC5F_1DbmeHA/s565/Lamantia%20--%201987,%20by%20Rob%20Lee.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="565" height="464" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4um6Cg_WhoKv9LwHFYKS8NJToBNfGa8BMAqxo5yKUmEZYlKwAYQcEeovkrOms4WpcF-XmP4SvgXeVaa6guBcLsSzpqWgAR7JMddlQD8_htyB5wEToGDczGQ3-mI1tF6ncGtHepsalYXnew2x8p7AITtghWTZS1ca3xFbodFcABJ-JEArC5F_1DbmeHA/w640-h464/Lamantia%20--%201987,%20by%20Rob%20Lee.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>¡¡¡ VIVA LAMANTIA !!!</b></span><br /><br />+++(+)+++</div><div style="text-align: center;">+++++(+)+++++<br />+++(+)+++<br /></div>Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-51972853623680596662022-06-04T00:00:00.692-07:002022-06-04T08:48:10.949-07:00Harry Crosby Day!<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUhvV6_ef7TxuKJ15UvB6oVDT4ch-AmBoibXb3s5FnbOPiBoHKcb1AnjoxY2PsZr6lgEeOty9b9iPG_6vt8AEcv1ysFSykjZlMHpQOFLsoYHuuonR7Q6WbD92HcMJyuEZwDoU_9kG7G-bn7wkKrEF6XzEKviEGOXCy5otwQGj0-K7P5CbX0I--mXA-nA/s642/Crosby,%20Harry%20--%20photo%20sitting%20in%20The%20Sun.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="595" data-original-width="642" height="594" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUhvV6_ef7TxuKJ15UvB6oVDT4ch-AmBoibXb3s5FnbOPiBoHKcb1AnjoxY2PsZr6lgEeOty9b9iPG_6vt8AEcv1ysFSykjZlMHpQOFLsoYHuuonR7Q6WbD92HcMJyuEZwDoU_9kG7G-bn7wkKrEF6XzEKviEGOXCy5otwQGj0-K7P5CbX0I--mXA-nA/w640-h594/Crosby,%20Harry%20--%20photo%20sitting%20in%20The%20Sun.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Today's the 124th anniversary of the birth (in 1898) of Harry Crosby and yes yes yes the day's well worth remembering and celebrating, as we look towards -- natch -- The Sun. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">This year it's especially important to celebrate Crosby, I think, because exactly a century ago -- 1922 -- he began the diary entries that would eventually become <i>Shadows of the Sun</i>, which almost surely is his crowning literary achievement. It <a href="https://catalogue.swanngalleries.com/Lots/auction-lot/BLACK-SUN-PRESS-Crosby-Harry-Shadows-of-the-Sun?saleno=2400&lotNo=44&refNo=711301">first appeared in 1928-29-30 in three gorgeous volumes, published by his and his wife Caresse's Black Sun Press in Paris</a>, then again </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span><a href="https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Crosby&bi=0&bx=off&cm_sp=SearchF-_-Advs-_-Result&ds=30&pn=Black%20Sparrow%20Press&recentlyadded=all&rollup=on&sortby=20&sts=t&tn=Shadows%20of%20the%20Sun&xdesc=off&xpod=off">in 1977 </a></span>in a beautiful unexpurgated version </span><span><span><a href="https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=Crosby&bi=0&bx=off&cm_sp=SearchF-_-Advs-_-Result&ds=30&pn=Black%20Sparrow%20Press&recentlyadded=all&rollup=on&sortby=20&sts=t&tn=Shadows%20of%20the%20Sun&xdesc=off&xpod=off">edited by Edward Germain for Black Sparrow Press</a></span>.</span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://maps-legacy.org/poets/a_f/crosby/diary.htm">Crosby, as Professor Edward Brunner has neatly shown, worked hard to jot down daily events in vest-pocket notebooks, then expand upon those in ruled notebooks, then transform the latter </a></span><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://maps-legacy.org/poets/a_f/crosby/diary.htm"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: large;">into dated diary entries "in longhand . . . written with an
eye toward seeming</span> </span></a><span><a href="http://maps-legacy.org/poets/a_f/crosby/diary.htm">as if [they] had been sketched at white-hot speed."</a> The end result is an extremely readable, sometimes </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span>irresistible account of 1920s Paris and Crosby's travels in that decade. It includes appearances by people such as James Joyce, Hart Crane, and Kay Boyle, plus lots (lots) of alcohol, drugs, and carrying on. Best of all, it's all animated <a href="https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=icarbs">by what editor Germain rightly calls Crosby's "active curious mind"</a> and reflects his many enthusiasms, including reading, poetry, horse racing, woman, art, jazz, death and -- natch again -- The Sun.</span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">There are many, many stellar entries in </span><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Shadows of the Sun. </i>These include a description of Lindbergh's late night landing near Paris after his trans-Atlantic solo flight (5/21/27), and Crosby's bibliophilic joy when he received and unpacked an </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span>inheritance</span> of thousands of rare books (5/4/28).</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">One hundred years ago today -- June 4, 1922 -- Crosby, in his </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Shadows of the Sun </i>diary entry, wrote [translation of the French provided in brackets]: </span></span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">To the Chateau de Madrid. Changed clothes with a waiter </span>(</span><span style="font-size: large;">tenue de soirée de rigueur [evening dress required]) so that I could dance. Dancing and then to bed in the Chateau and the plaintive music of the tango and the coolness of linen sheets---and I am twenty-four years old to-day and we bathe in the forest and at midnight gaze into the Red Sun. C'est Kefalin qui gagne![Kefalin wins!]<br /></span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">This sounds like a majorly fun birthday! <a href="https://www.jazzageclub.com/the-chateau-de-madrid/5082/"> T</a><a href="https://www.jazzageclub.com/the-chateau-de-madrid/5082/">he Chateau de Madrid was a grand jazz club about three miles from Paris, in the Bois de Boulogne, where you could dance and if necessary rent a room for the night</a>. <a href="https://www.jazzageclub.com/the-chateau-de-madrid/5082/">T</a><a href="https://www.jazzageclub.com/the-chateau-de-madrid/5082/">he Chateau had magnificent gardens with "lush and tall deep-blue green trees," and was also near the Longchamp race track.</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Prix_de_Paris">Kefalin was a horse quite successful in the 1922 season, including winning the prestigious Grand Prix de Paris</a>.</span> <br /></span><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">But <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/X-class-flares.html">giant exploding X-class solar flares</a>, let's further celebrate today with a </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span><i>Shadows of the Sun</i></span> entry that showcases an episode of Rimbaudian derangement, shall we? Harry loved Arthur; Crosby in 1929, the last year of his life, declared "</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span>I believe that Rimbaud is the greatest poet of them all<i> . . . ." </i></span> (</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span><i>Shadows of the Sun</i>, 4/1/29.)<i><br /></i></span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">The following diary entry, dated 11/14/26, recounts what Crosby writes was his first real experience with<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kief"> kief, the substance Wikipedia describes as a "</a></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="ILfuVd"><span class="hgKElc"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kief">pure and clean collection of loose cannabis trichomes."</a><b> </b></span></span> The experience described is perhaps relatively modest compared to other </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span><span>mind-altering experience </span>Crosby wrote about</span>, involving </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span>prodigious amounts of hashish, opium, and/or ethanol</span>. But this one is still a, er um, high point:</span></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Last night for the first time really experienced the kief, and saw strange but clear visions, not vague as in a dream, but chaste with colors of pure gold and sun shining through green water and a fountain under the sea spouting jets of silver fish and an autumn-gold forest with a path leading into infinity (I have never seen such a depth of perspective) and white bodies of fauns and nymphs appearing and disappearing, copulating and uncopulating.</span></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Hell yes, pass the kief and stone me. More than that, I dig the poetry here. And not just the cavalcade of gold, sun, silver, autumn-gold and white, or the rhythmic rush of the prose, nice as those are. The tippy-top poetry here, for me, is Crosby's use of the word "chaste" when describing his visions. They were "not vague as in a dream, but chaste . . . ." </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Now, Crosby does not use "chaste" here to suggest there was a sexual purity to his visions, which might be assumed given the primary meaning of the word. Any chance of that being the case is obliterated by the orgiastic mythological beings at the visions' end.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">Instead, Crosby uses "chaste" in its lovely figurative sense, meaning, to borrow from the <a href="https://www.oed.com/">Oxford English Dictionary</a>, "undefiled," "stainless," and "pure." This use of "chaste" is not particularly common in literature (but see <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.5.2.html">Shakespeare, <i>Othello</i>, V.ii.2</a>), but it's exactly perfect here, given that kief, as said above, is a "pure and clean" substance. <br /></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: large;">An unalloyed true immaculate -- a chaste -- vision looks mighty fine to me, and it certainly was for Harry. May you have the same, if you want it. Regardless, here's to the literary work of Crosby, who </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: large;">Philip Lamantia memorably called "a true dandy of explosively Promethean desire," on the anniversary of his birth</span><span style="font-size: large;">.</span> </span> </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><br />Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-32893719517549100222021-10-23T00:00:00.004-07:002021-10-23T00:00:00.160-07:00Philip Lamantia Day -- 2021<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IyEwx-pZEKw/YXOBh4_0yGI/AAAAAAAABHI/_aSSiHFpo6I1AYmVWhdg7A0sDKFg1pvjwCLcBGAsYHQ/s980/6-ways-to-measure-vibration-image.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="390" data-original-width="980" height="254" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-IyEwx-pZEKw/YXOBh4_0yGI/AAAAAAAABHI/_aSSiHFpo6I1AYmVWhdg7A0sDKFg1pvjwCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h254/6-ways-to-measure-vibration-image.jpg" width="640" /></a></div> <p></p><p>Yes I said yes, it’s the 94th anniversary of the birth (in San Francisco, on October 23, 1927) of the great poet Philip Lamantia – so Let’s Celebrate, and Cerebrate! <br /><br />How about we read and think about one of his many fine poems? This one is from Lamantia’s <i>Becoming Visible</i> (City Lights, San Francisco: 1981 [Pocket Poets Series No. 39]):<b></b></p><blockquote><b>Vibration</b><br /><br />There is a wind torturing bats<br />there are the scorched feet of dead suns<br />the city spun into the sea<br />where the gulfs of the pterodactyl beckon<br />there is a whorl of terror livening my mind<br />there’s the hum-whirr of the skeleton of solitude<br />where angry corpses flower in a bottle<br />and red weapons vanish into mirrors<br />I look back by the blade of my double<br /><i>there</i> flies— through its eye— <i>The Hanged Man</i><br />where a pyramid of water hovers in the dark victuals of the inner life</blockquote>Clark Ashton Smith’s observation – “Explanations are neither necessary, desirable, or possible” – fully applies to this poem, I suggest. But since we’re celebrating (and cerebrating!) perhaps you will permit me a few words.<br /><br />Read silently or aloud, “Vibration” seriously moves, or, more precisely, oscillates. All sound is vibration of course. But here, particularly propulsive TWANGS are felt with and from the repeated line-starting word “there” (five instances) and, to a lesser but still felt degree, its rhyming echo “where” (used twice). Each “there” functions for me as both am adverb and, especially with its repetitions, an exclamation. <br /><br />More specifically, each “there,” as an adverb, fixes what follows in a particular place or position. Each also – this the exclamatory angle – signifies or discharges with each recurrence a kind of audio-verbal shimmer of amazement or shock. In this regard, the final italicized use of the word in the next-to-last line seems by that point almost preordained. <p></p><p>As I read the poem aloud, I naturally find myself emphasizing each “there,” and enjoy doing that! Give it a try! Doing that reminds me that Robert Kelly, in <i>Caterpillar </i>5 (October 1968), described Lamantia’s “high excitement” during public readings. I definitely feel that in this poem. <br /><br />Vibratory movement is also referenced in – or reverie-ed from – the third line’s “spun,” the fifth line’s “whorl,” the sixth line’s “hum-whirr” (and what a wonderful compound word that is – did anyone use it earlier?), and even the final lime’s “hovers” what with the way it brings to mind a hummingbird’s delicate wingbeats.<br /><br />“Vibration,” to me, comes from, or is about, an emotional / mental state, one with frightening even terrifying elements but which is ultimately good or positive and even necessary for Lamantia, the poet. It’s the sensation, I feel, of the oscillations or surge of creative energy. It’s intense, VIVID, and scary – yet necessary for imagination’s vision. <br /><br />The scary, frightening, and terrifying parts here are easy: “a wind torturing bats” “scorched feet of dead suns,” [t]he city spun into the sea” “the gulfs of the pterodactyl beckon[ing],” “a whorl of terror,” the exactly perfect “hum-whirr of the skeleton of solitude,” “angry corpses” which “flower in a bottle,” “red weapons” which “vanish into mirrors,” “blade” and “<i>The Hanged Man</i>.” It’s a kind of horror scene to me, a place of suffering and anguish.<br /><br />And yet, the “whorl of terror,” Lamantia writes in the fifth line, is “livening [his] mind.” And, in the final line, a pyramid of water hovers “in the dark victuals of the inner life.” Here, while the “victuals” (an archaic word, usually pronounced “vittles” and meaning provisions or food supplies) are “dark” they are, inherent in that definition, nourishing. They sustain the “inner life” – which I take to be the creative imagination. <br /><br />I’ll leave to you to think on how the terrifying and the creative imagination must co-exist. I’ll end here by remembering that Allen Ginsberg, in the first sentence of his Preface to Charles Plymell’s <i>Apocalypse Rose</i> (Dave Haselwood: San Francisco, 1966), referred to Lamantia as an “American vibration artist.” Indeed!<br /> <br />Happy Birth-Anniversary, Philip!<br /><br />¡Viva Lamantia! <br /><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DM2dj2KP2WM/YXOCWc7P3oI/AAAAAAAABHQ/ur2L8a9wNd8jnNdAlVpY9Bvjxzt6HNWpwCLcBGAsYHQ/s565/Lamantia%2B--%2B1987%252C%2Bby%2BRob%2BLee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="565" height="464" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DM2dj2KP2WM/YXOCWc7P3oI/AAAAAAAABHQ/ur2L8a9wNd8jnNdAlVpY9Bvjxzt6HNWpwCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h464/Lamantia%2B--%2B1987%252C%2Bby%2BRob%2BLee.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-3669680728543281062021-06-04T00:00:00.014-07:002021-06-04T16:20:17.249-07:00Harry Crosby Day!<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UZw2xrQOjJ0/YLmuNiHW8AI/AAAAAAAABEg/Xs_ASc5hsx46D7r4EHCZtUl14X0qc4joQCLcBGAsYHQ/s642/Crosby%2Bgazing%2B--%2Bphoto.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="595" data-original-width="642" height="594" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UZw2xrQOjJ0/YLmuNiHW8AI/AAAAAAAABEg/Xs_ASc5hsx46D7r4EHCZtUl14X0qc4joQCLcBGAsYHQ/w640-h594/Crosby%2Bgazing%2B--%2Bphoto.JPG" width="640" /></a></div><p></p><p>Among those who love the writing of Harry Crosby (born this day in 1898), the big news over the last 12 months was the publication of a <i>Selected Poems</i>. The book, announced by MadHat Press as available in June 2020 (and paid for then), arrived in early 2021. I’d hoped it would nicely showcase Crosby’s poetry. <br /><br />Alas, while the book has some positives, its major problems are, unfortunately, the main story. <br /><br />Here’s the deal: the primary criteria used to select the poems – everything that happened to be published in magazines and anthologies in or just after Crosby’s lifetime – is unconvincing, and in part botched. As a result, this <i>Selected</i> includes nearly a dozen pages of work that ain’t poetry, and another dozen pages or so of, I kid you not, essentially duplicate texts. Ugh. Further, due to either uninspired or uninformed editing, a dozen or so essential Crosby poems are not included. Ugh again, and let me explain. <br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Jnnne-gIkSk/YLmuhRa-z6I/AAAAAAAABEo/JQ0zORVKLQYBIff4GF0Yx7eLBGE3FHa5gCLcBGAsYHQ/s3919/Harry%2BCrosby%2BSelected%2BPoems%2B--%2Bcover.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3919" data-original-width="2727" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Jnnne-gIkSk/YLmuhRa-z6I/AAAAAAAABEo/JQ0zORVKLQYBIff4GF0Yx7eLBGE3FHa5gCLcBGAsYHQ/w446-h640/Harry%2BCrosby%2BSelected%2BPoems%2B--%2Bcover.jpg" width="446" /></a></div><p> </p><p>About two-thirds of the book – the first 100 or so of its 150+ pages–
is given over to what is said, to quote the introduction and back
cover, “the whole of” or “all of” Crosby’s contemporary magazine and
anthology appearances. This was done, the editor asserts, so we can
read the poems seen at the time, and have a historical record of what
was submitted by Crosby and printed by others. </p><p>That reasoning
doesn’t make sense. At the same time he submitted poems to magazines,
Crosby self-published , or prepared for publication, several volumes of
his poetry. I would think the work he chose to collect and publish
himself would be the starting point for any selected poems, as well as
the poems not included in those books but which appeared elsewhere. <br /><br />Said
another way, the right way to compile a selected poems is to consider
EVERYTHING a poet wrote, then, focusing on the work itself, fashion a
collection that reflects the breadth or characteristics of the poet’s
achievement, or some other angle intrinsic to the work. Discarding all
that for an extrinsic and rather arbitrary factor such as where poems
happened to first appear, especially when the magazine and anthology
poems are greatly outnumbered by the entirety of the poetry, devalues
the work as a whole, and thus the poet’s legacy. In this way, much of
the MadHat selected Crosby is wrongly compiled.<br /><br />The book, by the
way, fails in it’s on its own terms. Contrary to its claims, it does
NOT include the “whole of” or “all of” Crosby’s contemporary magazine
poems. O editor and publisher, get thee to <a href=" https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=18359 "><i>Poetry</i>, Vol. XXXIV, Number
11 (May 1929), at pages 78-79 (“Fragment,” a 35 line verse poem)</a>. I
wonder what else was missed? Oh yeah, the key series of question and
answers, first published in <i>transition</i> 14 (Fall 1928), that Crosby
published as the prose poem “Enquette” in his <i>Mad Queen</i>. This
tremendously entertaining four-part word-rush reveals much about
Crosby’s vision of himself, including as an expatriate outsider. “The
End of Europe,” a short visionary and apocalyptic prose-poem in
<i>transition</i> 16-17 (June 1929) is also not included. <br /><br />And
while these poems were missed, the editor includes a straight prose
work, “Observation-Post,” which appeared in a magazine. It’s an essay in
which Crosby critiques a magazine essay dismissive of poets that Crosby
considered “the True Dawn.” That this is not a poem is obvious. In
addition to being closely reasoned, the essay quotes liberally from the
work of a number of poets, including the entirety of Hart Crane’s “O
Carib Isle.” The editor does not explain why this essay is included in a book of poems. It
takes up 11 pages and is a big mistake. </p><p>Also, the misguided decision to include ALL magazine and
anthology results in – I kid you not – approximately three dozen poems
being repeated – one three times – because they appeared both in
magazines and then later in an anthology. Most of the repeated poems,
which mostly all appear in the book’s first 90 pages, are duplicates of
each other. In the others, there are minor – very minor – differences,
such as additions of a title. Can you spell s-i-l-l-y and
a-n-n-o-y-i-n-g? This <i>Selected</i> is not supposed to a <i>variorum </i>edition.
The poems as Crosby finally published them himself should have been
used, period. The duplicates here, which collectively take up about a
dozen pages, are another big mistake.<br /><br />I’ll do the math: between
the prose essay and the duplicates, there’s almost two dozen pages of
text that’s either inappropriate or unnecessary. <br /><br />All those
wasted pages are a shame given the poetry that is not included. There’s almost
nothing from Crosby’s first two books, <i>Sonnets for Caresse</i> and <i>Red
Skeletons</i>. The editor implies that the work in these books is not
Crosby’s “mature period.” While that is true – the poetry’s largely
derivative in style, tone, and subject – there are a few gems in those books not
included here (the homage “Baudelaire,” to name one) that would rightly
shine in a selected poems. <i>Devour the Fire</i>, a Crosby selected poems
published in 1983, managed to do so. It’s strange to that so few poems
from these books are included, while an 11 page prose essay and at least
that many pages worth of duplicate are.<br /><br />Triple-alas, many
stellar and essential “mature period” Crosby poems are missing. These
include <a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2009/04/old-forms-made-new.html">the dardanic masterpieces “Stud Book,” “Sun-Testament” and “Telephone Directory,”</a> the scintillating “Photoheliograph
(Self-Portrait),” the hyper-fervent Boston-excoriating “Target For
Disgust,” the marvelous Egyptian travelogue in verse “House of Ra,”
“Sunrise,” a mini-epic of witnessing, the super-short but important
late-life list poems “Beacons,” “Vocabulary,” and “Library,” in which
Crosby sets forth, respectively, his tippy-top people, words, and books,
and the brilliant manifesto-like prose poems “I Climb Alone” and “The
Ten Commandments.” All these, as I count, would have fit on the pages
wasted on the long prose essay and the duplicate poems. <br /><br />I’d
also have put in certain short verse poems which, while perhaps not Crosby
classics, charm and stir reveries in ways that the short verse poems
that are included don’t: “All That is Beautiful” (it’ll delight any
gardener), “Beyond” (the powerful pull of erotic desire), “Roots” (“And
the root of a tree / Dark-fingered / Thrusting into / Infinity.”), “New
Every Morning” (a quick set of similes and metaphors that invigorate the
dawn), and “Alchemy” (about the “madness we require” and the “sudden
alchemy of splendor” that, I believe, Crosby says poets must embrace and
harvest). <br /><br />Okay, the editor here swung and missed lots. As a
result, and sadly, this <i>Selected Poems</i> is far duller than it should have
been. The book simply does not showcase the full splendor of Crosby
as“a true dandy of explosive Promethean desire,” to use Philip
Lamantia’s characterization in “Poetic Matters” (1976). <br /><br />To be
fair, the book does some things right. The introduction winningly
includes the Crosby diary entry about his inheriting a huge library of
rare books. This passage, a de facto prose poem, will make bibliophiles
swoon. The book proper includes “Illustrations of Madness,” a prose
poem in ten short sections that since its initial 1929 magazine
appearance has only appeared in an extremely limited edition of
uncollected Crosby poems published about five years ago. (That
publication winningly included an additional sub-part to the poem that the magazine
apparently edited out). The poem is exactly what its title implies;
certain sections memorably disturb, in the way great art
sometimes does: “I continually feel hurricanes of magic storming into me
as wild as eagles catapulting themselves into the sun.” <br /><br />In
addition, the book includes about a dozen Crosby classics, mostly
because they happened to have been originally published in magazines or
anthologies.. Among these are the disturbing and breath-taking “Hail:
Death!,” <a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2019/06/harry-crosby-and-chasing-sun.html">the Joycean (cf. Episode 17 of <i>Ulysses</i>) “The Sun,”</a> the
marvelous manifesto-like “The New Word,” the stirring and inspiring
rejection of the past, “Trumpet of Departure,” the middle-finger (and
more) to businessmen, “Scorn,” the beguiling “Short Introduction To The
Word” (albeit an edited version that lacks the full power of the
original), the erotic quick five-line verse poem “Kiss,” and the
breathtaking revolutionary spirit of “Assassin” (“I am the harbinger of a
New Sun World. I bring the seed of a New Copulation. I proclaim the
Mad Queen.”). <br /><br />That said, all the poems listed in the preceding
paragraph, except the five-liner, are included in <a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2020/06/harry-crosby-day.html"><i>Seeing With Eyes
Closed: The Prose Poems of Harry Crosby</i> (Quale Press, 2019)</a>. That book
also includes most of the essential Crosby poems mentioned in the
paragraph above that begins, “Triple-alas.” And there’s a lot more in
that book as well, including all of Crosby’s <i>Aphrodite in Flight</i>, a
series of aphoristic poetic prose meditations on the correspondences
between airplane flight and love. Even without any verse poems, this
collection is far closer to a representative selection of Crosby’s
poetry.</p><p>So I celebrate today the poetry of Harry Crosby, but not so much the MadHat Press Harry Crosby <i>Selected Poems</i>. And I dream of a complete collected Crosby, with not only all that Crosby published, as he and his wife Caresse published it, but with some of the work currently only available in archives, not published by Crosby or others in his lifetime, and only in very limited editions since then. <br /></p>Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-24437068582901597582020-10-23T00:00:00.318-07:002020-10-23T00:00:00.229-07:00Philip Lamantia Day -- 2020<p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Gather ‘round people, a shelterin’-in-place (or not), as today’s the 93rd anniversary of the birth – on October 23, 1927, in a home on Sanchez Street, San Francisco – of Philip Lamantia.</span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-19HGh4OMn7g/X4-p3RYcmCI/AAAAAAAAA9w/COkEoPgcCfYLVEV4CFGckgTPhKdRFtOpwCLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Lamantia%2B--%2BSanchez%2BStreet.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-19HGh4OMn7g/X4-p3RYcmCI/AAAAAAAAA9w/COkEoPgcCfYLVEV4CFGckgTPhKdRFtOpwCLcBGAsYHQ/w480-h640/Lamantia%2B--%2BSanchez%2BStreet.JPG" width="480" /></a></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: small;">1917 Sanchez Street, San Francisco: “On October 23, 1927, a midwife delivered </span></div><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: small;">Philip Lamantia in the garret of this two-story wood-frame house.” </span></div><div style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: small;">Don Herron, <i>The Literary World of San Francisco & its Environs</i> (City Lights, 1990), at 141.</span><br /></div></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span style="font-size: medium;">So Yes! and Hey Now!<b>, </b>Let’s Celebrate, and Cerebrate! How about we read, and think a bit about, one of his many fine poems? Here we go:<b><br /></b></span></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><b>After the Virus</b><br /><br />Am I happy? Were I happy!<br />Zoos of happiness converge<br />on horrors which is a wide paw<br />of who calls first from<br />the lip’s underscore<br />Happiness not a constant state<br />The field of man’s gore<br />makes bones shine further<br />to the suicide machine<br />We make the sacrifice tree grow<br />for its necessary leavens<br />burnished with an ecstatic smile<br />of pain — the oscillations escalate —<br />not a moment of happiness but<br />contradicted by the black undertow<br />What, then, is coming to be<br />from undergrounds too fast<br />in their bright plumages<br />flailing our brains<br />with the gash of birth?<br />Something storing mercurial islets<br />and fungi of being . . .<br />and sold for altars<br />pitched to the stars!<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">“After the Virus” – a title that for obvious reasons caught my attention while re-re-re-re-re-etc-reading Lamantia during the present pandemic – was first published in the “Secret Freedom” section of <i>Selected Poems</i> (City Lights, 1967), along with fourteen other previously uncollected and mostly unpublished poems, all written, per the book’s Table of Contents, between 1963 and 1966. <br /></span></p><p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fi4JbD89GjE/X4-uM5p2h-I/AAAAAAAAA98/G5YlHR-9q6UCkdXAWu-eoR1LMSoCodycACLcBGAsYHQ/s2048/Lamantia%2B--%2BSelected%2BPoems.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Fi4JbD89GjE/X4-uM5p2h-I/AAAAAAAAA98/G5YlHR-9q6UCkdXAWu-eoR1LMSoCodycACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Lamantia%2B--%2BSelected%2BPoems.JPG" /></a><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">All this work, of course, is also available in <i>The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia</i> (University of California Press, 2013).<br /><br />There’s a winning verve and singular (if I may say it like this) unusual-ness to all work in “Secret Freedom.” With regard to its unusual-ness, one of the poems is titled “What Is Not Strange?” while another has an one word exclamatory title – “Gork!” – followed by, count-‘em, an eighty-five word sub-title. As to ardent enthusiasm </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">– remember here William Blake’s “Exuberance is beauty” </span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">– consider the fervent way-out optimism of the inspiriting declaration in</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> “She Speaks the Morning</span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">’s Filigree</span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">”:</span> </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“</span>We can play host to the marvelous / and have it burn us to the salt of memory / where an invisible stone contracts all thought / to draw out our words / that shall crackle your sleep / to wake us up beyond the Pleiades</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">”.</span></span></span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Also, a </span></span></span></span>fresh mid-1960s wind invigorates the </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“Secret Freedom” </span>poems. Tellingly, one of them, “Astro-Mancy,” first appeared in a 1967 issue of the quintessential hippie-era newspaper, <i>The San Francisco Oracle. </i>In that poem, Lamantia, </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">quite in tune with those heady times (or did he play the music to which others then sang?),</span> foretells </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“essential changes”</span> including </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“</span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><i><span style="font-size: medium;">The Realm Apart</span></i>”</span> (italics in original) where among other things </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“poetry [is] the central fact.”</span> There are also plenty of</span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"> esoteric allusions, some of which t can challenge, including because they are in part imagined, such as the reference to </span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“the Giant Chairs of Tartesos” which I take (this largely a guess) alludes to <a href="https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_J_Paul_Getty_Museum_Handbook_of_the/J43RSssY_zMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=Tartessos+chair&pg=PA13&printsec=frontcover">Tartessian BCE thrones, which, so far as I can learn, have not survived but are known to have been supported by two foot tall bronze sculptures of winged felines</a>. <br /></span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Finally, and probably most important, Lamantia during this period returned to his surrealist roots, so there’s an authentic automatism in the poems. Parts of </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“After the Virus</span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">” show this, I think.</span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">As I read it, “After the Virus” concerns the emotional and physical state, as well as the psychic mindset, just after an illness or perhaps while still sick but trending towards recovery. The nature of the illness is not specified – see conjecture below – but the poem’s opening question – “Am I happy?” with its almost rueful self-answer “Were I happy!” clearly indicates that Lamantia – the presumed speaker here – is not 100 percent well, to say the least, although that the response comes with a mark of exclamation suggests there’s some energy there as well. <br /><br />The memorable lines that follow suggest more specifically what’s going on: “Zoos of happiness converge / on horrors which is a wide paw / of who calls first from / the lip’s underscore”. The words connote a state that’s wild, varied, penned-in as well as frightening, nightmarish, frantic, immediate, and well-entrenched or emphatic. It’s quite an image, or series of them. <br /><br />There then follows a broader philosophical suggestion – “Happiness not a constant state” – which is given a stunning visceral twist by the lines:</span></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The field of man’s gore<br />makes bones shine further<br />to the suicide machine</span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Lamantia’s suggestion that happiness is not always with us, especially when coupled with images that suggest blood, skeletons, mechanized self-harm and death–, reminds me of the scene in Samuel Johnson’s <i>Rasselas</i>, in which the title character envies life in Europe but is counseled by his guide, Imlac, that “[t]he Europeans . . . are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.” <br /><br />The poem doesn’t go as far as Imlac’s pronouncement; Lamantia seems to suggest not that sorrow almost totally predominates, but that joy and sorrow co-exist, are ever-present companions, always in tension. In this regard, the poem a few lines later, references “. . . an ecstatic smile / of pain . . .” (does Bernini’s <i>Ecstasy of Saint Teresa</i> come to mind?) –<br /></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-b9mpo9rPkpE/X4-u9-CS3VI/AAAAAAAAA-E/F896CCAVfoUJj8HOtusPpvtYjE3zmNCkQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1200/Bernini%2B-%2Bteresa.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="877" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-b9mpo9rPkpE/X4-u9-CS3VI/AAAAAAAAA-E/F896CCAVfoUJj8HOtusPpvtYjE3zmNCkQCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/Bernini%2B-%2Bteresa.jpg" /></a></span></div><p><span style="font-size: medium;">– and then, a few further lines down, directly declares, “not a moment of happiness but / contradicted by the black undertow”. <br /><br />The repeated, emphatic insistence that “horrors,” “pain,” and “the black undertow” co-exist with happiness or ecstasy may well reflect that Lamantia, to borrow the words in “High Poet,” the magnificent introductory essay to<i> The Collected Poems</i>, “struggled with a lifelong manic-depressive condition” marked by periodic “intense manic episodes” and “cycles of depression.” This mental health condition is reflected in many of Lamantia’s poems, and he occasionally explicitly references it. In “Invincible Birth,” for example, published in <i>Meadowlark West </i>(1986), he speaks of “my frenzy mantic mania,” and the late 1980s “No Closure” includes, “[f]or I have, as the poet Cowper, known 3 cycles of “depression” cursed by my own line / “. . . fallen into the goblet of suicide . . . ”.<br /><br />Given all this, perhaps the “Virus” in “After the Virus” is not a submicroscopic infectious agent, but shorthand for the manic-depression which plagued Lamantia. It seems quite possible. It’s also possible, I suppose, that the “virus” of in the poem is something that infects society at large. Lamantia never held back his strong views of the ills of the world; other “Secret Freedom” poems, for instance, indict the “monster metal cities / and their billion, bullioned wheels of chemical death” (“Voice of Earth Mediums”) and declare that “[t]he old civilization / that rolled the dice of Hitler / is surely bumbling / into a heap of catatonic hysteria” (“Astro-Mancy”). </span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">But perhaps in addition to the personal and global, an actual viral illness was involved here too – or solely so. Ah, I wish I could ask Philip, but alas, <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/philip-lamantia-6240.html">he’s now gone – this seems impossible – 15 years</a>. <br /><br />The powerful exploration of the relationship of happiness and pain in the poem’s first fifteen lines is followed by nine concluding lines in which Lamantia, as I read it, prophesizes what’s to come from where he’s at, a state in which “oscillations escalate.” This prophecy is told in a question-and-answer format:</span></p><p style="margin-left: 40px; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">What, then, is coming to be<br />from undergrounds too fast<br />in their bright plumages<br />flailing our brains<br />with the gash of birth?<br />Something storing mercurial islets<br />and fungi of being . . .<br />and sold for altars<br />pitched to the stars!<br /></span></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">That is one far-out Socratic dialogue, or perhaps better said, one very deep or may I suggest one very high and surreal catechism. In the end, what Lamantia asks and answers – what he sees – is probably one of those matters for which “[e]xplanations are neither necessary, desirable, or possible,” to borrow the words written by the early 20th Century California poet and weird tales author Clark Ashton Smith, whose work Lamantia knew and liked, see <i>Preserving Fire: Selected Prose </i>(Wave Books, 2018) at 127. <br /><br />While a definitive explication here is beyond the reach of reason (and hurrah! for that), the combination of images beguiles and intrigues. To say it another way, </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">the “Something” </span></span>that is </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“coming to be” </span></span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">– with </span>its suddenly and unpredictably changing small islands (or does “islets” refer to biologic cells?) and </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">’sh</span></span>rooms of existence, which then are sold as a ritual furnishing aimed at the titans of the universe (and remember, <a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2017/10/philip-lamantia-day-2017.html">Lamantia was a star-lover of, er um, stellar dimensions</a>) </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">– </span></span><i>enchants</i>. <br /><br />I say, let Lamantia’s “Something” come to be!<br /><br />The last four lines of </span><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-size: medium;">“After the Virus” </span>are a particularly formidable reverie-generator, and as such you and I – us readers – create in a way similar to Lamantia when he wrote it. The images also remind, to quote Gaston Bachelard, that “great poets teach us to dream. They nourish us with images with which we can concentrate our reveries of repose. They present us with their psychotropic images by which we animate our awakened oneirism.” <i>The Poetics of Reverie</i> (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971) at 158. <br /><br />Happy Birth-Anniversary, teacher, nourisher, and animator, Philip Lamantia!</span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-n8lEEg6OkMA/X4-wFhRl17I/AAAAAAAAA-Q/zplg4gBU3q8vXWLtTkUpjgaFijAzfHvDwCLcBGAsYHQ/s565/Lamantia%2B--%2Bin%2Bliobrary.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="409" data-original-width="565" height="290" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-n8lEEg6OkMA/X4-wFhRl17I/AAAAAAAAA-Q/zplg4gBU3q8vXWLtTkUpjgaFijAzfHvDwCLcBGAsYHQ/w400-h290/Lamantia%2B--%2Bin%2Bliobrary.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-27192857983571505412020-06-04T00:01:00.000-07:002020-06-04T00:15:32.855-07:00Harry Crosby Day!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Yes, today’s the anniversary of Harry Crosby’s birth (June 4, 1898). He’d be 122. He died in 1929, age 31, alas (and alas) by his own hand in a double-suicide or murder/suicide (the other person was his lover). And a further alas can be voiced as well, I think, in that these deaths were consistent with Crosby’s deadly serious desire to die on his own terms, an impulse (read: obsession) that surely stemmed in part from (alas yet again) a near-death experience while driving an ambulance on a World War I battlefield. <br />
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Nevertheless, despite the shocking and grievous circumstances of his death, much of what Crosby did while alive can deeply inspire. He was, to use Philip Lamantia’s riveting assessment, “a true dandy of explosively Promethean desire,” who “left in <i>Mad Queen</i> [1928] and elsewhere, signs of a ‘Sadean’ magnanimity in the realms of mad love . . . .” In addition to his poetry – more on that below – there’s his remarkable diary of the 1920s, <i>Shadows of the Sun</i>. He also had world-class reading habits, a high-motor autodidact drive, independent and often enduringly correct critical judgments, a top-flight work hard / party hard ethos, an adventurous spirit, and the desire and ability, greatly helped by his wife Caresse, to publish beautiful books by stellar writers at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sun_Press">Black Sun Press</a>. <br />
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And oh yes there’s above all his hyper-focus on and worship of the Sun. I’ve put up a commemorative post on Crosby’s birthday the last few years, and the tradition now continues for (natch) another slightly oval trip ‘round our nearest Star. <br />
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Without a doubt, the big Big BIG Harry Crosby news in the last year was the September 2019 Quale Press publication of <i>Seeing With Eyes Closed</i>, which collects all of Crosby’s previously published prose poems. Per Quale, Crosby was “the first poet writing in English to produce a significant body of work in prose poetry” and the first poet to strongly show the surrealist influence on American poetry. I think those things are true, and that this collection is a great grand opportunity for adventure.<br />
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It’s also a great grand opportunity to get the poetry for relatively little cost. While some have been re-printed over the years in anthologies or two collections of Crosby’s work (<a href="https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?bi=0&bx=off&cm_sp=sort-_-SRP-_-Results&ds=30&recentlyadded=all&sortby=1&tn=devour%20the%20fire">one published almost four decades ago and now scarce</a>, <a href="https://www.soulbaypress.com/books/ladders-to-the-sun/">the other, more recent, poorly done</a>), much of the poetry in <i>Seeing With Eyes Closed</i> has been available only as originally published in the late 1920s and early 1930s, either in a few issues of <i>transition</i> magazine, or in several of the Black Sun Press collections of his work: <i>Chariot of the Sun</i>, <i>Mad Queen</i>, <i>Sleeping Together</i>, <i>Aphrodite in Flight</i>, and <i>Torchbearer</i>. Those fine well-made limited editions are highly valued by collectors. It would likely cost upwards of $5,000 to get them. Gulp. <br />
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Not only that, one of the books – <i>Aphrodite in Flight</i>, a collection of 75 very short comparisons of romance and airplane flying (“observations on the aerodynamics of love” is how the sub-title neatly puts it) – is essentially unobtainable. Black Sun Press published only 27 copies of the book, all <i>hors commerce</i>. <a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/aphrodite-in-flight-being-some-observations-on-the-aerodynamics-of-love/oclc/18797156">At least 13 of those are in libraries (and rare book rooms at that).</a> The nearest of those to me in San Francisco is almost 1,000 miles away, <a href="https://usafa.insigniails.com/Library/ItemDetail?l=0001&i=218828&ti=0">in the McDermott Library at the (yes, believe it) U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado.</a><br />
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As such, the 200 plus pages of poetry in <a href="https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9781935835257/seeing-with-eyes-closed-the-prose-poems-of-harry-crosby.aspx"><i>Seeing With Eyes Closed</i> – which retails for $19</a> – seems an extraordinary poetry-bonanza bargain, even in our current exceedingly difficult times.<br />
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The book includes the Crosby prose-poems that adoring <i>moi</i> has previously highlighted here in the glade (click poem titles and scroll down to see): “<a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2009/04/old-forms-made-new.html">Stud-Book,” “Sun Testament” and “Telephone Directory,”</a> all from <i>Mad Queen</i>, as well as the marvelous declaration of lexical adventure “<a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2018/06/harry-crosby.html">The New Word” and “Empty Bed Blues,”</a> no doubt inspired by the great Bessie Smith song of the same name, plus of course indeed most certainly yes the wonderful <a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2019/06/harry-crosby-and-chasing-sun.html">“Madman” aka “The Sun,”</a> modeled after the equally wondrous answer to the question “What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?” in Episode 17 of James Joyce’s <i>Ulysses</i>.<br />
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<i>Seeing With Eyes Closed </i>is also neatly designed. The typeface looks very much like that used in the Black Sun Press original publications, and it’s a very cool look, sharp and alluring, redolent of the roaring ex-pat Paris of almost a century ago. Combine that with generous margins – no text falling into or crawling out of the gutters here – and starting each poem on its own page and <i>voila</i>! it’s a remarkably elegant and strong publication, showing what print-on-demand can do when done right. The only mis-step is the printing of “The New Word” without an extra space between the paragraphs, as originally published. The editors acknowledge the emendation, and it appears to have been done so the poem could fit on a single page. If so, I’d have voted for using a larger page size, since . . . well, just look how gorgeous and powerful the poem’s prose-stanzas are when each has a bit of space to shine (this from <i>transition</i>, June 1929): <br />
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How about two more poems, to entice you to buy and read the others in <i>Seeing With Eyes Closed</i>, and to allow me to write a bit about Crosby’s craft? I love “Seesaw,” one of about five dozen dream poems from the endearingly titled <i>Sleeping Together</i> (and yes, my slightly angled photo here is purposeful!):<br />
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What do I love in “Seesaw”? The primacy of child-play, that font of fecund creative energy: plus, to borrow from J. Huizinga’s <i>Homo Ludens</i> (English translation, 1950), the charm of its temporary abolition of the ordinary world’s laws and customs. The fantastic enlargement of the play, scaled such that the participants reach the cosmos. The Winsor McCay <i>Slumberland</i>-like interrupting of the dream by the ringing of the phone. And the convincing pulled-from-the-hypnopompic logic with which the poem ends. A dream true indeed.<br />
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Completely different is “Collision,” from <i>Torchbearer</i>:<br />
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This is no dream. It’s a 37-word maxim-poem, I do believe, one in which Crosby declares, teaches and ultimately challenges the reader. He uses analogy to illustrate the anagogic: Dust in the Sun = Thoughts in the Mind. I love the focus on the noetic and the possibility of marvelous chance encounters, the latter expressed via an allusion – “orchestral magnificence” that directly suggests the complex musical splendor of poetry. Then there’s the last phrase, a challenge that brings the poem to life. That phrase – “he who has ears to hear let him hear” – also corresponds with Andre Breton’s often made point, perhaps most directly stated in the 1946 essay <i>Golden Silence</i>, that “Great poets have been ‘auditories’ not ‘visionaries’.” <br />
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<i>Seeing With Eyes Closed</i> also includes fantastically assiduous notes on a number of the poems and three essays – a foreword and two afterwords – that discuss or explicate various matter related to Crosby and his work. The essays are fine, with the exception of the foreword’s baffling naming of someone other than Philip Lamantia as the “best practitioner” of American Surrealist poetry. But that’s a minor quibble, and ultimately the editorial material, even when excellent, is beside the point. Crosby’s poetry is the (Sun is a) Star here. <br />
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So, yes, and especially today, the anniversary of his birth, Bravo Harry Crosby! And Bravo Quale Press, for<i> Seeing With Eyes Closed</i>.<br />
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<br />Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-75944920014137503882019-10-23T00:00:00.000-07:002019-10-25T09:59:42.296-07:00Philip Lamantia Day -- 2019<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">San Francisco </span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">and</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">– say it LOUD, say it PROUD – </span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Frisco! </span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">– yes, my friends, FRISCO! – </span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: small;">+++++ </span></span></b></div>
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Hey now, today’s the 92nd anniversary of the birth (October 23, 1927) of Philip Lamantia. Let’s cerebrate, and celebrate!<br />
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Lamantia was born (on Sanchez Street) and raised (the Excelsior District) in San Francisco, and for most of his life called The City home. Perhaps not surprisingly, his poetry – see please <a href="https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520324817/the-collected-poems-of-philip-lamantia"><i>The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia</i> (University of California Press, 2013, with a paperback edition published – hey now – just this month!</a>) – occasionally alludes to places in or features of The City. His poems also contain many references to The City’s name. Almost all these allusions and references are found in poems written after approximately 1970, when after various world travels Lamantia returned to and settled back in San Francisco (the North Beach neighborhood). <br />
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Now, there’s no Fisherman’s Wharf, cable cars, Transamerica Pyramid, or Golden Gate Bridge in Lamantia’s poems (though there is “Golden Gates” (“Revery Has Its Reasons”) and “Goldengate” (“Last Days of San Francisco”). But the allusions to specific places in The City include, for example, Coit Tower (“Redwood Highway,” “America in the Age of Gold, ”and ”Other States”), Crissy Field (“Birder’s Lament” and “Diana Green”), Lombard Street (“Sweetbrier”), the Lombard Steps (“Shasta”), the Cliff House (“The Mysteries of Writing in the West”), the Shrine of Saint Francis (“Seraphim City”), Guerrero Street (“Deamin”), Market Street (“Meadowlark West” and “Reached the Turn”), Mission Street (“Virgo Noir”), Union Street (“Shasta”), Telegraph Hill (“Poetics by Pluto”), Grant Avenue (“Flaming Teeth”), Columbus Avenue (“Seraphim City”), the Embarcadero (“The Romantist”), the Presidio “Death Jets”), North Beach (Altesia or the Lava Flow of Mount Rainier”), Alcatraz Island (“Flaming Teeth”), Jimbo’s Bop City (“Time Traveler’s Potlatch” and “Bird: Apparition of Charlie Parker”), and Mission Dolores (“Fourth of July,” “Altesia or the Lava Flow of Mount Rainier,” and “Invincible Birth”). <br />
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There are also references in Lamantia’s poems to more general features of The City. These include “slanting parks” (“Flaming Teeth”) and “seven hills” (<a href="https://www.kalw.org/post/what-are-seven-hills-san-francisco#stream/0">the number traditionally said to exist in San Francisco</a>). There are also – and these are obviously more pointed and critical allusions – “solemn melancholic towers” (“Tonight Burned with Solar Slime”) and “buildings of monolithic glass” (“Once in a Lifetime Starry Scape”). Another example are allusions to fog, both direct, as with “[t]he patch of summer fogs [that] screws the ears of the forest city” (“Other States”), “[r]ed fog in the night” (“In Yerba Buena”). and “enveloped by grey moist density” (“Recall”), and metaphorically, such as “On a hill . . . / the gothic spread of the mantle” (“Irrational”).<br />
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In addition to the allusions to certain places in and general features of San Francisco, Lamantia name-checks his hometown in about two dozen poems. The name-checks are particularly interesting to me – and I hope to you – because of a shift in nomenclature that Lamantia made in the work written after approximately 1980. Before then, in nine poems published between 1959 and 1970, Lamantia exclusively referred to his hometown as “San Francisco” (see list below). <br />
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But that formal appellation disappeared – was never used again – starting with the poems in his collection <i>Meadowlark West</i> (1986), most likely written over the course the previous five years. In five poems in that book, and then again in five poems written and published thereafter, Lamantia when referring to his hometown chose to use not “San Francisco” but the contraction or nickname “Frisco.” And he not only chose to use that term, but used in often: it appears seventeen times in those ten poems (again, see list below). <br />
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As you probably know, many consider “Frisco” very wrong, gauche, a rube’s giveaway, a term to be assiduously avoided. This view has been espoused for decades, and in the last approximately half-century was primarily and quite solidly reinforced by the long-time San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen (1916–1997), who in 1953 published a popular book about The City titled <i>Don’t Call It Frisco</i>.<br />
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Caen’s title served as a commandment, and most obeyed, although there were exceptions including perhaps most popularly the lyric, “Left my home in Georgia / Headed to the the Frisco Bay” as sung by Otis Redding in his 1967 smash <i>(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay</i>.<br />
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Lamantia rejected the cultural taboo on Frisco, using it repeatedly in his later poetry. Best I can tell, he first used the word in print in a short prose work, “Alice Farley: Dancing at Land’s End,” included in the anthology <i>Free Spirits</i> (City Lights, 1982) and republished in <i>Preserving Fire: Selected Prose</i> (Wave Books, 2018). Why this shift in names occurred is, I think, interesting to consider.<br />
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Around 1999, when Lamantia and I became friends and he was relatively socially active, the term “Frisco” came up in a conversation. He told me he liked it partly because of his contrarian nature, given that it was a term despised by many. But more important, he strongly disagreed that the term was inappropriate, recalling its use by old-time dock-workers and others when he grew up (1930s and early 1940s) , as well as by those in the jazz and drug cultures in the late 1940s and 1950s, and people he met on his travels in the 1950s and 1960s. He thus used the term proudly, including declaring “my native Frisco” in the late poem “No Closure.”<br />
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In addition, the word “Frisco” appears to have been embraced in the late 1970s by a subset of the ecologic counter-culture that interested Lamantia. Specifically, <i>Reinhabiting a Separate County: A Bioregional Anthology of Northern California</i> (Planet Drum Foundation, 1978) includes an essay on the Bay Area by the otherwise anonymous “Frisco Bay Mussel Group.” As explained below, Lamantia’s was highly attuned to Planet Drum precepts, particular regarding bioregions.<br />
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Lamantia also appears to have known of the findings regarding “Frisco” published by Peter Tamony, a self-taught collector and investigator of colloquialisms and slang. <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1498453.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents">In 1967, Tamony published a short article, “Sailors Called It ‘Frisco’” in the journal <i>Western Folklore</i></a>. He conjectured, convincingly, that Frisco derives from “Frith-soken,” which meant “refuge” or “sanctuary.” <a href="http://cosmopolitanreview.com/dont-call-it-frisco/">In the words of journalist Lynn Ludlow, from whose writings I learned of Tamony</a>, “[b]ecause San Francisco Bay is just such a haven, sailors called it Frisco Bay.” I don’t know if Lamantia actually read or knew about Tamony’s research, but it would seem so, given the line “a true Frisco, ‘haven in a storm at sea’” in his poem “Once in a Lifetime Starry Scape.”<br />
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In addition, I believe Lamantia enjoyed the consonantal and vowel
crispness of Frisco. Admittedly, this an educated guess, but after all,
as a poet Philip was intimate with the wonders of language, and there’s
no doubt of the fricative, sibiliant, plosive power of the word’s
consonants, to say nothing of the big round “o” with which it ends.
Atop all this, of course, the word’s relative concise. <br />
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Finally,
it seems to me – and this seems important – that “Frisco” fits best
with a kind of alternative, re-imagined or prophesied locality and
region that Lamantia alluded to in the poems in and after <i>Meadowlark West</i>. This alternative place included what he called “Calafia” (and related terms such as “Calafian landscapes”), an allusion to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calafia">the fictional (from a16th century Spanish novel) Amazonian Queen</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_the_name_California">from whose name probably comes “California.”</a>
Lamantia may have first heard, or been reminded of, Califia when it
was used as the title of a very diverse Ishamel Reed edited poetry
anthology, published in 1979 and which included two of Lamantia’s poem.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sEi5jxFi0Ek/Xa4QRq18i8I/AAAAAAAAA2Y/koabey9UsKguBvgvXAWpn__sGI3Rdn61gCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Calafia.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sEi5jxFi0Ek/Xa4QRq18i8I/AAAAAAAAA2Y/koabey9UsKguBvgvXAWpn__sGI3Rdn61gCLcBGAsYHQ/s400/Calafia.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Calafia, as depicted in a painting in the Mark Hopkins Hotel</td></tr>
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In Lamantia’s poetic world, Calafia seems to be a place encompassing all the greater bioregion of northern California and southern Oregon. This notion presumably stems in large part from Lamantia’s study of and belief in bioregionalism as developed in the 1970s and championed thereafter by Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft of the Planet Drum Foundation. Lamantia’s friendship with those two visionaries and their principles is mentioned in “High Poet,” the detailed and beautifully written introduction to his <i>Collected Poems</i> (see page liii therein). More directly, Lamantia’s brief Contributor’s Note in the journal <i>Caliban</i>, No. 7 (1989) discusses the ideas of Berg and Goldhaft, characterizing the two as among the “central minds” of the Planet Drum Foundation. This poetic and re-imagined place certainly includes his hometown: in the late poem “Egypt II,” Lamantia specifically names “Frisco, Calafia.” That particular appellation makes clear that Lamantia has rejected, and wishes or foresees that others too will reject the dominant, ingrained political and cultural labels, paradigms, and structures. <br />
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Other elements of Lamantia’s alternative world include “Ohlone” and related uses such as “Ohlonian spring” and “these Ohlone shores” (the latter phrase appearing in “Redwood Highway,” the long opening poem in <i>Becoming Visible</i> (1981)). This, I believe, refers to the Bay Area or some part of it; as Lamantia put it in the <i>Caliban</i> Contributor’s Note cited above, “my specific re-name for the micro-bioregion I am re-inhabiting, OHLONIA.”<br />
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Lamantia also references “Shasta,” by which, to quote the poem with that title, he appears to reference an area “from Suisun Bay north to the Rogue River,” and which he implies is adjacent to “Frisco,” which, in turn, is a “diplomatic zone between [Shasta] and southern empires of regrettable memory.” This too presumably derives from the Planet Drum worldview, as that organization (and Peter Berg in particular) used the appellation “Shasta Bioregion”often, including in the mailing address for its San Francisco post office box. <br />
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More specific to Lamantia, I believe, is his re-imagining of Telegraph Hill, on whose slope he lived during the last decades of his life, as“Bear Hill” and “Avian Hill” (see “Once in a Lifetime Starry Scape”). The names imply a hoped-for return of animals and birds of the kind found there before arrival of European: a prophesied Frisco, one as different as the names Lamantia uses to describe The City and its place in our world.<br />
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<u>Addendum</u>: After reading the above post, Nancy Peters, Lamantia’s widow and editor of his <i>Bed of Sphinxes</i> (1997) collection, provided the following comment regarding Lamantia’s use of “Frisco”:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Philip didn’t believe that . . . Frisco was actually derived from the old Icelandic. But he was familiar with Tamony’s findings, and he loved the coincidence. That the word and the sound would have been used so long ago and that it referred to a refuge, sanctuary, safe harbor. His own Frisco! </blockquote>
I thank Nancy Peters for the clarification and additional information. Her her last sentence, I think, should be emphasized: by using the nickname, Lamantia created “[h]is own Frisco!” For me, that’s a singular and beautiful poetic act!<br />
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hlfUpFIdhPA/Xa5B4yYbmII/AAAAAAAAA2k/hkajhtciF3MB4AbIpwspyX39aHL34YYHgCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/SF%2B--%2BCoitTower%2BPanorama.jpg"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hlfUpFIdhPA/Xa5B4yYbmII/AAAAAAAAA2k/hkajhtciF3MB4AbIpwspyX39aHL34YYHgCLcBGAsYHQ/s640/SF%2B--%2BCoitTower%2BPanorama.jpg" /></a> <br />
A panorama of Frisco, Ohlonia, in the Shasta Bioregion, with Bear Hill aka Avian Hill in the foreground <br />
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+++++ <br />
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The Lamantia poems that include “San Francisco,” the name of the city, with date of publication, are: “Immediate Life” (1959) / “Last Days of San Francisco” (1962) / “U.S.S. San Francisco” (1962) / “Destroyed Works Typescript” (circa 1962) / “From the Front” (1962) / “Crab” (1962) / “My Athens Terrace Ruins” (1965) / “Altesia or the Lava Flow of Mount Rainier” (1970) / “Flaming Teeth” [two mentions] (1970) / “Tonight Burned With Solar Slime” (1970).<br />
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The Lamantia poems that include “Frisco” are: “Invincible Birth” [two mentions] (1986) / “America in the Age of Gold” (1986) / “Irrational” (1986) / “Other States” (1986) / “Shasta” [three mentions] (1986) / “Poetics by Pluto” [three mentions] (1986) / “No Closure” (1989) / “Once In A Lifetime Starry Scape” (1990) / “Unachieved” [three mentions] (1997) / “Egypt II” (1997). <br />
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+++++<br />
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+++++ Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-65458299005693053812019-06-04T00:00:00.000-07:002019-06-05T06:49:02.510-07:00Harry Crosby and "Chasing the Sun"<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Harry Crosby's <i>The Sun</i> -- a magnificent one-poem miniature book</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Richard Cohen's <i>Chasing The Sun</i></td></tr>
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Richard Cohen’s <i>Chasing the Sun</i> (2009) is an “information-packed miscellany on solar worship and solar studies,” in Booklist’s words. It’s easily the best recent general book on our Daytime Star. <br />
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Being a “miscellany,” the book favors breadth over depth. Unfortunately, this means apt details are absent at times, dulling the presentation. For example, the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten is gets but a single sentence, in which it’s stated The Sun was an “all-embracing diety” during his reign. That’s true, but there’s no mention of Armana, the city he had built where temples and doorways were positioned catch the rays of the morning sun, or of the “Great Hymn to the Aten,” the beautiful paean-poem to the sun-disc god (sample line: “Earth brightens when you dawn in lightland”) attributed to him. <br />
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The book’s treatment of Harry Crosby – five paragraphs over not-quite-two pages – is another example where a few more salient facts would have greatly brightened <i>Chasing the Sun</i>. Crosby, called a “sun worshiper” and “fervent apostle of the sun,” is rightly included in the book, which includes a compact summary of his life, including his obsession with death and suicide. <br />
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It’s also said that Crosby “develop[ed] an obsessive interest in imagery centered on the sun which he introduced into his own writing with a vengeance.” Crosby definitely did just that, and it’s a key point. But the book’s explication here is superficial. As supporting examples of the obsession, Cohen simply references and explains a bit of the symbolism of “Black Sun Press” (Harry and his wife Caresse’s publishing company), then name-checks three Crosby book titles (<i>Chariot of the Sun</i>, <i>Shadows of the Sun</i>, and <i>Transit of Venus</i>) that reference The Sun or solar activities. These examples strike me as obvious and inert. <br />
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Most glaringly, Cohen fails to mention let alone describe “Sun-Testament” and “Madman” (aka <i>The Sun</i>), the two stellar examples of solar-saturated Crosby poems. <br />
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“Sun-Testament” is a prose poem in the form a will (the legal document disposing of one’s estate upon death). As the title implies, it’s the imagined last will and testament of The Sun. It was first published by Crosby in the collection <i>Chariot of the Sun</i> (1928) then expanded, revised, and republished as such in <i>Mad Queen</i> (1929). In addition to introductory and concluding paragraphs that mimics or echoes language typical in a legal will, the poem in its revised version contains twenty-eight numbered codicils, each of which reflects on, or is emblematic of, Crosby’s creative energy including, for example (remember, the sun is the “speaker” in the poem):<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
EIGHTH, I give and bequeathe to the planet<br />
Venus all my eruptive prominences whether in<br />
spikes or jets or sheafs or volutes in honor of her<br />
all-too-few transits.<br />
. . .<br />
<br />
FIFTEENTH, I give and bequeathe to Icarus a<br />
sun-shade and a word of introduction to the Moon. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
. . . </blockquote>
<blockquote>
EIGHTEENTH, I give and bequeathe to Arthur<br />
Rimbaud my firecrackers and cannoncrackers,<br />
to Vincent Van Gogh my red turmoil and hot-<br />
headedness to Stravinsky my intensity and fire.</blockquote>
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Gregory Wolff, who long ago now wrote what remains the definitive Crosby biography (<i>Black Sun</i>, 1976), opined (see page 7 of that book) that Crosby “was a wizard with figures, conceits, lists, [and] correspondences . . . .” The fanciful and elaborate list-poem “Sun-Testament” is surely an example of the masterful at times magical intelligence of the poet. <br />
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“Madman” (aka <i>The Sun</i>) obviously draws its inspiration from a passage from the “Ithaca” episode of James Joyce’s <i>Ulysses</i>, in which the narrator provides a lengthy catalog-list answer to the question, “What in water did [Leopold] Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?” The answer beautifully sets forth various features and qualities of water. <br />
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Crosby’s prose poem in a similar way expounds upon The Sun, for approximately 100 clauses, each separated by a well-spaced colon, thus giving each discussed quality or feature a kind of stand-alone forum of its own while keeping the reader’s energy moving ever-forward. It totals a bit more than 900 words, and here’s a taste, from the very start, and then from towards the end: <br />
<blockquote>
When I look into the Sun I sun-lover sun-worshipper sun-seeker when I look into the Sun (sunne son soleil sol) what is it in the Sun I deify — <br />
His madness : his incorruptibility : his central intensity and fire : his permanency of heat : his candle-power (fifteen hundred and seventy-five billions - 1.575.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.) : his age and duration : his dangerousness to man as seen by the effects (heatstroke, insolation, thermic fever, siriasis) he sometimes produces upon the nervous system : the healing virtues of his rays (restores youthful vigor and vitality is the source of health and energy oblivionizes ninety per cent of all human aches and pains) : his purity (he can penetrate into unclean places brothels privies prisons and not be polluted by them) : his magnitude (400 times as large as the moon) : his weight (two octillions of tones or 746 times as heavy as the combined weights of all the planets) : his brilliance (5300 times brighter than the dazzling radiance of incandescent metal) : his distance from the earth as determined by the equation of light . . . </blockquote>
<blockquote>
[. . . ] </blockquote>
<blockquote>
. . . his mountains of flame which thrust upward into infinity : the fantastic shapes of his eruptive prominences (solar-lizards sun-dogs sharp crimson in color) : his brilliant spikes or jets, cyclones and geysers, vertical filaments and columns of liquid flame : the cyclonic motion of his sports : his volcanic restlessness : his contortions : his velocity of three or four hundred miles an hour : his coronoidal discharges : his cyclonic protuberances, whirling fire spouts, fiery flames and furious commotions : his tunnel-shaped vortices : his equatorial acceleration : his telluric storms : his vibrations : his acrobatics among the clouds : his great display of sun-spots : his magnetic storms (during which the compass-needle is almost wild with excitement) . . . </blockquote>
Again, Crosby’s wizardry with lists is evident here, as is, more obviously, his obsession with The Sun.<br />
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“Madman” was first collected in <i>Mad Queen</i> (1929), of which fewer than 150 copies were printed. That same year, Crosby published the poem as a miniature book titled <i>The Sun,</i> in an edition of 100 copies. “Miniature” here is no exaggeration: the book measures 1" by 3/4" and the poem is printed in 3 point type, meaning each letter is about a millimeter. Crosby’s book has been featured a couple times on the internet this year. <a href="https://tinynewyork.com/blog/2019/2/8/tiniest-in-book-in-the-new-york-public-library-tells-a-twisted-tale">In February, a post quoted the New York Public Library’s Curator of Rare Books, who said <i>The Sun </i>is that august institution’s smallest book and that he needed both a magnifying glass and a reading glass to read it (click here to see the post, and photos of the book)</a>. More recently, <a href="https://www.fodors.com/world/north-america/usa/new-york/new-york-city/experiences/news/dont-overlook-these-11-tiny-nyc-sights">Fodor’s Travel featured <i>The Sun</i> in a list of “Tiny NY Sights” that should be overlooked (click and scroll down to number nine)</a>. This is dang fine for a poem and book now 90 years old.<br />
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I love that Crosby made a book about <i>The Sun</i> as small as The Sun is huge. That inverse treatment of the subject is poetic – pure
poetry to me. This all makes it more of a shame that it <i>Chasing the Sun </i>fails to mention it.<br />
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I’m not sure why <i>Chasing the Sun </i>author Cohen didn’t mention “Sun-Testament” and “Madman” (aka <i>The Sun</i>). Surely, a half-sentence about each could have been included. Unfortunately, it may be that Cohen may not have read or even known of these two brilliant works: his footnotes only cite works about, not by, Crosby. Whatever the reason, the omissions are unfortunate. The presentation of Crosby’s poetic obsession with The Sun is dim where it should blaze.<br />
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+++++<br />
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And yes, today’s the anniversary of Harry Crosby’s birth (June 4, 1898). He’d be 121. He died at age 31. His writings – including his poetry – still live.<br />
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<br />Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-56294836186368017202018-10-23T00:00:00.000-07:002019-02-06T20:52:24.651-08:00Philip Lamantia Day -- 2018<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">Love’s the thing in “The Talisman,” a four-stanza, nineteen line poem by Philip Lamantia. The poem was first published in 1969 and is of course included in <i>The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia</i> (University of California Press, 2013). And this poem, with love at its center, is most certainly right for today, the 91st anniversary of the birth of the poet whose work I adore. Let’s celebrate by reading – then taking a quick, closer look at – this most marvelous poem: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The Talisman</b><br /><br />Only for those who love is dawn visible throughout the day<br />and kicks over the halo at the pit of ocean<br />the diamond whirls<br />all that’s fixed is volatile<br />and the crushed remnants of sparrows travel without moving<br /><br />I find myself smoking the dust of myself<br />hurled to the twilight<br />where we were born from the womb of invisible children<br />so that even the liver of cities<br />can be turned into my amulet of laughing bile<br /><br />Melted by shadows of love<br />I constellate love with teeth of fire<br />until any arrangement the world presents<br />to the eyes at the tip of my tongue<br />becomes the perfect food of constant hunger<br /><br />Today the moon was visible at dawn<br />to reflect o woman the other half of me you are<br />conic your breasts gems of the air<br />triangle your thighs delicate leopards in the wood where you wait</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++(+)+++</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span>“The Talisman” opens strong with a bold luminous assertion: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">Only for those who love is dawn visible throughout the day </span></blockquote>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">That’s a declaration that’s stuck with me for years now, and how could it not? It powerfully conveys that love brings fresh, sustained visions, and the certainty with which it’s asserted persuasively sweeps you into the poem, which with quick rhythmic lines then showcases a series of surrealist images and actions, some drawn from classic surrealist ideas, including the first stanza’s </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">All that’s fixed is volatile</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">which echoes a fundamental precept explicated by Andre Breton in the first chapter of <i>L’Amour fou</i> (Editions Gallimard, 1937), translated as <i>Mad Love</i> (University of Nebraska Press, 1987): </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">The word ‘convulsive,’ which I use to describe the only beauty that should concern us . . . .” [ . . . ] Convulsive beauty will be veiled-erotic, fixed explosive, magic-circumstantial, or it will not be.</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">Much else in </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">the poem,</span> such as the mix of interior awareness, vibrant action, and what I’ll call “elsewhere” in the last three lines of the second stanza– </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">I find myself smoking the dust of myself<br />hurled to the twilight <br />where we were born from the womb of invisible children</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">–strikes me as quintessential Lamantia:</span> the words dust, womb, invisible, and children are among those that recur in his poetry (by the way, I continue to hope for a concordance to his works). Other they-can-only-be-Lamantia images, it seems to me, are “my amulet of laughing bile” (in the second stanza, and presumably the titular talisman), then “teeth of fire” and “the eyes at the tip of my tongue” in the third stanza.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In the final stanza, </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Lamantia brings back the dawn of the poem’s first line: </span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">Today the moon was visible at dawn</span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">and by reporting on what he presumably saw just a few hours earlier </span>Lamantia also neatly returns us to the right here, right now. It’s a</span> lovely reverie-bloom of an image, bringing together, as surrealists sometimes do, the opposites of night and day. </span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“[T]</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">he moon . . . at dawn</span>” might also to be </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="st">verisimilitudinous </span>detail of what was seen after spending a night at play and in conversation, a possibility heightened by the concluding lines identification of a particular woman as the animating source of the love-energy that has fueled the poem. </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The beloved</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s importance and delights are </span>marvelously celebrated in the poem’s last three lines. Lamantia first directly declares </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> her spiritual and psychological value (“the other half of me you are”) then uses </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">cadenced references to her breasts and thighs (</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“conic your breasts” / </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“triangle your thighs”) </span></span>as a poetic springboard for vivid praise. </span></span>The geometry trope reminds that Lamantia had an avid interest in that field, including its philosophical elements.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The rousing images that </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">conclude the poem </span>suggest and celebrate his beloved</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s </span>rare and exalted beauty (“gems of the air”), and, via a </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">metaphor from the animal world </span></span>(“delicate leopards in the wood”)</span><span style="font-size: large;">, </span><span style="font-size: large;">certain </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">of her pardine qualities, including, if I may I run reverie-wild with the image, a fine, </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">fierce intelligence, lithe </span><span style="font-size: large;">agility, </span><span style="font-size: large;">nocturnal energy, </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">and patient self-assurance</span>: </span><br />
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">Today the moon was visible at dawn<br />to reflect o woman the other half of me you are<br />conic your breasts gems of the air<br />triangle your thighs delicate leopards in the wood where you wait </span></blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">What a lovely, loving poem! </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Yes I said yes I will yes! </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Happy Philip Lamantia Day, and</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">¡Viva Lamantia!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++(+)+++</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Today the moon was visible at dawn . . .”</span></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Philip Lamantia</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">February, 1999</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Beyond Baroque / Venice, California</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Photograph by Michael Hacker</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">+++(+)+++</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++++(+)</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">(+)</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">(+)</span></span></span></span>+++++</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> +++(+)+++</span> </span> </span></div>
Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-53288033185393350612018-06-04T00:00:00.000-07:002018-06-04T05:58:53.018-07:00Harry Crosby<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Boston-born to a family of wealth</b> (his uncle was J.P. Morgan), <b>World War I ambulance driver</b> (at the front, for a traumatic and transformative 18 months, including a searing miracle moment in which he survived a near direct hit by an artillery shell that vaporized his vehicle), <b>Harvard grad</b> (the accelerated two-year soldier’s degree), <b>expatriate</b> (Paris), <b>traveler</b> (Spain, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, Venice, the Alps, trips back to the States), <b>poet</b> (he wrote seven volumes, all out of print, alas), <b>diarist</b> (<a href="https://archive.org/details/shadowsofsun00harr">the superb <i>Shadows of the Sun</i></a>), <b>publisher</b> (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sun_Press">the amazing Black Sun Press</a>, done with his wife Caresse) – </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Harry Crosby</b> – </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><br />believed in <b>The Sun</b> (the Sun above all), <b>the beauty and delights of women</b> (including but definitely not limited to his wife, plus one lover only imagined), <b>books</b> (he had thousands including first editions of Baudelaire</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">’</span>s </span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><i><span class="st">Les <i>Fleurs</i> du mal</span></i> and Rimbaud</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">’</span>s <i>Illuminations</i></span>), <b>reading</b> (naturally, given all the books but this was serious, obsessive, self-directed reading, of seemingly everything, including the Bible, Shakespeare, encyclopedias, philosophy and all kinds of literature), <b>horse racing</b> (as a bettor and an owner, ultimately not very successful as either), <b>poetry</b> (lots, but Rimbaud, Blake and Hart Crane’s “O Carib Isle” would be in his top five), <b>the Revolution of the Word</b> (see the Proclamation at the end of this post), <b>certainty of opinions</b> (just as one example, he excoriated his native Boston as a “Target For Disgust” and “the City of Dreadful Night”), <b>intoxication</b> (champagne, absinthe, whisky (he liked Cutty Sark), gin, rum, beer, wine, opium, cocaine, and hashish, for example), <b>1920s Paris</b> (the annual and wild <i>Bal des Quat’z’Arts</i> for example), <b>contemporary writers</b> (James Joyce was tippy-top for Crosby, especially the “miraculous last paragraph of Anna Livia Purabelle,” but also Hemingway, D. H Lawrence, and Kay Boyle, among many others including the poets Crane, Cummings, and MacLeish), <b>music</b> (jazz jazz jazz but much else including Stravinsky’s <i>L’Oiseau de feu</i>), <b>art</b> (Van Gogh above all, but also Brancusi, Redon and many others, including Alastair and Georgia O’Keefe), <b>the forging of souls</b> (not simply the furnishing of such), <b>flying</b> (he witnessed Lindbergh’s arrival (“<i>ce n’est pas un homme, c’est un oiseau</i>”) and later obtained a license and soloed himself), and yes, <b>Death</b> (he died in 1929, at age 31, with his mistress, and it was a scandal: a murder-suicide or suicide pact). <br /><br />If you don’t know his life-story, seek and ye shall find. <br /><br /><b>Today’s the anniversary of Crosby’s birth – June 4, 1898</b> – and hey now people get ready it’s a mere five years to the <a href="http://www.dictionary.com/browse/quasquicentennial">Quasquicentennial</a>! – and so I celebrate his poems and other writings. I might just have an absinthe too. <br /><br />Philip Lamantia in his 1976 essay “Poetic Matters” rightly suggested that Crosby was a precursor of American Surrealism, along with Mina Loy, Samuel Greenberg, and Poe. Lamantia called Crosby “a true dandy of explosive Promethean desire” who “left in <i>The Mad Queen</i> and elsewhere, signs of ‘Sadean’ magnanimity in the realms of mad love . . . .” (Lamantia’s essay will be included in <a href="https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/preserving-fire"><i>Preserving Fire: Selected Prose</i>, to be published this October by Wave Books</a>.) <br /><br />True to Lamantia’s “true dandy of explosive Promethean desire” characterization, some of Crosby’s poems are fiery detonations of rebellious creative energy. Three examples follow; you may agree the intensity is, well, intense.<br /><br />First is “The New Word,” published in the Eugene Jolas edited magazine <i>transition</i> (no. 16-17, June 1929) </span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">–</span> the famous Revolution of the Word issue (see the Proclamation at the end of this post). It’s a short prose ditty, to be cheap about it. More accurately, it’s a poetic manifesto or vision. May its “Panther in the Jungle of the Dictionary” and “Diamond Wind blowing out the Cobwebs of the Past” jolt your lexical energy field:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Next up is “Empty Bed Blues,” published in <i>Mad Queen</i>, Crosby’s 1929 collection of “Tirades” (his word, used on the cover and title page). The poem gets at, and well, desire and its aftermath. I love too that it takes its title from Bessie Smith’s amazing 1928 record: </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">In a February 10, 1929 diary entry Crosby recounted a small gathering of friends at which there was “a great drinking of red wine and the <i>Empty Bed Blues</i> on the graphaphone and a magnificent snowball fight . . . .” And you know what? Every party should have music and the stupendous Ms. Smith is always special so let’s enjoy: </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Finally, here’s “The Ten Commandments,” the final poem in <i>Torchbearers</i>, which can be considered Crosby’s final collection. It was published posthumously in 1931 and features an afterword by Ezra Pound. The Sun-God’s mandates are prototypical Harry-fever Crosby-fervor:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">For more on Harry Crosby’s work, see <a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2009/04/old-forms-made-new.html">my write-ups on his poems “Stud Book,” Sun-Testament” and “Telephone Directory” about half-way down the post here (click to go)</a>, and t<a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2012/06/transit-of-venus.html">he post (click here) on his poetry collection <i>Transit of Venus</i></a>. </span><b><span style="font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">+++++</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;"> Here, as a coda,</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">is the</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">“Revolution of the Word”</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;"> Proclamation</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;"> (Crosby is a signer),</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">as published in</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;"><i>transition</i>, no. 16-17 (June 1929):</span></b></div>
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<br />Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-44618124615877539612017-10-23T00:30:00.000-07:002017-10-23T00:30:25.012-07:00Philip Lamantia Day -- 2017<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Yes yes yes my friends it’s time again to celebrate the
anniversary of the birth (October 23, 1927) of Philip Lamantia, the late
great San Francisco poet (he died in 2005) and this year – </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">– I’m throwing a stellar party for Philip: laid out below are the 145 (yow!) instances in which “star” or “stars” (or </span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">variants such as</span> example “starlight”</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">)</span> appear in Lamantia’s <i>Collected Poems</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">It would take a concordance to know for sure (and I dream that some day there will be one!), but my best guess is that “star” / </span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">“stars”</span> and variants are most certainly among </span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">Lamantia’s </span>most frequently used nouns, and they may well top the list of such words (and yes, I know I’ve included some adjectives below). The reason why “star” </span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">/ </span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">“stars”</span> </span>and variants are so common in Lamantia’s poetry is worth a celestial reverie or three, or probably, if I may borrow a phrase, <a href="https://news.avclub.com/carl-sagan-did-say-billions-and-billions-a-lot-on-cos-1798275508">billions and billions</a> of such thoughts. So focus your imagination’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/23/science/space/unforgettable-hubble-space-telescope-photos.html">Hubble-scope</a>, channel your inner <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin">Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin</a>, and constellate a theory, will you please? <br /><br />For the moment, I’ll simply observe that while Lamantia’s poems date from 1943 to about 2001, his many uses of </span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">“star” / </span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">“stars”</span> and variants </span> do not seem dated today at all. Indeed, it might perhaps be said that Lamantia’s star-filled poems were ahead of their time – or should I say their space-time continuum – given the current and most welcome ascendancy of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/10/13/why-idaho-is-setting-up-a-giant-nature-preserve-in-the-sky/?utm_term=.d77b59a6a9ab">“dark-sky reserves”</a> where we might more fully enjoy the <a href="http://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/universe/stars/">“cosmic energy engines”</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star">“luminous sphere[s] of plasma”</a> which populate the universe. <br /><br />In any event, my fellow earth-dwellers, I hope you find the following excerpts a most scintillating intergalactic poetic trip! Happy Lamantia Day star-gazing to all (please note, I</span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">’</span>ve excerpted as many or as few lines from each poem as I thought necessary or fun, <b>bolded</b> each instance of </span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">“star” / </span><span style="font-size: x-large;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">“stars”</span> and variants, and tried to preserve the formatting of the lines)</span></span></span><span style="font-size: x-large;">, and here we go: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">. . . leaving behind a limpid song<br />heard by a million murdered <b>stars</b>.<br /><br /> – The Ruins<br /><br />O the mirror-like dirt<br />of freshly spilt blood<br />trickling down the walls<br />the walls that reach the <b>stars</b>!<br /><br /> – Automatic World<br /><br />and with our mouths opened for the <b>stars</b><br />howling for the castles to melt at our feet<br />you and I<br />will ride . . . <br /><br /> – Hermetic Bird<br /><br />The naked lovers! All of them, fifteen years old! One can still see their hair<br />growing! They come from the mountains, from the <b>stars</b> even, with their handsome<br />eyes of stone. <br /><br /> – A Civil World<br /><br />Neurasthenics<br />with young blood<br />ride to the <b>stars</b><br />with horses from Peru<br /><br /> – The Enormous Window<br /><br />The <b>stars</b> are wet tonight<br />the naked schoolmasters<br />are no longer in the gardens of childhood<br />and the sea has been heated for lions<br /><br /> – The Enormous Window<br /><br />Your body reclaiming the <b>stars</b><br />lifts itself in a wooden frame<br />to be seen in boulevards<br />that twist themselves at dawn into my room<br /><br /> – Mirror and Heart<br /><br />Butterflies have come to rest upon your lips<br />Whose words clothe the dancing <b>stars</b><br />Falling lightly to earth.<br /><br /> – Awakened From Sleep<br /><br />We have been carried here against our will<br /><br />Burnt <b>stars</b><br />Oceanic gardens<br />where the clouds are soaked into my eyes<br /><br /> – Celestial Estrangement <br /><br />just as no one has the right to understand<br />why you were born in a house of cigarettes<br />or I in a howling <b>star</b><br /><br /> – You and I Have Nothing to Fear<br /><br />Rest assured<br />we have not been uttering a word<br />against the master<br />His leafy ears heal too quickly<br />and besides the <b>stars</b> have crossed over<br />our tight embrace<br /><br /> – You and I Have Nothing to Fear<br /><br />To You Henry Miller of the Orchestra the Mirror<br />the Revolver and of the <b>Stars</b> of <b>Stars</b><br /><br /> – [poem title]<br /><br />You flee into a corridor of <b>stars</b>.<br />You sleep in a bleeding tree,<br />And awaken upon the body of trance.<br /><br /> – [You flee into a corridor of stars]<br /><br />Your mask disappears in the sky<br />Leaving the veined star open<br />For my kisses. Your <b>star</b>, above<br />Pain’s phantom touch, slowly entering<br />The net of my arms to sleep again<br />In the rib’s infinite eye.<br /><br /> – Nativity of Love<br /><br />This love’s knowing silence<br />Flows toward divinity;<br />Is a finger of light<br />Upon grains of sand:<br />Our golden <b>stars</b> of infinity.<br /><br /> – Autumn Poems<br /><br />I am forlorn.<br />The berry under the breast<br />Breaks its sea of sorrow over my head.<br />Resting on stone, I think of my unending quest<br />For the morning <b>star</b> gone.<br /><br /> – [I am forlorn]<br /><br />As I watch him, I wonder what alien wind<br />Drove the savage tooth, as a sea,<br />To his body’s <b>star</b>:<br /><br /> – Sorrow<br /><br />We walk arm in arm in the country,<br />With <b>stars</b> and grains of sand<br />Gathered for apt communion.<br /><br /> – Night Vision <br /><br />Unable to move and hardly breathing,<br />I am before the <b>stars’</b> alchemy of light<br />And eternal marvel of blue of sky into darkness,<br />Becoming balm to my blood’s long agony<br />Of we two wrested from each other<br />In these dreaded days<br />And unholy divisions of our love.<br /><br /> – [Unable to move and hardly breathing]<br /><br />Not unlike, I imagine, Adam<br />Before the Fall, a man in coition,<br />Rousing great power out of dust and clay,<br />With the first <b>star</b> of night<br />Brightly in his loin, is carried upward,<br />And knows the wordless speech<br />From a quick rush of water,<br />Transformed among pebbles and rocks,<br />And through the toneful wind<br />In a darkened forest of moving trees.<br /><br /> – Symbols<br /><br />I remember the day fused with the night<br />In the dawn of a moment’s eternity,<br />And hearing your voice from beyond the <b>starry</b> wall,<br />I know what we knew together is the way,<br />Now and even when the seasons are no more.<br /><br /> – Another Autumn Coming<br /><br />At the crossing of the winds,<br />under the morning <b>star</b>, the rose<br />plumed and the violet plumed, fly out<br />returning the treasures while the Spring Wheel<br />turns in the blossoming flowering.<br /><br /> – Revelations of a New Order<br /><br />Ashes, like <b>stars</b>, fall into the sewers.<br />A bird, hatched no longer than a second,<br />Falls from its nest<br />Fated for no other wings than death.<br /><br /> – Break of Day<br /><br /> And this was my dream that lasted from some dawn to some midnight in the<br />fallingdown room overlooking the oldest graveyard of Manhattan:<br /><br /> the poisonous <b>stars</b>: <i>benign</i><br /> the rootless tree: <i>nailed to the sky</i><br /> the black pit: <i>enclosing ladders of white light</i><br /> the icebergs of the mind: <i>floating to the tropics . . .</i><br /><br /> – Inside the Journey<br /><br /> Fire<br />Crackles beneath and above:<br /> Watergrown<br /><b>stars</b> overoute the wordtide.<br /><br /> – [Ground grade guard the crucible] </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">On a smiling crevice of street,<br />He cuts, for death, the diamond of her eye:<br /><b>Star</b> plumed hands put it<br />Burning on his brow.<br /><br /> – [In a garden that isn’t, but will be]<br /><br />They curve, craned in a surging stream,<br />Until spasmodic rungs flame to leap<br />Toward a deathbed <b>star</b><br />Of the spherical deep: they rise,<br />Drop, love, bird/ript in a highted dream.<br /><br /> – [In a garden that isn’t, but will be]<br /><br />A tongue grew tongueless:<br />The breath, a wail of <b>stars</b><br />And black sky: a flying milk—<br /><br /> – [Flame gates open to water gongs]<br /><br />And the madmonths whirled<br />To never-die-alone,<br />And alone they died in a lie<br />Of the wildbleet sound of <b>starry</b> truth.<br /><br /> – To the Music<br /><br />To the flat lands by the hills of Suum Nar<br />to MarMagAgog, onto sidereal semaphores,<br />to leech/hung prayer fields of Avadon<br />to Triptika on the sunbelted Nile<br /> where fish is god<br />to <b>stars</b> unravelling the numena/number<br /> snaked in iceflames of Baruda<br /> whirler of the wild,<br />to Smarachet . . . <br /><br /> – [To the flat lands by the hills of Suum Nar]<br /><br />O rocket me,<br />He who is mine is I<br /> and wins the Sky:<br />A Sun & Moon ago, kissed to <b>stars</b>,<br />a momentary string of sands to go,<br /> arriving on the silent sea roar.<br /><br /> – [To the flat lands by the hills of Suum Nar]<br /><br />Glory crasht on time<br />and burden of the <b>stars</b><br />elliptical HEARTS convex<br /><br /> – Christ<br /><br />three magi on the road<br />and <b>star</b> wheels to<br />B E T H L E H E M<br /><br /> – Christ<br /><br />I’ve killed them, <b>stars</b> and chains of lust<br /> before magi, magi, magi,<br /> Cavalcanti on the stairs<br /> La beauté<br /><br /> – Les Langueurs Allongées<br /><br /> the trouble with the <b>stars</b> is<br /> they’re too far from my eyes to yours<br /><br /> – Sheri<br /><br /> I am smoked to dryness<br /><br /><b>Stars</b> of smoke who made this road throw up<br /> your eyes<br /> which are closed in New York<br /><br /> – Ball<br /><br />by the sun from the page I wait<br /> as long<br /> as a <b>star</b><br /><br /> – Ball<br /><br />Winds have not flown longer than time we stopped<br />Whose sail hit the rooms where you looked into voids<br />—A beast on a <b>star</b>, Jaiba on the moon, the sunken tooth—<br />Stalks of madness tripled fire<br />And sent gardens under the sea<br /><br /> – Dead Smoke<br /><br />The <b>stars</b> have gone over the mountain<br />Meridians later your smile broke glass<br /><br /> – Deirdre<br /><br /> As some light fell<br />on the inescaped facade<br /> stains of interior cancer<br /> intervined the <b>stars</b><br /><br /> – [As some light fell]<br /><br />For it is all blest by God<br /> water, earth, <b>stars</b>, souls<br />which is to say, all is blessed IN God<br />and what is not, is not<br />for God is that WHICH IS<br /><br /> – The Poor Paradoxes<br /><br />Last night Mike told me he believed the <b>stars</b> are alive<br />Today we walk with the yellow haired child<br /><br /> – Boobus<br /><br />The morning is burnt with smells of cooking and cooked <b>stars</b><br />It’s nirvana!<br /><br /> – Boobus<br /><br /> Come lion - come tiger - come ocelet<br /> come coon - come weed - come leopard<br /> come saliva - come <b>STARS</b><br /><br /> – McClure’s Favorite<br /><br /> It’s zenith!<br />zodiacal beasts phospher<br />and <b>stars</b> devoured white!<br /><br /> – Observatory<br /><br />No longer the razor from a sheath of <b>stars</b><br /> over the face of day<br />come back from night<br /><br /> – Intersection<br /><br />It’s useless to ask who’s behind these eyes<br />set like <b>stars</b> in snow<br />or name the creatures coming alive<br /> out of the exploding iris<br /><br /> – Intersection<br /><br />My coat covered the <b>stars</b><br /> the bird gave me a cap of hair<br /><br /> – [It was a time I didn’t see the beast]<br /><br />goats, gangrene and The <b>Stars</b><br /><br /> – Binoculars [Michael McClure]<br /><br />Who is the <b>star</b> dancer the turn the glide speed the changes<br /><br /> – Binoculars [John Hoffman]</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> All night long, aztec messengers arrived</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> and fell <b>stars</b>!</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> All night long, end of time</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> jaguar in her eye</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Memoria</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Can I make it to windows of fur?</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Can I soup up her eyes in a can of <b>star</b> milk and shoot it for light?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Füd at Foster’s</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">These are not poems I wanted to make</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Ones I wanted to didn’t come out</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">They’re stuck in <b>star</b> thief land</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Immediate Life</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">they call to me, holy fires</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">holy fires to send me forth out of Loon</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">holy fires behind <b>stars</b></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">numena cabalas of Fiery Disk</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Orphic Poem</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">as we wove thru street’s half light, a junky</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">leaned his arm on the <b>stars</b> of my sleeve</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Politics Poem</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">GONG OF THE WORLD OF SENSE / GONG OF EQUILIBRAL </span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> <b>STARS.</b> </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Last Days of San Francisco</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">EARTH / <b>STAR</b></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Last Days of San Francisco</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Together we watched for ten thousand years</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">— the first five an age of monsters</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">and I laid open to the plumage of the <b>stars</b></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">magnetic wands and gourds fell upward in a dance</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">that shook the lice of the ages!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Time Is as Eternity Is: On the White Road: The Muse</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">. . . if the <b>stars</b> were colors of her eyes</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – [Shooting down to L.A. in an open car]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Rosa Mystica! Holy Woman lighted by afternoons</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> in the temple</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Woman lit with the sun, crowned by <b>stars</b></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Womb of universes turning over in her eyes</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – The Juggler in the Desert</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">that doesn’t stop my cry your hurt</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> your death these <b>stars</b> upset</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> in the circumnavigations of the bed</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – [in every way i am dazzled by you]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Ah the communion of spirits talking</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">vegetables, singing <b>stars</b>,</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">cruel gods gored my loves</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Jet Powered Suicide</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Is NOT. And not— it’s ended,</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">as <b>star</b></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> watcher</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> skyred.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Jet Powered Suicide</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">My friend, you sing songs of burden</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">I’m singing of the silence of saliva, streets, <b>stars</b></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">the invading of angels</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">at the moment of a singular embrace</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> for all time given</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">to set us free among the beautiful limits</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – My Labyrinth </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">it’s everywhere</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> in this passage of assaults</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">PRESENCE of a new <b>star </b>opened in my throat’s wisdom</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> Child! Hope! looking for the key in the roar of mazes</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> FOUND</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – My Labyrinth </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Take a shell of cotton</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">move a river south</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">exact a city with rain</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">paint a sign with <b>stars</b>.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Little do we know.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – [Why write about “things”?]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> . . . after getting lost unable</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">to find the steps down a million <b>stars</b> blacked</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">out by Mantle Night . . . </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Ceylonese Tea Candor (Pyramid Scene)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">hoping we’d find the stone stairway</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">and there were few <b>stars</b> to illuminate us down</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Ceylonese Tea Candor (Pyramid Scene)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">for fifteen minutes outside in the night I SAW THE LIGHT BEHIND THE </span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>STARS</b></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">LIGHT THE DARK</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">AND MY EYES WERE FULL OF IT!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Crystals</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">it’s the moment interruption of hallucinated <b>stars</b></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">now fallen down in my room with poetry</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">falling with lights of shimmering brains . . . </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Kosmos</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">They come with a scratching <b>star</b></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">with a mugwort of madmanes of the Head</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">that point all the faces of the Beast at once appear!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Year of Weir</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Beast of mudajangi</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">the Lord of Youth</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">his head the spindle of <b>stars</b></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Year of Weir</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">and a thousand bird cries fallen diagonally from the <b>stars</b></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> return to batú bató the stars are calling</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Destroyed Works Typescript (# 10)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">inside the earth by the arrows of your quivering breath, poet</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">penetrate the fins of the sand star out of the mist to the house of the sand <b>star</b></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Destroyed Works Typescript (# 18)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Last night I walked on 9th Avenue and the moon was my guide</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">The <b>stars</b> guided you Christopher Columbus</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">And I talked for hours about Spain</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Destroyed Works Typescript (# 20)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Not the sublime among these baroque enscrollations</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">but a thousand angelfaces, <b>star</b> tilted eyes</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">out of sweating, sun baked bodies burning me</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">conducting me to silences</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">and mend my heart to God’s—</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Destroyed Works Typescript (# 22)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">I came throwing shells and beasts godfathered</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> for suns moons and zodiacal <b>stars</b></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Destroyed Works Typescript (# 33)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">her head’s foot spades my head</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> stringing <b>stars</b> . . . </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Destroyed Works Typescript (# 33)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> . . . in Hades</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> a <b>star</b> thief found it</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> and sold it in Siam.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Destroyed Works Typescript (# 35)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Through a village suspended like a <b>star</b> of blood</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">going into the rites of the old men</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">silence invaded me . . . </span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Destroyed Works Typescript (# 36)</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I’m Osiris hunting <b>stars</b> his black tail of the sun!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – [old after midnight spasm]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Every time I smoke a cigarette the Creator has blinked all <b>stars</b> time pebbles of</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> water in a trillion second of man’s sodomite existence my words can not lie!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – [Immense black void . . .]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">black <b>star</b> of Amapola</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – [In camera of sempiternity . . .]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">seers shift in <b>stars</b> Amapola in clutches of white lice</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – [In camera of sempiternity . . .]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">spilled on swords of history Morgenroth I carve yr face by <b>starspilled</b> mariahs</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – This World’s Beauty</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">I keep stoning you with black <b>stars</b></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Resurrections [It is I who create the world]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> I think a <b>star</b> in monster’s mouth</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Incisions of frosted flowers take up on its lake</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> its clouds turn into iron hooks</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">its oceanic tower turns in yr entrails</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Fin del Mundo [At the sleeper of inveterate cars]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> Lost in a crowd, the mark on his forehead untouched, his cat fell out of the</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">clouds. For this police gyrated to him. I make it on the poem he said. The room he</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">slept in turned into a <b>star</b>. Down he went against the magnetism of the Flush!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – The Apocalyptic [Lost in a crowd]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> I’ve come to the time of brain crashed <b>stars</b> diadems of implacable women turn</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">in sewers of Los Angeles. My corner of meat is a necklace of guts, Oh bug of eternal</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">recurrence!</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – The Apocalyptic [I’ve come to the time]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">. . . Gabagava and the rest of doomed bones of <b>starshit</b>.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – The Apocalptic [I’ve come to the time]</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Who giveth birth to the Morning <b>Star</b>, Here’s the quiet cry of stars broken among</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> crockery</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Morning Light Song</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">O beato solitudo! where have I flown to?</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>stars</b> overturn the wall of my music</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">as flight of birds, they go by, the spirits</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">opened below the lark of plenty</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – High</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> Cups the legends reveal & the ancients</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> are beginning to pass around as if they were ordinary</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">milk bottles for the children newly born from</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> top branches of the Tree with its roots</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> going back</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> to the <b>starfields</b> of Every Night.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – The Ancients Have Returned Among Us</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> <i>the youth’s vision</i></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><i> is a vibrant string plucked by the gods</i></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><i> over the field of <b>stars</b></i></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – She Speaks the Morning’s Filigree</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Over & over the dusk of the Chant from the plain of Segovia</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">rings up the veil through which the deities move prisms of desire :</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">the cup that swallows the sword, the wands that shake the <b>stars</b> !</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – She Speaks the Morning’s Filigree</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> Epiphany</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> in a <b>starspangled</b> leather jacket</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – What Is Not Strange?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">The <b>stars</b> have gone crazy</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">and the moon is very angry</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">The old civilization</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">that rolled the dice of Hitler</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">is surely bumbling</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">into a heap of catatonic hysteria</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Astro-mancy</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Another civilization</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">secret for six thousand years</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">is creeping on the crest of</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">future, I can almost see the</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">tip of its triangular <b>star</b></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Astro-mancy</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">What, then, is coming to be</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">from undergrounds too fast</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">in their bright plumages</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">flailing our brains</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">with the gash of birth ?</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">Something storing mercurial islets</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">and fungi of being . . .</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">and sold for altars</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">pitched to the <b>stars</b> !</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – After the Virus</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">I would marry all the <b>stars</b> sitting on the face of the sea</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">like a traditional wolf of the absolute</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">sucking down the dish served up by the flood !</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Coat of Arms</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> the forest before me</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">replaced</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> by a cartilage of <b>stars</b>?</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Coat of Arms</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">and only the <b>starlight</b> consoles.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Difficult First Steps</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">prayer is constant Magick, the single beam</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">coming from the Sky Crown: the sure stairway</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">that writes the <b>stars</b> as the Scales measure</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">what you see, how you stroke cats or when the time IS</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">to cross bridges between earth & air . . .</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Without Props</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><i>to the schisms </i></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><i>of <b>star</b> & seed</i></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Thorn of the Air</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">The green eye on my coat</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">loots the sun’s paradise of green eyes</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"><b>star</b> caught in throat is a green eye</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Interjections</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> It is you, Christian Rosencruetz</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">in the surrealist <b>star</b> that cries with sphinx’s bluefeet</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">triple dogmatism of apocalyptic night</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">the Rosicrucian horseman is butchered by Knowing Skulls of Mount Atlas</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Interjections</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Like the fond palm leaves of my childhood<br />That broke from my breast of <b>stars</b><br /><br /> – [San Francisco melts as I come together]<br /><br />Manikins come alive<br />Their livers suckable as plums and raging <b>stars</b><br /><br /> – [The maginot line of poetry has not been invented]<br /><br />I can watch the children climbing the diamond temples at every corner<br />And there’s a taste of bituminous wine<br />For the solar incubation so rarely conjured<br />But for your hair shedding the <b>stars</b><br /><br /> – Ephemeris<br /><br />I comb the <b>stars</b><br />And they undress the moon with their nipples<br /><br /> – Out of My Hat of Shoals<br /><br />Your feet spread like vibrant chords over rustling plastic dolls<br />Bleeding american flags planted into your eyes knit with nazi <b>stars</b><br />Leather brassieres wave through the universal televisions<br /><br /> – [The mosque of your eye has exploded]<br /><br />Pea brain is the <b>star’s</b> octopus sucker or is not to be<br />disturbed . . . <br /><br /> – Tonight Burned with Solar Slime<br /><br />for the likes of the adepts<br />who smile through the velvet fissures of the centuries<br />that are Waves & Blankets of <b>Stars</b><br />under which we are given, if we burrow long enough<br />for the hidden script, the Key to the King’s Shut Chamber<br /><br /> – The Adept<br /><br />Suck the bark to your <b>star’s</b> ease that illumines One, the cavern above the storm<br />Two, the desire which is desired, and Three phases from virginal to torture.<br /><br /> – World without End<br /><br />I can barely see you mixed up to be chopped like so many valentine hearts by the fierce<br />blades that I roll out of the black <b>star</b>!<br /><br /> – World without End<br /><br />Here heady garbage glitters<br />through the sand its own perfection<br />between minute <b>star-specks</b><br /><br />and the infinite calling the grains . . .<br /><br /> – [Flying beasts]<br /><br />Not only the <b>Star </b>Woman luminous within convulsions at the apex of your<br /> cascading dress<br /><br /> – Luminous Lady<br /><br />The look of haunted beasts<br />Slaughtered long ago through crystal flakes<br />Shimmers from the imaginal tropic<br />To a <b>star</b> field of birds<br />Whose cries paint the sonorous language<br /><br /> – Redwood Highway<br /><br />Sleep-<br /> Flaking<br />To the hinterland<br />In a circle bound by shooting <b>stars</b><br />Ears beneath the sands of sable dreams<br /><br /> – Redwood Highway<br /><br />Nearing sleep, this same wind rustles the void of bloodstained horses (my first cabals) whose galaxy dissolves with a kiss the victorious rescue of the palpable shadow streaming <b>stars</b>, her face: this bed, the undulant phantom: her hips.<br /><br /> – Primavera<br /><br />The <b>stars</b> dress up their furrows<br /><br /> – Becoming Visible<br /><br />Violet <b>Star</b><br /><br /> – [poem title]<br /><br />between a <b>star’s</b> gleaming shadow<br />and its great coat of morning stilts<br />thrown on a grave like a glove of drenched eyeballs<br /><br />there is a splinter of green dust<br />luminously taking off for the hurried horizon<br /><br /> – Precipitous Oracle<br /><br />My foot in the hair of spinning <b>stars</b><br /><br /> – Life Sciences<br /><br />In my hand cupping sun assassins<br />lines of mercury and unknown <b>stars</b><br /> pure poetry of Pomo night<br /><br /> – Willow Wand<br /><br />Perishing <b>star</b> systems Enough of a raid on the tsetse-fly<br /><br /> – Invincible Birth</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> standing like a <b>star </b>over the slaughter house<br /><br /> – Black Window<br /><br /><b>Star </b>War syndromes hang like purple flowers . . . <br /><br /> – Black Window<br /><br />the lugubrious pianos dim out the song of <b>star</b> wars<br /><br /> – The Romantist<br /><br />She’s in their mouths<br /> a house like a pyramid<br /> built with rectangulars<br />perfect pear of a diagonal<br />down to the <b>stars</b> picked from photic jargon<br />The hand that writes is worth an empire on the moon<br /><br /> – Virgo Noir<br /><br />They say there’s a world outside me but I know better<br />Enlightenment in the kali yuga is a daily recurrence<br />shubahdu it’s over taking a long trip to the <b>stars</b><br /><br /> – Virgo Noir<br /><br />‘Move the prisms north<br /> the south direction is not propitious<br />follow the <b>star</b> . . . ’<br /><br /> – The Mysteries of Writing in the West<br /><br />the card of Blazing <b>Star</b> in the slow drawers of the Far West<br /><br /> – Exorcist Exercises <br /><br />the sheep have lunged from their <b>star</b> paths over Alhambra . . . <br /><br /> – Other States<br /><br />to catch the ring of <b>stars</b><br /> at the still point<br />of infinite sur-rational flight<br /><br /> – There<br /><br />In the alchemical legends, there’s a certain <b>star</b> seen at the completion of the Work, appears on the silver horizon through the trail in the grove.<br /><br /> – Shasta<br /><br />There are none there— but <b>stars</b><br /><br /> – Haiku for Satie<br /><br />Once in a Lifetime <b>Starry</b> Scape<br /><br /> – [poem title]<br /><br />Yet, this city’s night is marvelous when there’s a general electric breakdown<br />The <b>stars</b> come down to us, I see Orion’s belt close up in the eastern sky<br />With three-quarter waning moon<br /><br /> – Once in a Lifetime Starry Scape<br /><br />. . . We are hidden by <b>stars </b>and tars of this time<br /><br /> – Poem for André Breton<br /><br /> . . . Revolution the <b>Star</b> in the West springs the play of foam on the<br />rocks below. . . .<br /><br /> – Ex Cathedra<br /><br />The <b>star</b> card bestows the charm of new rivers, this word tomorrow, Andromeda,<br /> and with you, Amor. <br /><br /> – Ex Cathedra<br /><br /> . . . The <b>starry </b>sky, Pluto’s mirror . . . <br /><br /> – Unachieved<br /><br /> In my dream, the Goddess in her heavenly palace on the earth<br /> a kind of Marienbad in lunar light<br /> She in her silver gown slightly décolleté<br /> has me watch the Stellar Mirror<br /> while <b>stars</b> of the Pleiades run in a rhythm of Eight<br /> and do an astral dance, <i>tout court</i><br /><br /> – Unachieved<br /><br /> The great crystal pool <b>Starry</b> Night breaks into caves<br /><br /> – Diana Green<br /><br /> . . . this Ohlonian Spring of<br />superfinches I love more than to become a <b>star</b><br /><br /> – Passionate Ornithology Is Another Kind of Yoga</span></blockquote>
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<br />Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-50930186418200695342016-10-23T10:28:00.000-07:002016-10-23T10:28:30.569-07:00Philip Lamantia Day -- 2016<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Mosa%C3%AFque_d%27Ulysse_et_les_sir%C3%A8nes.jpg" class="overflowingVertical" height="348" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Mosa%C3%AFque_d%27Ulysse_et_les_sir%C3%A8nes.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="640" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">Roman mosaic: Odysseus and the Sirens (Bardo National Museum, Tunis, Tunisia)</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">I have always dreamed of the ultimate triumph of the Sirens who, it was said, were ‘defeated’ in their poetic combat with the Muses, and who can be deciphered to typify imaginative freedom from the restraints of rationally controlled poetry, whose spokesmen, like all good bourgeoisie, must always recommend that we ‘plug our ears’ against the enchantresses heard by the inspired poet on his voyage to the unknown.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> – Philip Lamantia, “Poetic Matters,” </span><br /><span style="font-size: large;"> in <i>Arsenal Surrealist Subversion</i> (1976) </span><br />
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Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-76385358925895885662015-10-23T00:01:00.000-07:002015-10-23T00:01:14.898-07:00Philip Lamantia Day -- 2015<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Come gather ‘round poetry lovers, wherever you may be, and let’s celebrate <br /><br />– and <i>cerebrate</i> – <br /><br />Philip Lamantia Day!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Yes, it’s here again – the anniversary of the birth (October 23, 1927) of the great, late (he died at 77 a decade ago now, oh my oh my) native San Franciscan poet. <br /><br />I think of Philip a lot this time of year, and not just because of his birthday. Lamantia also always comes to mind when – as has happened most every October for decades – the US Navy planes known as the Blue Angels do their screaming-loud practice flights for two days then choreographed air show for another two days above San Francisco. The jets are heard, seen, and felt across much of The City. Huge appreciative crowds gather to watch along the waterfront and at other view spots. The majority, maybe the vast majority, consider it a spectacular event. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Lamantia, on the other hand, considered the Blue Angels beyond terrible. His anti-militarist (and related pro-human) perspectives on this were one of the many, many things I loved about him. And equally fine, his antipathy for the annual event provided the spur for a memorable poem, titled “Death Jets,” first published in <i>Zyzzyva</i> magazine in Winter 1985, then included in <i>Meadowlark West</i> (City Lights, 1986). It’s also included in <i>The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia </i>(University of California Press, 2013). <br /><br />“Death Jets” features a very-unusual-for-Lamantia structure, in which a prose-ish explanatory interlude, labeled a “commentary,” appears after the poem’s first four lines. That commentary features </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">– and this will be the focus of this celebration today </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">– </span></span>a most surprising and delicious allusion, especially to us who love verse, to the 15th century Valencian poet named – well, more on that in a moment! First, take a look if you please at the poem’s first four lines:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Death Jets</b></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">three of them have terrorized my apollo finger</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">most hideous</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">of human existence</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">for the umpteenth time, sans life</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I dig dig dig this opening salvo, starting with the phrase “apollo finger.” It’s a term from palmistry that refers to the third or ring finger, said to indicate creativity, artistic flair and love of beauty. By this metaphor, Lamantia neatly shows that it’s no less than the poetic force itself that the jets attack. And the verb “terrorized” is exactly right, or so it seems to me as I recall the sudden core-rattling Shock-Shock (yes, I feel a double-startle) of the Blue Angels blasting through low in the sky, shaking windows, spines, and minds. Lamantia’s disgust at the jets couldn’t be clearer – “most hideous / of human existence” – nor could his </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">core objection to it all – “sans life”</span> </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">– and </span>exasperation at how long it goes on – “for the umpteenth time” (a neat use there of <a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/umpteenth">the informal adjective signifying </a></span><a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/umpteenth"><span style="font-size: large;">“</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span class="oneClick-link">an</span> <span class="oneClick-link oneClick-available">indefinitely</span> <span class="oneClick-link oneClick-available">large</span> <span class="oneClick-link oneClick-available">number</span> <span class="oneClick-link">in</span> <span class="oneClick-link oneClick-available">succession</span></span></a><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/umpteenth"><span style="font-size: large;">”</span></a>). <br /><br />These first four lines show and tell a lot. But Lamantia obviously wanted something even sharper and clearer, and why not? As William Blake wrote, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” And so to emphasize, explicate, and expand his perspectives, Lamantia </span><span style="font-size: large;">places the following prose-y section, sub-titled </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“</span></span>commentary,</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">”</span></span> after </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">the </span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">poem’s </span>opening stanza</span></span>: </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">These lines respond to the omnipresent threat of species suicide, to an ‘eternal' moment of decision, since it is certain that the sentence of death is passed unless there arise a conscious revolt against the forces of death — a mutational movement in opposition to all the moribund political powers who continue to sanction ‘Blue Angels,' whereas, thrills vaster than the poetry of Ausias March await us if, by the next century, Betelgeuse</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">always Betelgeuse</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">pervades the skyscapes a sudden sensuous freedom to sweetly ask for <i>chi'i</i> in all moments</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I dig dig dig this section too. I love the radical, visionary zeal, buttressed by a deep animus to “the forces of death.” I love too the resolute certainty in a future “sudden sensuous freedom to sweetly ask for <i>chi’i</i> in all moments” if – ah, yes, <u>if</u> – “a conscious revolt” and/or “a mutational movement” takes place. Also remarkable is the powerful almost cinematic nature of Lamantia’s imagined world: the red supergiant Betelgeuse (notice how that star is emphasized via the linebreak and repetition) omnipresent across “skyscapes” as us humans seek the essential life force and energy flow. Hey good people, let</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s make </span>it happen! <br /><br />But what I really, really like in this mostly-prose interlude is the surprising way Lamantia conveys the fun and adventure in the world he imagines, specifically by asserting:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">“thrills vaster than the poetry of Ausias March await us . . . .” </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“Thrills vaster than the poetry of </span>Ausias March</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">”</span>? </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">How about that?! </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">Ausias March</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">! </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span> </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Call me sheltered, but when I first read that line I had no idea who March was (his portrait is reproduced above) and knew nothing of his poetry. The esoteric nature of this particular allusion is not all unusual for Lamantia, particularly in the poems of <i>Meadowlark West</i>. He can make readers work in that regard. But despite my not getting the reference, Lamantia’s high regard and enthusiasm for </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">March’s</span> poetry came through clearly. <br /><br />Naturally, the line sparked my curiosity. I love checking out allusions made and other things mentioned by Lamantia, and have almost always found something that was most definitely worth finding (<a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2008/10/viva-lamantia.html">click here my essay on a few other things I was led to by Philip</a>). Here, I soon enough found <i>Ausias March: Selected Poems</i> (Edinburgh University Press, 1976), a bilingual edition presenting prose translations by Arthur Terry of approximately 30 poems <i>en face</i> with the original Valencian Catalan. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The 1976 Terry translation was the only edition of Ausias March poetry available </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">in English </span>at the time Lamantia wrote </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“Death Jets.” Subsequent translations were published in 1986 (in Spain) and here in the U.S. in 1992 and 2006; the latter publication features verse translations by </span>Robert Archer. I don</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’t know whether Lamantia read the 1976 edition, or read </span>the poems in a Spanish translation, in which case the full range of </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">March</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s work,</span></span> </span>a total of 128 poems, would have been known to him. <br /><br />March’s poems, written mostly in the first half of the 15th century (he died in 1459), are at points similar to the earlier medieval Troubadour work. There are many poems chiefly about love, addressed to particular women </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">as in the Troubadour tradition</span> (March had two loves, whom he called, respectively, “<i>Llir entre cards</i>” and “<i>Plena de seny</i>” which have been translated as “Lily among thorns” and “Wise Lady” or </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“</span>Beauteous Wisdom”). There are also poems on grief and death, poems of praise and blame, and poems on philosophical concerns including the nature of God and predestination. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Given the topics March assays you might conclude that the poetry would be predictable, or too Troubadour-ian. Not so. The work is </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> complex and, nuanced, with </span>plenty of interesting, exciting, and powerful lines and moments</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">.</span> </span>In fact, it’s not hard to guess what Philip found </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“</span></span>thrill[ing]</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">”</span></span> in March’s verse, in that there is plenty enough in the work that is similar to what</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s found </span>in Lamantia’s own poems. <br /><br />The main thrill in March’s poems, as I read them, is the palpable personality that comes through in them all. March has an active mind, is a deep thinker, and many aspects of his mental and emotional life </span><span style="font-size: large;">are memorably rendered. For example, there is </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">his acute sense of difference or alienation from the world and sometimes from his very self times </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">–</span> traits that seem</span> not-so-medieval, to say the least: </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-size: large;">En altre món a mi par que io sia </span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: large;">I els propis fets estranys a mi aparen . . .</span></i><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I seem to live in another world<br />and my own actions seem strange to me . . . <br />[Unless otherwise noted, this and the other translations below are adapted from those published in 1976 by Arthur Terry]</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I think Lamantia’s poetry at points expresses similar traits. Consider, for example, this expression of separation from the world found in </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“</span></span></span>A Winter Day,” published in Lamantia</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s first book <i>Erotic Poems</i> (1946)</span>:</span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">It is a strange moment</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">as we tear ourselves apart in the silence</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">of this landscape</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">of this whole world</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">that seems to go beyond its own existence</span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">or this depiction of a episode of self-splitting most strange, found near the start of the first of two poems titled </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“V</span>isions</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">”</span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> (written circa 1960, published in <i>The Collected Poems</i> (2013)):</span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">I remember the time I was thrown down my soul severed from my body hanging as if by a string – one to the other and I was taken up above myself left sweating and weeping, old earth body nothing but shit and there in the High Paradise lost or not I don’t know . . . </span></span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">+++</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Another aspect of Ausias March that comes through in his verse is a profound sense of melancholy and sadness. While it may seem odd to consider such a matter a </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“</span></span>thrill,</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">”</span></span></span> the way the poet shows these feelings does give quite a charge. March can be so explicit or poetic that it almost causes one to stagger or recoil. For example, there is: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span style="font-size: large;">. . . l’hora sent acostada </span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: large;">que civilment és ma vida finda</span></i><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">. . . I feel the hour is approaching <br />when my life among other men will end</span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">and</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span style="font-size: large;">Cell Teixion qui el buitre el meja el fetge</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>e per tots temps brota la carn de nou . . .</i> </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I am besieged by a suffering greater than <br />that of Tityos, whose liver is devoured by a vulture . . .</span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">and</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Plagués a Déu que mon pensar fos mort <br />e que passà ma vida en dorment.</i><br /><br />If only God would paralyze my brain <br />so I could spend a lifetime lost in sleep!<br />[Translation by Robert Archer] </span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">Similar expressions of suffering and depression can also be found in Lamantia’s work. </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">The biographical introduction to <i>The Collected Poems</i> makes clear that Lamantia experienced repeated periods of clinical depression (and mania). Not </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">surprisingly, the word “pain” frequently appears in the poems. There is, for example, the line</span></span></span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am always walking in pain</span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">in “Subconscious Mexico City New York” from <i>Destroyed Works</i> (1962). </span><span style="font-size: large;">The following lines, from the <i>Meadowlark West</i> (1986) poem “Isn’t Poetry the Dream of Weapons?” offer a more expansive expression, and are especially poignant given that the suffering is juxtaposed with what might be considered the highest goals of of Lamantia’s work:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">Between the ecstasy and the secret<br />I’ve touched bottom I want to be lost<br />the glow is bathing me in pain </span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">The opening stanza of </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Lamantia’s </span>“V</span>ibrations,</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">” </span>from <i>Becoming Visible</i> (1981), </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">is especially</span></span></span></span> vivid in its depiction of a world and self wracked with suffering, and as such seems </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">similar to </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">March’s </span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">lines, quoted above, regarding the giant </span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Tityos</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s</span> liver being </span>“devoured by vultures</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">”</span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;">:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">There is a wind torturing bats<br />there are the scorched feet of dead suns<br />the city spun into the sea<br />where the gulfs of the pterodactyl beckon<br />there is a whorl of terror livening my mind<br />there’s the hum-whirr of the skeleton of solitude<br />where angry corpses flower in a bottle<br />and red weapons vanish into mirrors </span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">The final example of an expression of suffering and depression in </span>Lamantia is from “Touch of the Marvelous,” one of his earliest and best known poems (first published by Andre Breton in the magazine <i>VVV</i> in February 1944 and first collected in <i>Erotic Poems</i> (1946)), in which he declares: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am now falling into the goblet of suicide . . . </span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">There are plenty of other thrills in March, including most notably vigorous extended similes of a kind that don</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’t appear in Lamantia</span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s poetry.</span></span></span></span></span></span> But surely Lamantia, who in the <i>Meadowlark West</i> (1986) poem “Invincible Birth” referred to </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">my frenzy mantic mania</span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">would have found a thrilling connection with March’s lines</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span style="font-size: large;">Illja mos dits, mostrants pensa torbada . . . </span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">[ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ] d’hom fora seny</span></i><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">just read my poems, full of frenzied thoughts,</span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">a madman’s ravings . . . </span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">[translation by Archer]</span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">In addition, Lamantia surely would have thrilled when he came to a a March image (albeit uncommon in the work) with a surrealistic quality, such as in these lines:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Menys que lo peix és en lo bosc trobat<br />e los lleons dins l’aguia han llur sojorn,<br />la mia mor per null temps pendrà torn . . .</i><br /><br />Sooner say that fish are swimming in the wood<br />or that lions now across the oceans roam<br />than that my love can ever start to wane . . . <br />[Archer translation] </span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">+++</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Another enchanting element in March, and the final one I’ll point to here, again concerns the clear sense of the poet that one gets from reading the poems. I mentioned this above, and I must insist that the tippy-top moment for this comes in the concluding two lines of the next-to-last stanza of the final poem in the Edinburgh Press edition, in which the poet exclaims:</span><br />
<blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span style="font-size: large;">A temps he cor d’acer, de car e fust.</span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: large;">Io só aquest que em dic Ausias March!</span></i><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I have a heart of steel, flesh and wood, all in one.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I am this man who is called Ausias March!</span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">Now that</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s a kick! </span></span></span>Let me tell you: when I read those lines, with their rousing embodiment and declaration of self, and I leap to my feat and exclaim, “Yes, yes you are, Ausias March, goddamn yes, you are!” <br /><br />I’ll also guess here that Philip may have dug those lines in a similar way. After all, in a way at least arguably akin to March</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s line t</span></span></span>hat his heart is made </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“</span></span>of </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">steel, flesh and wood, all in one</span>,</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">”</span></span></span> Lamantia in the poem </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“</span></span>I Touch You</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">,”</span></span> first published in <i>The Blood of the Air</i> (1970), wrote:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">my heart of the rose hermetic and flushed by goats sighting prey . . . </span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">He also wrote, in the beat-era poem “Immediate Life” –</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">My name is Philip Lamantia</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">And I go around with whoever </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Which means all kinds of weir persons I like . . .</span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">– which are the only lines in his poetry in which his full name appears, and which embody and confidently declare self-identity in a similar to when March name checks himself</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></span></span></span>. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">There are also many “I am . . .” lines in Lamantia’s work that sort of mirror the excitement of </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">March</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“I am the man who is called . . .”</span> declaration. Consider, if you please, the </span></span></span></span>self-assurance and beautifully expansive self-identity within </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Lamantia’s</span> statement in “Kosmos” (written circa 1960, available only in <i>The Collected Poems</i> (2013): </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am the womb of the transcendent Vision!</span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;">and the following gorgeous and genuinely surreal aggregation of self-declared personality traits, from “The Marco Polo Zone” in </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Meadowlark West</i> (1986)</span>:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">I am lore bundled of crow dew finger of pine eaglet bone of my bone soaring thought </span></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Now that</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s a kick! </span></span></span></span>Let me tell you: when I read that line, with its rousing embodiment and declaration of self, and I leap to my feat and exclaim, “Yes, yes you are, Philip Lamantia, goddamn yes, you are!” <br /><br />+++<br /><br />Following the </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">prose-ish second section with </span>its reference to Ausias March, Lamantia’s “Death Jets” continues for another approximately 30 lines. The poem quickly becomes difficult, even beyond difficult, with the mostly discursive reasoning and straight-ahead grammar of the prose commentary giving way to associational leaps and fragments of thought, with allusions to Lemuria, the Heraclitean wind, Rodin’s ‘Thinker’, and ancient Pomo fetishes, </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">among other things, </span>as well as truly occult references such as </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“</span>the Stage Magician</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">”</span> </span>and </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“</span>‘the Idea’</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">”</span> (single quotation marks in the original). The final lines have multiple references to Anarchy and Anarchs and invoke shiva and shakti. <br /><br />Curious? Well – how about this! – you </span><span style="font-size: large;">can </span><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=_ffD8l3-Kd8C&pg=PA373&dq=%22death+jets%22+lamantia&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAGoVChMIv8DM5afNyAIVC6SICh3i2w_I#v=onepage&q=%22death%20jets%22%20lamantia&f=false">read “Death Jets” in its entirety by clicking right here</a>. Better still, open the poem at that link and then open another browser window and follow along as you listen to <a href="https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Lamantia/1986-Blakes/Lamantia-Philip_03_Death%20Jets_1986_Blakes.mp3">Philip himself read the poem, from a 1986 recording, via the miraculous PennSound site (click and go; it’s the first 2:25 of the audio track)</a>. <br /><br />And, of course, have yourself a </span><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Great </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Philip Lamantia Day</span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">and </span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">¡Viva Lamantia!</span></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">+++++++</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">+++++</span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">+++++++ </span></div>
Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-28962133546882261882014-10-23T15:43:00.003-07:002014-10-24T07:32:31.519-07:00¡¡¡¡¡¡¡ Viva Lamantia !!!!!!!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Philip’s Poetic Prophecy <br />for</span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NemJf_qpL2s/VEl1fr3RcCI/AAAAAAAAATo/L50LsKlV6Y8/s1600/sf-sea-rise-overlay-72.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NemJf_qpL2s/VEl1fr3RcCI/AAAAAAAAATo/L50LsKlV6Y8/s1600/sf-sea-rise-overlay-72.png" height="516" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">San Francisco! </span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Yes, Happy Lamantia Day, a celebration on the birth date (October 23, 1927) of the late great poet Philip Lamantia. I’ve posted something here each year since I started way back (ha!) in 2008, and while this is nothing yet like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe_Toaster">the annual glass of cognac and three roses on Poe’s grave</a>, let me take a few minutes to remember, honor, and enjoy the continuing vitality of </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Lamantia</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s </span></span> work. <br /><br />Of all the vibrant (sometimes darkly vibrant) wonder of Philip’s poetry, I </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">am today </span>while re-reading <a href="http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520269729"><i>The Collected Lamantia</i></a> thinking on the native son aspects of his work. <br /><br />To focus on San Francisco / Frisco (Philip proudly used the latter term, with its working class roots and sonic force, in his poetry from about 1980 on) is reductive, of course, given the very worldly (and otherworldly!) aspects of Lamantia’s life and work. There’s lots of Mexico and Spain, for example, in the poetry, and other places too. Lamantia was no provincial, that’s for sure, and I’d have to agree with anyone who suggested that the idea of Elsewhere (capital E intended) is central in the work. <br /><br />But still, The City was Philip’s hometown, and there’s plenty of it in the poems. I pointed out some of this <a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2013/10/philip-lamantia-collected-poems.html">when I wrote and posted about <i>The Collected Lamantia</i> a year ago (click here to see): the fog, waterfront, autumn atop a hill, etc.)</a>. There’s plenty else as well, from bits of childhood recollection (what was in his father’s garden) to particulars of place (e.g., Mission Dolores and Crissy Field) to more wildly imaginative or surreal images. <br /><br />Among the wilder San Francisco-specific lines, one of my favorites is this, from near the end of “Other States” in <i>Meadowlark West</i>:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">The patch of summer fogs screws the ears of the forest city</span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I dig the energy there, the way the torque and in-your-headness of the incoming fog gets conveyed. I think of this often when I happen upon the fog rolling in against the slopes of Mount Sutro and Mount Davidson, San Francisco’s very tree-y mid-city hills. The former is pictured here:</span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LEuy5JDsbqg/VEl1luolN3I/AAAAAAAAATw/IM9BAuxsFo4/s1600/mt-sutro-forest-east-side.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-LEuy5JDsbqg/VEl1luolN3I/AAAAAAAAATw/IM9BAuxsFo4/s1600/mt-sutro-forest-east-side.jpg" height="417" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-size: small;">The patch of summer fogs screws the ears of the forest city</span></i></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;">Most compelling to me, though, are Philip’s prophecies about San Francisco. There may not be a lot of them in the work, but Allen Ginsberg early on famously called Lamantia a “soothsayer,” and so perhaps Philip’s vision(s) regarding San Francisco’s future are something to behold. <br /><br />Philip’s primary poetic prediction for The City remained consistent over the decades, and is both startling and, more and more these days seemingly more and more exactly right, given the increasing awareness of possible environmental changes compared to fifty and twenty-five years ago when Lamantia wrote his poems. <br /><br />Check out these wild lines, from the prophetic / apocalyptic “Last Days of San Francisco (1962) [emphasis added here, and in the quotations that follow]:</span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>streets of water</b>, masonic columns vaporize</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">chinabowls scream in steel bridges</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;"> an old <b>subaqueous</b> tune, rambling</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Goldengate spangles, Ferry Boat— Yerba Buena, isla del sol— a</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">hundred moons vibrate to MONEY, dissolved in yet/pot odors</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">[ . . . ]</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I see the Cosmic Intervention! <b>I see water over San Francisco!</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I see God putting you down, moneylovers!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">PLAGUESVILLE!</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">The astrologer: BREAKUP BY SCHIZOBOMB <b>I see oceans over</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b> Berkeley!</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I see</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> the Angel’s</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">  FIRST WEDGE COME DOWN!</span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;">That is some beautiful energy, including the sounds of </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“</span>Goldengate spangles,</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">”</span> the neologisms </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“</span>PLAGUESVILLE and SCHIZOBOMB,</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">”</span> and the mimetic rhythmic propulsion of the final three lines. But the main point is the emphatic way Lamantia puts the imagined </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">aqueous future. There is little doubt that it is a-coming.</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Similarly, see these lines from the much later (1</span>989) “Once in a Lifetime Starry Scape” (written on the night of the Loma Prieta Earthquake, </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">25 years ago this month</span>!), in which Lamantia envisions a beautiful and quite different Telegraph Hill (re-christened “Bear Hill” or “Avian Hill”) in North Beach, in which the prominence (on which he lived) is surrounded by . . . (natch) water!:</span></div>
<blockquote>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>I dream a moat between this Bear Hill I inhabit</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>and those buildings of monolithic glass</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">a stone bridge to <b>this new island</b> of three thousand,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">later less than five hundred humans on it,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">but before contact, brown bears, owls, oaks, bobcats</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and lost bird species— now only fifty or so, resident to rare</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">It could be, again: Avian Hill, a new Ys in reverse</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">outlasting earthquakes from its Franciscan stone formation</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">a true Frisco, “<b>haven in a storm at sea</b>”</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">to seed a coming cycle . . .</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">That there is a beautiful vision, panoramic in its sweep. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I think the idea of San Francisco inundated was, for Philip, but a return to what had been. Consider please the following lines from the mid-1990s poem “Unachieved”: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Frisco once also <b>covered with ancient waves</b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">a kind of lost Atlantis several kalpas ago</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Today, I believe in Philip</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s poetic </span>vision of San Francisco covered, or mostly covered, in water. I mean, it feels right. It</span><span style="font-size: large;">’s Lamantia Day, after all.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">And who knows, someday, perhaps we’ll all go for a swim down Broadway! </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Flip-turns against the top of the Pyramid! </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Float and splash about both sides of Dolores! </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Scuba through the Mission! </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Tidepooling at the edges in the Outer Sunset! </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Deep dive the Excelsior! </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Happy Lamantia Day! </span></div>
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Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-79277955067913467422014-06-16T00:01:00.000-07:002014-06-16T07:46:49.699-07:00Bloomsday -- 2014<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Poetic Language +++++ Poetic Consciousness</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Macrocosmos +++++ Microcosmos</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://hirokawa810.com/top_e.html"><span style="font-size: small;">Taishi Hirokawa -- from <i>Timescapes</i> (Valle de la Luna, Atacama Chile -- May 3-4, 2000)</span></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><i>What spectacle confronted them when they, first the host, then the guest, emerged silently, doubly dark, from obscurity by a passage from the rear of the house into the penumbra of the garden?</i><br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-large;">The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.<br /><br /><i>With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?</i><br /><br />Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.<br /><br /><i>Were there obverse meditations of involution increasingly less vast?</i><br /><br />Of the eons of geological periods recorded in the stratifications of the earth: of the myriad minute entomological organic existences concealed in cavities of the earth, beneath removable stones, in hives and mounds, of microbes, germs, bacteria, bacilli, spermatozoa: of the incalculable trillions of billions of millions of imperceptible molecules contained by cohesion of molecular affinity in a single pinhead: of the universe of human serum constellated with red and white bodies, themselves universes of void space constellated with other bodies, each, in continuity, its universe of divisible component bodies of which each was again divisible in divisions of redivisible component bodies, dividends and divisors ever diminishing without actual division till, if the progress were carried far enough, nought nowhere was never reached.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;">Text from Episode 17 of James Joyce's <i>Ulysses</i> (1922) </span></div>
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Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-43807724250409429752013-11-18T19:25:00.001-08:002013-11-18T19:30:44.373-08:00Bruce Conner - Happy Birthday Anniversary !!!<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: x-large;"><b>Bruce Conner</b> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Born: November 18, 1933</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">(80 years ago today)</span></div>
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<complete id="goog_2079773752">+++++</complete></div>
Steven Famahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09886207582824520804noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-40780621533369736622013-10-23T01:49:00.000-07:002013-10-29T06:17:42.449-07:00Philip Lamantia -- The Collected Poems<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;">Publication of any volume of collected poems is a grand event, worthy of celebration. The more complete any such book is, in terms of the poetry included and comprehensiveness of editorial material, the bigger the party should be. And that goes double if the poetry’s particularly potent. <br /> <br />By these measures, <i>The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia</i> (University of California Press, 2013), edited by Garrett Caples, Andrew Joron and Nancy Joyce Peters, deserves a Saturnalian blow-out. </span> </div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kFT7o07VQos/Umcl_FthFcI/AAAAAAAACzE/aPS0LXG7uFE/s1600/saturnalia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="348" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-kFT7o07VQos/Umcl_FthFcI/AAAAAAAACzE/aPS0LXG7uFE/s640/saturnalia.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Yes, I enthuse, and big-time. For me, this Collected is a dream – a DREAM – come true. I have collected and read (and read and read and read) Lamantia’s poetry for years. More than a decade ago, I compiled a chronological list of his published writings including appearances in magazines and anthologies – it numbers well over 250 items. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">More to the point, I love Lamantia’s wild and free imagination. His surreal, anti-rational images, and the associational play of the poems (they take me to “the kingdom of Elsewhere off the shores of Never More,” to quote a line from one of them). I love too, particularly in the poems from the mid-1960s forward, the many erudite, esoteric, and/or hermetic allusions that stimulate and challenge the mind. <br /><br />I also met Lamantia in 1998, and became a friend. Among other things, we were both native San Franciscans of Sicilian heritage. We regularly talked and occasionally met until late 2001, when depression caused him to withdraw from social life (he died in 2005). This blog takes its name from a line in one of Lamantia’s poems, and each year on the anniversary of his birth (October 23, 1927) – hey, that’s today! – I’ve posted something here about him or his poetry.<br /><br />Finally, I played a small part in getting this <i>Collected Poems</i> into the world. I provided the editors – who I’ve each known for about 15 years – with a list of previously published but uncollected poems by Lamantia (and copies of some of them), as well as information about (and copies of) certain previously unpublished poems. The editors very kindly mention this help in the book’s acknowledgments. I also helped with proofreading. <br /><br />So I am not a neutral observer. My exuberance ignites from my love and passion for Lamantia’s poetry. But even leaving that aside, this book deserves kudos. As the saying goes, facts are facts. <br /><br />First, the <i>Collected Lamantia</i> includes all the poetry from Lamantia’s fourteen previous books. Of course, the original books will always be worth having, if you can get them. Lamantia and his various publishers made beautiful books, and its great to read the poems as originally presented. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">For example, there’s <i>Destroyed Works</i> (Auerhahn Press, 1962). Its black-and-white cover photo of an outré Bruce Conner assemblage (see image directly below) neatly echoes the gathering of poems within, and relatively large-sized pages nicely create space for Lamantia’s sometimes long lines.</span><br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vfzmKZyD2O0/UmdBB2HdD3I/AAAAAAAAC3E/4vou4Z5qNng/s1600/Destroyed+Works.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-vfzmKZyD2O0/UmdBB2HdD3I/AAAAAAAAC3E/4vou4Z5qNng/s400/Destroyed+Works.jpg" width="321" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The problem, however, is that almost all of Lamantia’s original books are out-of-print, with several now collector’s items. It’d likely cost several hundred or even a thousand dollars or more to buy them all. Now, all that poetry – oh that beautiful poetry (please see below for my list and discussion of two dozen Lamantia poems you might want to read!) – is available in a single volume for around $40 or $50, depending on where you shop. It’s fantastic to have it all for a relatively affordable price. <br /><br />But wait! There’s more! </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Collected Lamantia</i> also includes approximately 100 poems in addition to those found in Lamantia’s books. About 50 of these additional poems were previously published in small magazines and the like, but uncollected. The other half are entirely unpublished, selected by the editors from Lamantia’s surviving manuscripts. <br /><br />These previously uncollected and unpublished poems come from each of the seven decades (‘40s through ‘00s) in which Lamantia wrote. Among the rarities is Lamantia’s long-lost first published poem, from a 1943 California high school anthology. Written when he was 15, it’s not strictly juvenilia since within about a year of its appearance Lamantia would have about a dozen other poems published in <i>View</i>, <i>VVV</i>, and <i>Hemispheres</i>, </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">the leading national avant-garde magazines o</span>f the era. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Also included is an almost 20 page assemblage-work comprised of 42 numbered sub-poems or sections </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">from the late 1950s / early 1960s</span>, and fourteen poems from Lamantia’s final years of writing (1998-2001). Overall, the previously uncollected and unpublished poems comprise about 25% of the book and permit a deeper and more multi-faceted understanding of Lamantia’s poetic concerns and approaches. <br /> <br />But wait again! There’s still more! <br /><br /><i>The Collected Lamantia </i>also includes the editors’ 40 page introduction to the poet’s life and work, titled “High Poet.” This chronologically arranged essay details Lamantia’s eventful life, including his various travels and exiles (including multiple lengthy stays in Mexico) and key associates (including the avant-garde circle in New York City and Kenneth Rexroth in the 1940s, Jack Kerouac in the 1950s, and Nancy J. Peters from the mid-1960s to the end of his life). It also addresses his interests in certain values or activities (Catholicism, for example, and birding), experimentations (early 1950s use of peyote, for example), erudition (Lamantia was an autodidact polymath), and challenges (with depression and mania in particular). <br /><br />Among the many biographical nuggets that shine in “High Poet,” I especially enjoyed reading how Lamantia heard the call to poetry. He was 14 years old, rebellious, already fascinated by the marvelous, and deeply inspired by exhibitions he’d seen at local museums of paintings by Salvador Dali and Joan Miro. In a grove of trees atop San Bruno Mountain – located less than five miles from the San Francisco neighborhood (the Excelsior) where he grew up – Lamantia observed “the weird effects of the wind and fog banks” surrounding the mountain and then heard “an inner voice declaring [him] a poet.”</span> <br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oJ9qI2pBcpM/UmcnG0q4qoI/AAAAAAAACzM/u2dLPXEFC7c/s1600/fog+from+San+Bruno+Mountain.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-oJ9qI2pBcpM/UmcnG0q4qoI/AAAAAAAACzM/u2dLPXEFC7c/s1600/fog+from+San+Bruno+Mountain.jpg" /></a></div>
<a href="http://vimeo.com/69809668"><b>The weird effects of wind and fog, as seen from San Bruno Mountain</b></a><br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/69809668"><b>[click here for a time-lapse video -- and imagine what Lamantia saw when he heard the call!] </b></a><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The editors describe this mountain and fog experience as an early example of Lamantia’s “response to the marvels of the natural world.” That’s certainly true. But there’s also this: a kid born and raised in The City, called to poetry while on a hill watching the wind and fog. That, my friends, must be the mark of a true San Francisco Poet! <br /><br />“High Poet” also astutely describes Lamantia’s poetics, including the fundamental importance of the marvelous and surrealism, as well as his key belief that poetry was “both an expression and form of gnosis,” The editors – and I agree with this assessment – call Lamantia a “visionary poet who ascended the heights of pure imagination” and “sought both intellectual understanding and spiritual transcendence.” <br /><br />The editors also provide helpful observations on certain esoteric or hermetic aspects of Lamantia’s poetry. For example, there’s an explication of Lamantia’s iconoclastic concept of “weir”– a term that turns up in several late 1950s and 1960s poems. A variant of “weird, ” the word, the editors explain, concerns an imagined place or space where Lamantia could “correlate his experiences of mystical, drug-induced, and poetic vision under one heading.” <br /><br />The essay also briefly frames each of Lamantia’s books with remarks about the poetry itself or life events relating to the work. Occasional opinions are offered on the books as well, such as calling <i>Meadowlark West </i>(1986), the dense and sometimes difficult late-career collection, a “concise, left-wing riposte to Pound’s <i>Cantos</i>” that is “in many ways Lamantia’s most original book.”<br /><br />Until a full-length biography and/or a poem-by-poem study of Lamantia comes along, “High Poet” is IT. If awards were given for these things, this introductory essay would surely get the prize.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">A few years ago, Billy Mills nicely summed up the possibilities that, as he put it, “can really only happen in the context of a big collected poems.” With such books, Mills wrote, readers can begin to get “a new sense of the total shape” of a poet’s work, and see “the development of [the] poet’s individual voice.” <br /><br />Or, as Robert Grenier said – with characteristic pithiness – about another collected edition, readers can now “begin to contemplate what in the world it might be.” <br /><br />Yes oh yes, with <i>The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia</i>, the possibilities for readers now begin. Go forth, if you please, and . . .</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">¡Viva Lamantia!</span></b><br /><br />+++++ </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Twenty-Four Lamantia Poems<br />You Might Want To Read!</span></b><br /><br />[This list is roughly chronological. For each poem, I offer comments, sometimes brief, and an excerpt or more. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Please note: I could list many more!] </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;"><br /><i><b> I Am Coming</b></i> <br /><br />“I Am Coming” was among the five poems in Lamantia’s first appearance in a national publication – the June 1943 issue of <i>View</i>, edited by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler. Lamantia was fifteen years old. Here’s how the poems looked on the magazine’s page, with “I Am Coming” at the upper left:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Lamantia later described his writing of these and other poems (there were over two dozen) in this period as a “three-year adventure in ‘pure psychic automatism’ productive in the exaltation of the poetic marvelous, delirious eroticism and the reign of the unfettered imagination.”<br /><br />“Unfettered imagination,” “delirious eroticism,” and “marvelous” are exactly right for “I Am Coming,” whose three stanzas concern a very memorable and surreal journey. The poet follows an unnamed female – a muse and desired other, as I read it – to an imagined place where, again as I read it, inspiration reigns. Of course, the title can be read as a <i>double-entendre</i> which gives the poem a sexual charge. <br /><br />The first stanza features propulsive anaphoric rhythms and quick-cut images. The opening line:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I am following her to the wavering moon</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">has the poet in thrall, leaving the terrestrial and diurnal behind. The journey continues in the seven lines that follow, the first six of which begin with the word “to” (or “and to”), with each telling of a different place to which Lamantia follows the unnamed “her.” The first such place – “a bridge by the long waterfront” – seems to have a real-world analog: the Bay Bridge, less than a decade old at the time, standing above the series of piers jutting into San Francisco Bay along the Embarcadero. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The other places to which Lamantia follows seem more purely imagined. These include “valleys of beautiful arson,” “ men eating wild minutes from a clock,” and, in the stanza’s very evocative last lines, “ that dark room beside a castle / of youthful voices singing to the moon.” That final image ties back, of course, to the opening line, and adds the auditory dimension of song. <br /><br />The poem’s other two stanzas, three and five lines long respectively, are as memorable as the first, even as they abandon that stanza’s anaphoric structure. The second stanza shifts perspective, looking forward to what will happen to the “she” when the sun comes up: “she will live at a sky / covered with sparrow’s blood / and wrapped in robes of lost decay.” I like the use of the indefinite article “a” with sky, which removes that particular atmospheric zone from the familiar or known. But it’s the nightmarish shock of “cover in sparrow’s blood” and “wrapped in robes of lost decay” that stand out here. Automatistic, sub-conscious images are not always pretty. <br /><br />Here’s the final stanza:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">But I am coming to the moon,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and she will be there in a musical night,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">in a night of burning laughter</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">burning like a road of my brain</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">pouring its arm into the lunar lake.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In these concluding lines, Lamantia returns to the selenological trope of the first stanza and also uses images that relate back to other images used there (“musical” = “voices singing” | “burning” = “arson” | “road” = “bridge”). Those resonances plus repetition of key words (“night” in the second and third lines, “burning” in the third and fourth, and the gerunds that begin the last two lines) makes for a very rich and heady climax.<br /><br />With its evocative opening montage, counter-point second stanza, and compelling conclusion, “I Am Coming” was an amazing debut. Let me repeat, Lamantia was fifteen! Kenneth Rexorth’s remark about him, written in the 1960s, is worth remembering: “I have never known anyone else who started out, without preliminaries, with no five-finger exercises, as an achieved poet.” </span></div>
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<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">There Are Many Pathways to the Garden</span></b></i> </div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“There Are Many Pathways to the Garden” also appeared in the June 1943 issue of <i>View</i> (see it in image of the magazine’s page, above) and so is another written when he was fifteen. The poem’s title is a beautiful thing in and of itself, a persuasive variant on the idea, common in certain philosophic or religious traditions, that there is more than one way to revelation.<br /><br />The poem’s memorable images – remember they are automatistic – include “a stevedore’s wax ocean” and “a sublime bucket of red eyes.” There’s also a “rage of pennies” and “a crab’s rude whip.” Reading them, charged as they are with imaginative energy, my mind happily dances about, <br /><br />Four decades after it was first published, an English Professor reprinted “There Are Many Pathways to the Garden” in a book-length “guide to understanding” and “a celebration of” poetry. See Burton Raffael, <i>How To Read A Poem</i> (Meridian Books- Penguin Group, 1984), pages 122-123. Lamantia’s poem was used as a kind of counter-example. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“I have no idea what this is all about,” the professor declared, adding, “I recognize surrealist techniques but what they are meant to do I simply do not know.” Conceding there were “respectable people” who liked Lamantia’s poem, the he professor insisted as a believer in “poetry as communication” that he did not. He called the poem “truly obscure,” “impenetrable” and a “poetry of befuddlement.”<br /><br />I do not share the professor’s views. The poem’s title provides plenty of “communication” for me. More important, the wild images and absence of positivist logic or a straight-line narrative causes reverie to romp and associational thought to reign. In the concluding line of the poem’s second-to-last stanza Lamantia declares, </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">. . . I set free the dawn of your desires</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">and I think that’s precisely what this poem does, and does very well. <br /><br />About a decade ago the city of Berkeley had a couple dozen poems – each written by a poet with some connection to area – engraved on large metal plaques, and then placed the plaques on sidewalks downtown. They plaques are still there, and they’re pretty cool. “There Are Many Pathways to the Garden” was supposed to be included – it’s in the official book-length anthology – but for some reason never made it to a plaque / the sidewalk. Maybe that’s because Lamantia’s poem is too out-there even for Berkeley! </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>Touch of the Marvelous</i> </b><br /><br />“Touch of the Marvelous” is probably the most well known early Lamantia poem. Written at age fifteen or sixteen, and another from his “pure psychic automatism” years, it’s the first poem in The Collected. It was first published by Andre Breton in the magazine <i>VVV</i> in February 1944, along with two other poems and a full-page letter by Lamantia. The poem’s three-line opening stanza – </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The mermaids have come to the desert</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">they are setting up a boudoir next to the camel</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">who lies at their feet of roses</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">– captures and accelerates most readers’ imagination. <br /><br />The surge of surrealistic and oneiric imagery and energy continues in the second stanza:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">A wall of alabaster is drawn over our heads</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">by four rainbow men</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">whose naked figures give off a light</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">that slowly wriggles upon the sands</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In the first line, the word “alabaster” – familiar and slightly strange – seems key. The roll of its four syllables the deliberate pacing of the wall being pulled up, and the three soft a’s suggest something of how the wall looks (and feels). Also, the word denotes something translucent, and thus suggests the idea of energy passing through, an important concept in a poem of automatistic origins in which consciousness and the sub-conscious seem to mix. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Another key in this stanza</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s</span> first line is Lamantia’s use of the attributive adjective “our.” It suggests that we readers are also present in the desert along with him, the camel, and the boudoir of the mermaids with feet of roses. <br /><br />And then, of course, there are the “four rainbow men / whose naked figures give off a light </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">/ that slowly wriggles upon the sands.”</span> I always imagine – arising no doubt from “rainbow” – that the wriggling light is that of the visible electro-magnetic spectrum. The words here have the vividness and plasticity of an animated technicolor film. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The poem’s third stanza begins with Lamantia’s iconic declaration about being moved or stirred by (to borrow from the editors’ introduction) “manifestations of the uncanny, the sublime, or the impossible, which resist or exceed rationalization.” Of course, the poem puts it far more concisely and memorably: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I am touched by the marvelous</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">as the mermaids’ nimble fingers</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">go through my hair</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">that has come down forever from my head</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">to cover my body</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">the savage fruit of lunacy</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Lamantia’s declaration seems very real, in part because “the mermaids . . . fingers” go through his “hair.” That’s a naturalistic, tactile, and sensual detail that ties the surrealistic and fantastic to the actual. Hair, of course, is a universal feature of puberty, and the line here intimating that it covers his body reminds that Lamantia wrote this poem as a teenager. Calling the hair, in the stanza’s last line,“the savage fruit of lunacy” seems both an automatistic image and one rooted in the sometimes maddening and wild emotional charges and physical changes of adolescence. <br /><br />Lamantia’s declaration here also reminds me of Arthur Rimbaud’s self-description, written when he was a mid-teen, as “a child touched by the finger of the Muse.” See Enid Starkie, <i>Arthur Rimbaud</i>, pages 50-51. Do all prodigies feel similarly moved? <br /><br />“Touch of the Marvelous” reaches its peak, I think, in the next three stanzas: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Behold the boudoir is flying away</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and I am holding onto the leg of the lovely one</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">called beneath the sea</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">BIANCA</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">She is turning</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">with the charm of a bird</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">into two giant lips</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and I am now falling into the goblet of suicide</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">She is the angelic doll turned black</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">she is the child of broken elevators</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">she is the curtain of holes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">that you never want to throw away</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">she is the first woman and first man</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and I am lost in the search to have her</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The metamorphoses and the other action in these lines startle. The archaic and biblical “Behold” with which the stanza begins gives what follows an epic frame, and yet the extraordinary events that follow are presented matter-of-factly, giving the fantastic a very natural air. The associative connection between the “two giant lips” and “the goblet of suicide” which follows (the latter image, as Lamantia himself later pointed out, foreshadows his life-long struggle with depression), creates a sensibility beyond logic.<br /><br />The anaphoric series of metaphors (“she is the . . .”) that describe Lamantia's various imaginings of BIANCA are particularly potent. The first and last of these – “the angelic doll turned black” and “the first woman and the first man” – suggest the union of opposites central to the surrealist thought. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The other two metaphors are more allusive. The “child of broken elevators” is – well, I don’t know – but it’s a line I remember every time I get in a elevator. The next image – “the curtain of holes you never want to throw away” is perhaps a bit easier. It plainly implies a long-standing, deeply personal, and unalterable desire and attachment, a feeling that explodes in the following stanza/couplet with Lamantia’s confession, “I am lost in the search to have her”. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The poem’s final three stanzas are a kind of denouement, but desire remains primal and is expressed through surreal imagery (“I am hungry for the secrets of sadistic fish / I am plunging into the sea“). Lamantia ultimately continues to seek “BIANCA” in a place or space “beyond the hours and the day.” No clock, no calendar, just the desire for inspired marvelousness. That, I believe, is just the way it ought to be! </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>“It’s summer’s moment in autumn’s hour” </b></i> <br /><br />“It’s summer’s moment in autumn’s hour” is the killer first line of this untitled two stanza, nineteen line poem, first published in 1948 (it subsequently appeared in <i>Ekstasis</i> (1959), Lamantia’s second book). Have you ever been in San Francisco on a nice day in October? If you have, then you know that Lamantia’s opening line gets it exactly right. <br /><br />Written during a period when Lamantia’s poems brought in more naturalistic details, the opening six lines of “It’s summer’s moment . . .” are seemingly drawn from what he’s observed:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">It’s summer’s moment in autumn’s hour.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I walk over a carpet of leaves</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Fallen on a hill overlooking the city</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Watching the clouded moon cut</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Like a white diamond</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> across the sky.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">That’s a sweet use of blank space in that last-quoted line, allowing the moon-simile from the line above to for a moment shine and move as the reader’s eyes move across the page. The verisimilitude of these lines sets up the stanza’s last four lines, which arise from another sort of reality – that of a wild imagination: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The godly animals, roused from sleep </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> — Flying serpents and the many eyed of the ancients—</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Come out to mate on the lawns of heaven</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">All about me a fierce fireworks of desire.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">How about that? Do you remember the concupiscence of youth? Lamantia was twenty when he wrote this poem. His phrase “a fierce fireworks of desire”seems exactly right.<br /><br />The poem’s final stanza has a reflective, romantic, and lyrical tone. Lamantia declares he would make a necklace of the leaves “[in] vision of her the whirling winds have taken” and “joyous in her love.” But it ends more mystically than what one might expect: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I would be no more sentient than this bird above me</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Its breast against a receding wind</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">That is time broken by the beasts of heaven.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The final line’s image, of course, refers back to the “godly animals” of the first stanza. Interestingly, the visionary wish, “I would be no more sentient than this bird above me . . . ,” foreshadows by about twenty-five years Lamantia’s deep interest in ornithology. <br /><br /> I find the ecstatic and transcendent verve of “It’s summer’s moment in autumn’s hour” deeply moving. I remember it every warm fall day that I’m lucky enough to find myself atop a hill here in the City. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>Inside the Journey</b></i> <br /><br />“Inside the Journey” is a beautifully written angly-jangly eight paragraph surge of a prose poem. It was first published, along with three other similar works by Lamantia, in “A Little Anthology of The Poem In Prose,” a special 80-page section in <i>New Directions 14 </i>(1953), the well regarded annual from that publisher. The section, edited by Charles Henri Ford, which </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">I believe was the first comprehensive mid-century gathering of prose poetry, </span>featured work by historical and contemporary writers.<br /><br />The word “quickly” is key in the first paragraph of “Inside the Journey”– it begins each of the first four sentences. By the last of those sentences, which begins:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Quickly and quickly, and faster, faster . . . </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">the poem’s whirling in the mind’s eye (and ear). It’s as if some subconscious centrifugal force has been brought to the fore. <br /><br />It’s hard to describe the rest of the poem. It’s free, wild, personal and surprising. The third and fourth-to-last paragraphs of the poem show well the tour-de-force pacing and chains of imagery featured throughout: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> In another time, I was making blueprints for the Eternal, but the work was interrupted by some ogre who jumped out from behind a slab of magenta sky, and I was mesmerized on the spot between the poison I was wiping from my lips and the face behind the face I saw looking at me from the sky I was using as a mirror.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"> Anyway, I broke the spell. But another wave of invented emotions sank and another light fell on the crest of the wave: escape was a door I kept shutting all around me and on those who were carving me, symbolically they said, for the first course</span> <span style="font-size: large;">at the restaurant for the initiates of the lake of love— which is to say, sperm ran high that year, breaking over the brains of those who know how to conduct themselves properly in this world: which is to say, life goes on gathering wool for the mothers of all the daughters whose tongues spit live lobsters and whose insatiable desire for</span> <span style="font-size: large;">some seasalt paradise makes thunder break in my skull: which is to say, very simply and without metaphor, that my brain was oppressing me.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Take a look at the very short sentence – “Anyway, I broke the spell” – that begins the last paragraph above. That sentence sharply contrasts with both the long complex sentence that constitutes the entirety of the preceding paragraph is the paragraph above it, and the even longer and even more complex sentence that follows. Its brevity, as well as its almost off-hand informality and directness, cleanses the mind’s palate between the other sentences’ almost impossibly rich imagery.<br /><br />I love too how the latter paragraph’s l-o-n-g final sentence sustains attention. First, there’s the phrase, near the sentence’s start, that “escape was a door I kept shutting all around me . . . .” The nightmarish image of a person repeatedly shutting himself out from the possibility of escape is easily seen, and lures the reader into the suddenly deep water that follows. The phrase “which is to say,” which in the sentence’s last half Lamantia repeats three times, then serves as a kind of navigational buoy, a mooring or marker in the sentence’s oceanic waves of clauses and images. The last clause – “my brain was oppressing me” – brings it all to anchor. <br /><br />The poem’s crazed energy continues in the remaining paragraphs, and even gets more intense, with the next paragraph beginning, seemingly <i>in media res</i>, </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“—And that is not the most of it—</span><span style="font-size: large;">”</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">with Lamantia then embarking on an extended exploration of what he calls “the great vacuum of <i>this</i> world” (italics as in original). “Inside the Journey” indeed!<br /><br />I heard Lamantia recite “Inside the Journey” at a Poetry Project New York reading in 1999. With his voice a mix of matter-of-fact and dramatic verve, Lamantia spoke his rich and fantastic sentences. I recall an audible collective exclamation (was there also applause?) when the poem was over. I know it was recorded, and maybe someday we’ll be able to hear it.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">“escape was a door I kept shutting all around me . . . .” </span></b></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>The Owl</i></b> </span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“The Owl,”written in the early 1950s, offers a memorable take on the titular bird. The repeated words that end the first stanza hypnotize (italics as in original):</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> . . . his Eye magnetic to the moon,</span><br />
<i><span style="font-size: large;">his Eye magnetic to the moon.</span></i></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The repetition of the words, and italics, also seem to reflect or mimic the eye-moon attraction that’s described. <br /><br />The owl here seems to stand for the poetic marvelous and/or a kind of hermetic knowledge, but not anything easily attained. The poem needs to read whole – you’ll find it and do that, will you please? – but here’s a stanza that shows some of what I mean: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">He is not easily enticed to manifestation,</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">But stony silence, petrified moments</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">— a transfiguration— will bring him out</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">focused on the screen where all transfigured bodies are.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">You must be humble to his fangs</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">that paw the moonball dissolving in the space</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">from the corner of your eye:</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">He’ll trick you otherwise</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">— into daylight, where you meet his double while running.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>[ In a grove ]</i></b><br /><br />This beautiful and wild shaped poem, from the late 1950s, was published in <i>Ekstasis</i> (Auerhahn, 1959):</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The editors’ introduction in <i>The Collected Lamantia</i> suggests that this poem’s shape is similar to a vortex or a triangle. Others have seen a rose, a mountain / volcano, or a censer. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">How about you? </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">No matter what’s seen, the poem -- what it says -- reminds us of how Lamantia could and did receive visions and language from the world-about-him.</span></div>
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<b><i><span style="font-size: large;">“Ah Blessed Virgin Mary”</span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Ah Blessed Virgin Mary” is the first line of a short (14 lines over three stanzas) prayer-poem of Catholic mystical devotion. In the final stanza, visionary fervency reflects clearly in, and from, Lamantia’s words:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Tell Him I have eyes only for Heaven</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">as I look to you </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> Queen mirror</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">of the heavenly court </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Ah Blessed Virgin Mary” first appeared in a 1959 issue of Wallace Berman’s hand-assembled <i>Semina</i> magazine, and at that time played an important inspirational role for the great San Francisco artist Jay DeFeo. Reading the poem there, DeFeo was deeply moved by the stanza quoted above, believing that it resonated with her work. She then inscribed those final lines on the backside of <i>The Eyes</i>, a large (42 inches by 84 inches) graphite drawing she had just finished. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">Jay DeFeo, <i>The Eyes</i></span></b></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i> </i></span> </span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">DeFeo also wrote Lamantia’s lines across the wall of her studio, right below where she taped up the drawing. When the poem appeared a few months later in <i>Ekstasis</i> (Auerhahn, 1959), DeFeo hand copied the last stanza of Lamantia</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’</span>s poem on an end page in her copy of that book. On another end page in her copy of </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Ekstasis</i></span>, DeFeo drew a preliminary sketch of her masterpiece sculpted painting, <i>The Rose</i>. It all makes for a very cool story of Lamantia, </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“</span>Ah Blessed Virgin Mary,” and DeFeo (and was documented in the catalog for her recent retrospective exhibition at SF-MOMA and The Whitney). </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>From the Front </b></i><br /><br />The title “From the Front” suggests a war correspondent’s report from a fiercely contested zone, and in this poem’s thirty-seven lines a kind of battle rage as Lamantia experiences the world about him and that which swirls within. The poem does not so much describe what happens but rather enacts it – a quality that can often be said about Lamantia’s poetry. <br /><br />Written in Mexico in the late 1950s or early 1960s, “From the Front” first appeared in Destroyed Works (1962), as the final poem in a section titled Mantic Notebook. The poem takes off quick doesn’t slow much. The exclamatory single-word first line – </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Tenochtitlan! </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">– provides both a geographical anchor (the ruins of that historic community lie beneath what is now central Mexico City) and a sense of ancient forces at work. More than that, its multi-syllable mostly hard consonant sonics and exclamation mark provide a pulse-revving jolt. Ecphonesis, baby – it always gets me going! <br /><br />The poem next features blasts of sensations or thoughts from without and within. There are here and now details, as observed or heard: “grey seven thousand feet high / mist of dust,” “tin door open / to slow motion immobilized traffic,” “dust of wind,” and “slamming venetian blinds,” for example. Some of these details get repeated as the poem progresses. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Along with the naturalistic details, Lamantia brings in a number of esoteric or seemingly coined allusions (“fields of Egluria” and “Chicagos of Zeno”), visionary exclamations (“the sky is peeling its skin off!”) and questions – lots of questions – (“Is this American mood?,” for example, or the wonderfully outré “who ate the dogbrick sandwich?”). It’s quite a swirl. <br /><br />In the middle of these details, allusions and questions comes a single word sentence – “Reprieve.” It’s a moment of calm amidst the roiling churn of observations, stimulation, interior thoughts and questioning emotions. But the swirl immediately begins again, with fragmented and jammed together details and thoughts clashing and thrusting:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">. . . . Sail of dust wind</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">venetian mountain sequence</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">zeroguns silence the street</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">mute traffics— desperate surrealism</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">backfire from motorcycles</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">waves over empty roof tops</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The poem’s final lines masterfully enact and reflect the sensation of a self assaulted by or caught in a vortex of what’s both within and without. There’s first a set of, as I count them, nine questions that create a crescendo of uncertainty, and then a stand-alone last line that, in another kind of crescendo, repeats many of the poem’s here-and-now details:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> Where am I? you answer</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> the question where am I?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> who’s here? who wants Veracruz?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> what is New York? who is San Francisco?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> Friend </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> where are you?</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> what to do go where how?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Motorcycles of atonal venetian blind dust of wind roof top!</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">That final line, for me, is beyond wow – so I’ll write yow and xow and zow! It plays across the page (and in the mind) as a machine gun rat-a-tat manic lexical riff, a tremendous rush of words. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>STILL POEMS</i></b><br /><br />STILL POEMS (all caps in the original) is the title for a suite of a half-dozen poems, each between 13 and 21 lines, published in <i>Destroyed Works</i> (1962) but written in and around 1959. <br /><br />Have you ever found yourself in a moment relative or even transcendent calm, both within and without, when thought seems larger and deeper than usual? Sure you have, and it’s that kind of “still” – an inner meditative or ruminative state – that these six poems arise from. <br /><br />Sometimes this reverie-rich state happens deep in the dark, as is evocatively described by Lamantia in the first line of one of the six STILL POEMS:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The night is a space of white marble</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">This description of night as a space of white marble clearly suggests the hardness, durability, and beauty of the mental space out of which Lamantia wrote. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">These poems mostly are direct and very self-aware: “This is my mind talking,” “I’m weak from the altitude” and “There is this distance between me and what I see,” for example. But they are also at times quotidian (“a car goes by,” for example, or “I’m eating a tomato”).</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">And yet they can also be ecstatic and even transcendent (“arrows mark the dawn!”and “I am a God”), visionary or hallucinatory (“I see New York upside down” or “I shall watch speckled jewel grow on the back of warspilt horses”). Or vatic (“I have given fair warning / Chicago New York Los Angeles have gone down”). Mystical too (“everywhere immanence of the presence of God” and “I long for the luminous darkness of God / I long for the superessential light of this darkness”). At points they are didactic as well (“what’s important is not seen by eyes nor heard by ears”). Even outré (“I have eaten rhinoceros tail” and “A poppy size of the sun in my skull”) and beautifully mysterious (“Can you find the dinosaur’s track? / Can you put your hands on telephone wires? / Can you find Socrates in some garden?”). <br /><br />Get my point? These are vibrant and potent poet, the work of a poet alert to his surroundings and thoughts. Lamantia LIVES in these poems. </span></div>
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<i><b><span style="font-size: large;">Morning Light Song </span></b></i></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Morning Light Song” was written in the 1950s, when Lamantia lived in Mexico. </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">It was</span> one of four Lamantia poems Donald Allen included in his <i>The New American Poetry</i> anthology. </span> It’s a single stanza of about two dozen lines, most very long. The opening four lines are particularly rich in religious fervor and the ecstatic, and always energize my mind and spirit:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">RED DAWN clouds coming up! the heavens proclaim you, Absolute God</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I claim the glory, in you, of singing to you this morning</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">For I am coming out of myself and Go to you, Lord of the Morning Light</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">For what’s a singer worth if he can’t talk to you, My God of Light?</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">This long-lined mantic manic devotional energy surge continues throughout the poem (here are two random lines, to give a bit more of the flavor of the work): </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Here’s the worshiping Eye of my soul stinging the heavens</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Here’s my chant to you, Morning of Mornings, God of gods, light of light</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">I’ve loved </span>“Morning Light Song” </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">for years.</span></span></span> </span> Even now, I’ll sometimes get up real early, while </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">it’s</span> still dark, walk past the house (about eight blocks from where I live) on Sanchez Street in which Philip was born (in 1927), continue up to a hilltop here in San Francisco, then read the poem as the sun rises. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>Gork! </b></i><br /><br />“Gork!” is a poem from sometime in the mid-1960s. It concerns, to quote from its first line, “one of those days.” We’ve all had “one of those days,” I think, but me oh my I don’t know if anyone has ever had “one of those days” like Lamantia had one of those days: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">It’s one of those days when the moon jumps</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">out if its skin and the walls of the sky </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">crash down with a thud . . . </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">There are many searing phrases and images in this astrology-influenced, visionary, and social/cultural-protest poem, including “heads of state are venus fly traps / eating the scum of their slaves / from cisterns of all the phony capitols / of King Mob.” Lamantia advises readers:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">the planetary aspects are so bad if</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">anyone at all is not a Taoist — Be Still</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">& Act Not — an age of karma is set going so that</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">all future cranes & paradise birds</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">over bleed on the crests of all the seas</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">of our world, to the degree that on</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Another One of These Days the air itself</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">shall strike down the citizens like a plague!</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Another great thing about “Gork” is its approximately 85 word sub-title. Adjust your glasses and fasten your seat-belt, here it is (italics as in the original):</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Or, My Personal Minute Reading On the Calendar of Emblems Proclaimed From the</i> Principality of Weir <i>Which is Constantly SomeWhereElse Therefor Unreachable by</i></span><i> </i><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Machines & Beyond Any Psycho-Physical Analysis, and Conjuncts Only Relatively With the Phantomatic Distortions & Material Encumbrances Socially Projected by Over Proliferating Mobocracies, Murderous & Degenerate Sciences, Retrograde Religions & Politics At This Time Increasingly Oppressive & Horent Perpetuating Their Arbitrary Prerogatives Out of Certain </i>Atavisms of Thought & Operation <i>— Steeped in Integral Errors —</i> Known <i>to Corrupt and Destroy Our Humanity.</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">That’s one tremendous and tremendously weird sub-title as prose poem! </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++</span></span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>What is Not Strange?</i></b><br /><br />“Nothing” is the implicit but emphatic (and double-negative and thus in that way strange itself) answer that Lamantia</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">’s poem gives</span> to the question posed by its title. The strange here includes the poem’s shape, which zigs and zags relative to the left margin. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The allusions and hermetic references in the poem are potently strange too. Lamantia among other things brings in the sea towers of Sicily, the tongues of elephants, the Ibis, Diotima, Hermes, the fans of Murasaki, zipzap cities, Venus, Visionary hotrodders, Geronimo, sassafras seeds, Superman, Holy Biscuits, the Pacific Ocean, and the Roman Empire.<br /><br />The poem’s prescriptive, stand-alone, majuscular (and muscular!) final line:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">DO A KUNDALINI SOMERSAULT!</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">is memorable, a beautiful mystery that while perhaps not entirely explainable seems exactly right. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">“DO A KUNDALINI SOMERSAULT!”</span></b></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><i> I Touch You </i></b><br /><br />An approximately 40-line surrealist love poem, </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“I Touch You” </span> is very much in the spirit of Andre Breton’s “Free Union,” Benjamin Peret’s “Wink,” and Viteslav Nezval’s “Song of Songs.” The beloved is celebrated, always in unusual or even unsettling ways. Here are the first seven lines:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I touch you with my eyes when you lie under spiders of silk </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I touch you with my one hundred headed giraffes too secret to be seen</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">the rods & cones the morning covets awaken you</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">with my touch of tobacco eyes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and you rise from the snail’s bed of tubular hair </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I touch you with the breath of jet planes</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and they are gone elsewhere to you too </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">About a decade after it was first published as the first poem in <i>The Blood of the Air </i>( Four Seasons Foundation, 1970 ), “I Touch You” (along with the myth of the Sirens) inspired <a href="http://robertnasveld.com/works/i-touch-you/">Dutch composer Robert Nasveld to produce a multi-track tape abstract composition. While using none of Lamantia’s words, the song certainly catches the strangeness of the poem’s beauty (click here to listen)</a>. </span> </div>
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<b><i><span style="font-size: large;">The Comics</span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“The Comics,” from <i>The Blood of the Air</i> (1970), is a surreal gem. Here’s the poem:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Cussing</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">the men are going home to work</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">on sleeping horses</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and automobiles come alive</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and return to the factories</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">wearing lingerie and makeup </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Steering wheels chrome fenders and gears</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">leer at the computers </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">in the outer offices</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and the engines—ah those seductive engines—</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">get into black boots and thrash the clouds </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">rushing through gargantuan windows the pistons are eating</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">with anthropoid teeth. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">True to its title,</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"> the poem <span style="font-size: large;">reads as an almost panel-by-panel
series of images, and has more than a bit of biting comic humor too. (Lamantia, especially as a child and young teen,
deeply loved certain comics, as he explained in a lengthy essay
published in the late 1970s.) I like how it uses the comic
tradition </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">of animating normally inanimate objects</span></span> (think for starters of Winsor McCay’s classic<i> Little Nemo</i>, pictured above) . </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The main energy of the poem comes from its images and action. However, certain small effects, such as the sonic rhyme of the “gears” and “leer,” the hyphenated aside about the engines (complete with an “ah,”a verbal interjection often favored by Lamantia), and the multi-syllabic adjectives in the last two lines, add greatly to the whole.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Lamantia earns bonus points in “The Comics” for including
two no-doubt giants of modern life – the automobile and computer. The
allusion to computers suggests a a certain perspicacity or imaginative
foretelling since it would be years before those machines became
ubiquitous (other poems from that period also mention the computer).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> <span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++</span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>Between Sleep and Waking</b></i><br /><br />Previously unpublished, “Between Sleep and Waking” was written in the 1970s. The title refers to the hypnopompic state (defined by the title). The poem does not so much describe that zone as arise from it. </span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“Between Sleep and Waking” </span></span></span></span></span>features a series of unpunctuated quasi-sentences and phrases spread over 17 lines, with plenty of surreal or dream-life images and action: “mineral parabolas,” for example, and “cascades of thundering snow / with giant fires on saucers the earth left hanging / from its last general orchestration.” There’s also a reference to:</span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">. . . the flute of leaves</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">tangled at the mutating crater I call my muse</span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">That Lamantia calls his muse “the mutating crater” causes me to puzzle, and I cannot claim to know what precisely he means or is suggesting by the term. Perhaps it’s a reference to some very deep place in the mind where what I’ll call the thoughts and words from the subconscious, similar to magma in a volcano, rises up and forever changes he landscape of the conscious mind’s surface. But maybe the term is automatistic and can’t be parsed. <br /><br />The poem ends with a description of an exchange, perhaps between Lamantia and his muse, or maybe it’s between the poet and his readers, or – and this seems most likely – between the sleeping and waking, or waking and sleeping parts of Lamantia’s mind. In any event, it’s an interaction shot through with the marvelous: </span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">what I give you with my eye of solitudinous matter</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">you return with your left hand of laughter</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">as it gathers ocular pitches</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">scattered by black needles</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">over the storm of wooden eggs</span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">The term “ocular pitches” here charms and intrigues me. The adjective “ocular,” denoting the visual, when combined with “pitches” -- if that noun is taken to mean a steeply-angled environment -- seems </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">to suggest vertigo, or at least vision from acute perspectives. I think of Dickinson and </span></span></span></span></span>“tell it slant”or any mind when it looks at things from an unusual vantage point. Maybe even how a mind sees things, the oddness that can be, as it wakes from sleep. </span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />I also like “Between Sleep and Waking” for three other reasons. First, it remind me of the poem “Awakened From Sleep” from Lamantia’s teen years. It deserves a full reading but let me here quote four lines that, for me, reflect a beautiful embrace of the bliss that sometimes is the waking mind:</span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">There is no rule here,</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">No seasons and no misery;</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">There are only our desires</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Revealed in the mist.</span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Another reason I like “Between Sleep and Waking” is that Lamantia loved the permeable zone where the dreams and thoughts of sleep meet the more controlled thought in the waking mind. I once had very long, very late night / early morning phone call with Philip. After almost two hours, I laid down on my bed, and as Philip talked I dozed off for a moment or three. Waking up, I immediately told him what had happened and began to apologize. Philip would have none of it, insisting that he wanted to know exactly what was in my mind just then! <br /><br />The final reason I like this poem is because the zone between sleeping and waking is a very common human experience -- it happens </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">to everyone everyday</span></span></span></span></span>. As such, it may be the easiest way to explain the nature of the automatistic or quasi-automatistic zones that Lamantia valued when writing poetry. </span></span></span></span> </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZirtTEao0HA/Umc39qFAdmI/AAAAAAAAC1w/V_bkyXTgndM/s1600/sleepwaves.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="345" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ZirtTEao0HA/Umc39qFAdmI/AAAAAAAAC1w/V_bkyXTgndM/s400/sleepwaves.gif" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">brain waves - awake and in sleep</span></b></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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<i><b> </b></i><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++</span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>The Romantic Movement </b></i><br /><br />The five paragraph prose love poem “The Romantic Movement” (dedicated to Nancy Peters) was written on a ship while passing the Azores on an Atlantic crossing. It was published in <i>Becoming Visible</i> (1981). Sea-going details immediately grab the imagination:</span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">The boat tilts on your image on the waves between a fire of foam and the flower of moon rays, these the flags of your dreaming lips. I’m watching Venus on the ogred sky and a continent in cocoons. </span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Other images here similarly scintillate: “our eyes the dahlias of torrential ignition,” for example, or “the sempiternal spectrum of sundown at Segovia.” The latter’s alliterative multi-syllabic rhythms vividly suggest what must have been a very stretched and synesthetic twilight sky. The poem’s next-to-last paragraph is a complex and beautiful wish for the beloved. It’s so beautiful, I repeat it here, and wish it for you:</span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">The whisper of the inter-voice to wrap you in the mantle of marvelous power, with the secret protection of the forest that falls asleep in fire whose ores become transmined only for love—all your steps will lead to the inner sanctum none but you behold, your shadow putting on the body of metaphoric light. </span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">The final paragraph of “The Romantic Movement” is another Lamantia <i>tour-de-force</i>. A single sentence of almost twenty clauses, it begins with the declaration, “The stone I have tossed into the air of chance shall come to you one great day,” and then proceeds to list all which that stone will “exfoliate” (throw off) for the beloved. It may not seem particularly exciting but believe me, it is. The stuff the stone sheds beguiles, even when (as it often is) esoteric or hermetic. There are for example, “the carbuncle of delights,” “Chief Seattle’s lost medicine bag,” “a madrone forest to live inside of” and “the redolent eyes of first-born seers.” May you receive such things from those you love. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“The Romantic Movement” </span></span></span></span></span>also celebrates poetry-in-life and life-as-poetry (“life is a poem someday to be lived”), and includes Lamantia’s evocation of the imagined rulers of the poetic imagination – </span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">King Analogue</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Queen Image</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Prince Liberty . . .</span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">These three lines were considered important enough that they were quoted in the concluding paragraph of <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/21/arts/21lamantia.html?scp=1&sq=lamantia&st=nyt&_r=0"><i>The New York Times</i> obituary for Lamantia, published shortly after his death (click here to read)</a>.<br /> </span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;">“</span></b><b><span style="font-size: small;">the waves between a fire of foam and the flower of moon rays”</span></b><br />
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></b><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++</span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><i>Redwood Highway</i></b><br /><br />At about 250 lines, “Redwood Highway” is the longest lineated verse poem Lamantia ever published. It opens <i>Becoming Visible</i> (1981), and with its mix of esoteric allusions, western locales, AmerIndian references, naturalistic observations and surrealistic imagery, it anticipates the poetic approach of <i>Meadowlark West</i> (1986). </span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">The poem is made up of six unnumbered sections, each of which contain
between two and seven stanzas of various length. The lines are unpunctuated, and often relate to each other not via grammar or logic but by poetic
association. </span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NOI9rySlCvk/Umc4Mna04zI/AAAAAAAAC2A/Q7yYdFKj3Xo/s400/redwood+highway.jpg" width="267" /><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">There’s a real “Redwood Highway” in northern California (it’s the official name of Highway 101 from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border). However, Lamantia’s poem is not a travelogue set on that road. In fact, the poem has only a few references to that found along the route – redwood trees and the Yurok people (Native Americans of the lower Klamath River region) are about it. <br /> </span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">In fact, there are far more references in “Redwood Highway” to places and things far from the northern stretch of Highway 101. These include mountains in Arizona, Walpi (the Hopi Village), Oregon caves, the Washo of Nevada and Cora of Mexico, Mount Shasta (inland Northern California) and the Wintun people, and locations in the Bay Area (Mount Diablo, Angel Island, and Coit Tower). Plus there are references to historical figures such as Giordano Bruno and Charles Fourier. As such, “Redwood Highway” seems to refer to where the poem took flight, or the mental space within which it occurs – a journey of discovery that has the sentinel majesty of the world’s tallest trees. </span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">The poem’s lexical energy arises from the visionary verve and swerves of Lamantia’s thought, including the various allusions (examples given above) and many unusual and thus very striking adjective-noun combinations. These include phlogistic eye, murmuring minerals, furious salt, alembic sleeve, iron cloud, molten phallicular, antelope-necked tom-toms, sea-witch glamour, webfooted mirrors and quadratic foliage.</span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“Redwood Highway,” </span></span></span></span></span> using the geographic places it mentions as well as its many allusions, explores and seeks knowledge. For Lamantia, the land, and the traditions associated with it, are – to quote his line – “Dazzling with Mythos Rising.” However, the poem is a kind of alchemical quest, and thus does not translate to rational prose. It’s all opposed to “the gangrene of the world,” </span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">as the poem’s final line puts it. </span></span></span></span></span> <br /><br />Although it’s not typical of the poem, there’s a marvelous image, seemingly taken from an observation in nature, presented in the last three lines of a stanza near the end of the fifth section of “Redwood Highway.” The context matters, so here’s the stanza in its entirety: </span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Closed eyelids through the eternity behind us</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">This vast ring of the rising crystal</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">To swim into manta rays</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Mentation of the vowel</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">To the sonatal leap</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Hidden on the verge of the verbal jungle</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">A tarantula</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Quaintly with a diffidence of speed</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Retreats back into its hollow</span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">I love how the final three lines reflect the ornate and seemingly timid deliberativeness of the spider’s movement. The heart of it is “Quaintly with a diffidence of speed” -- the words there amble across the page (and in the mind), similar to the how spider must have moved. In addition, the multi-syllabic words in the final three lines – “ta·ran·tu·la / Quaint·ly . . . dif·fi·dence . . . / Re·treats . . . hol·low” – seem to connote the arachnid’s segmented appendages. <br /><br />It’s a cool image, neatly presented. Plus, coming as it does after lines that explicitly involve the mind engaged in language, the retreating tarantula suggests how words or ideas sometimes just move away in the thinking mind. </span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6OlP9yur-tQ/Umd2RmMlAmI/AAAAAAAAC3U/oW-kEsf6sqM/s1600/tarantula.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="265" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6OlP9yur-tQ/Umd2RmMlAmI/AAAAAAAAC3U/oW-kEsf6sqM/s400/tarantula.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">“A tarantula / Quaintly with a diffidence of speed / Retreats back into its hollow”</span></b></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr>
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"> </span></b><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++</span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>The Fulcrum Loaded</b></i> </span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Published in <i>Becoming Visible</i> (1981), “The Fulcrum Loaded” is a potent poem of approximately 40 lines. The title plainly implies a machine ready have energy or effort applied. Of course, the energy to make this poem-machine work is supplied by you, the reader, by the act of reading. Reading lifts Lamantia’s words to imagination’s stratosphere, where logic may be scarce but surprise is abundant. The sensation of accelerating lexical energy begins in the poem’s opening two lines: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">With the serenity of goats copulating in a volcano of street corners</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Curves of thought turn over the silver avalanche dreamt from the ocean’s brain</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Yow! Now that’s a vigorous (and surreal) characterization of thought in the waking mind. Notice too the three hard c’s at the end of the first line, and the one at the start of the second. They create a cacophony that’s not at all serene, which of course is consistent with the impression given by metaphor itself (there is nothing serene about what the goats are doing, and where!). Let me repeat: Yow!<br /><br />There’s similarly energetic images in the poem’s other almost forty lines. Excerpts are difficult, since the effects line-to-line are largely dependent on context and flow, but just for fun and edification, try this set of a half-dozen lines, which contain both trademark Lamantia imagery and a bit of very hopped-up avuncular advice (if your uncle was an automatist poet, that is!):</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Black suns that rivet space </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Immediate coherence in a waterfall of echoes </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Remember</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">To stick out your zodiac of the earth on fire</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Paranormal windmills gallop the skyway </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Your head steaming the space between a fallout of engines and florid beaks</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Double-Yow!</span> </div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><i>Poetics By Pluto</i> </span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Previously uncollected, “Poetics By Pluto” was written in the mid-1980s and published in 1986 in the print journal <i>Exquisite Corpse</i>. It’s another poem in which Lamantia’s erudition plays a key role. He alludes, to myths (kali-yuga, the Phoenix, Cernunnos, and Diana), well known persons, people, or places (Goethe, Isadora Duncan, the Coastanoan, San Juan Bautista, the Watts Towers, Walpi, and Altamira, for example), and the esoteric (Mother Shipton). There are also references to various ornithological and astrological matters (“Pluto retrograde five degrees into Scorpio,” for example – a multi-year period that began in 1983 that was supposedly marked by intensity or strong emotions). </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Poetics By Pluto,” like many by Lamantia, proceeds by its own desires as he seeks and finds through language. However, the poem at its core is one of protest and warning. It begins with the observation, perhaps made from a city apartment window, that a “dendrophobe just across the way just demolished nests / of finches sparrows other possible birds.” Later, more global concerns are raised:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">sudden death for a whole continent of forest here & everywhere</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> sparrows strangled in midair with the last condors</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">situate Acid Rain and the Green House Effect</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> plague-lined trees oil-slick birds</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">There’s little time left for geographic enclaves to form Aquarian islands </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The poem also brings in – as suggested by the title – concerns about the purpose of poetry, and the role of the poet, with Lamantia remarkably direct about both. He observes: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">If (as Hegel proved) poetry is a rare assemblage</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">a Watts Tower transmuting junk</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">how over-quantified to vanishing the prosaic</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">This critique of “the proasaic” exists in tension with other lines in the poem in which Lamantia – albeit in the context of a poem that has a wide variety in it – seems to embrace and explain direct personal declarative statement: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">How do I feel? rotten, misnamed ‘hysterical’ who calls freely for the Annulment of</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> Nuclear Physics</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">as if technē were the issue and</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">not a cosmic catastrophe</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">[ . . .]</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Now there’s mostly monolithic media noise</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> on the inner cliff a shadowy figure who announces</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">the Admonition, again</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">but certainly some attempt at statement, flying wild to the polis, is proportional to</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> our destruction as a species</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">When does the winged bridge appear on this terrified earth?</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I love the idea and images here: the poet as a shadowy figure on the inner cliff whose attempt at a message (the poem) is “flying wild to the polis.” Here, poetry “flying wild” seems perfect: words fierce and free winging their way to the places where we live. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> <span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++</span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<i><b><span style="font-size: large;"> Native Medicine </span></b></i></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-STsn45DQD1M/Umc5xVw6hZI/AAAAAAAAC2Y/cxK1Zb-vUek/s1600/Washo+Indians.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="444" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-STsn45DQD1M/Umc5xVw6hZI/AAAAAAAAC2Y/cxK1Zb-vUek/s640/Washo+Indians.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The second poem in <i>Meadowlark West</i> (1986), “Native Medicine” is an excellent example of the dense, erudite, sometimes hermetically allusive and fragmentary approach of the work in that book. It’s compelling poetry, but difficult to write about or comprehensively explicate (it’s a poem, after all!). It begins: <br /><br />Forty years ago I was born from a crumpled tower of immaculates that twist like<br /> the fleeting damaged bridge torrential rain on a road nearing Chehalis <br /> love driving through her native land the beauty of all I’ve <br /> received from her<br /><br />These opening four lines present a series of interesting challenges, the first being what is meant by “[f]orty years ago I was born . . . .” Since the poem was written in the early 1980s when Lamantia was about 55 years old, “[f]orty years ago I was born” cannot refer to his actual birth in 1927. The math instead suggests Lamantia’s referring to something that happened when he was 15, and so I’ve always thought it refers to the event (discussed in my general introduction above) when while within a grove of trees on a mountaintop he heard the call to poetry. <br /><br />Even if that’s right, the phrase “born from a crumpled tower of immaculates that twist . . .” is difficult to parse. I’ve not at all certain of this explication, but feel that “immaculates” – a noun formed from an adjective – suggests the purity of the poetic message heard; with “crumpled” and “twist” suggesting the complications of it all, or perhaps the shape of the trees where the call was heard. <br /><br />That the “crumpled tower of immaculates that twist” is then, via simile – a somewhat rare device for Lamantia – tied to seemingly more contemporaneous observations (“the fleeting damaged bridge torrential rain on a road nearing Chehalis” (a small city located about half-way between Portland and Seattle) complicates it all even more. That said, the import of the opening’s final two lines – “love driving through her native land the beauty of all I’ve / received from her” – seems clear, underscoring the vitalness of the land and its traditions to Lamantia. <br /><br />The poem includes references to AmerIndian lore and related matters, including Lamantia’s all-night experiences with “the Washo peyotlists” which clearly remained important to him (“none shall ever steal from me our sixty eyes to the smoke hole at the Tipi flue”).<br /><br />There is also, later in the poem:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">the slash of cosmic jokery</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">which seems to me a fairly perfect encapsulation of the sometimes sharp absurdities of our worldly existence. There’s also “corpses of the doomed sciences,” “human misery,” and “Serpent of suffering,” all of which effectively convey the pain of that sometimes challenges our lives, against which, as a kind of antidote, Lamantia puts forth “Native Medicine.” The poet’s values are made clear in his declaration, near poem’s end, “Ancient ones only you shall see us through. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> <span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++</span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>There </b></i><br /><br />“There” is a beautiful eighteen line poem from <i>Meadowlark West </i>that conveys and celebrates a particular ecstatic, visionary and, for Lamantia, ever-inspiring experience in the natural world. The poem begins with lines that recall the dramatic moment:</span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">on that chain of Ohlone mountains</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">shafts of light on a bobcat</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">through the thick madrones</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">first seen emblems that cupped my nine years </span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">the great booming voice of nature</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">in the red bark’s sloping labyrinth</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">who called my name</span></span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
</div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">“Ohlone,” as you may know, is the term for the native (American Indian) peoples of the San Francisco and Monterey Bay Areas, so the “mountains” here could be any number of coastal hills. The totemic quality given to the bobcat and madrones (“emblems”) is classic Lamantia, as is his hearing the voice of nature (see “[In a grove],” above). Also classic is the fervency the experience continues to have for Lamantia, and its connection to poetic fire:</span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">these lights never die whose embers glow wilder </span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">than wilderness at the beginning of words</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">to catch the ring of stars</span></span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">The phrase “wilder / than wilderness” – how luxuriously feral! – always gets me. <br /><br />In the poem’s final six lines, </span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Lamantia</span></span></span></span></span></span> seems to describe where his poetry is generated and a bit of what he experiences or finds there. By the end, when he speaks of -- </span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">elastic time in the gape of memory</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">visionary recitals in the exultant spring oblivious to the sea </span></span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">-- the intensity of Lamantia’s poetic reverie-thought is strongly felt. </span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JD_wkCYx8TI/Umc6M_ciynI/AAAAAAAAC2g/yIe4hzgx0xY/s1600/madrones.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="343" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JD_wkCYx8TI/Umc6M_ciynI/AAAAAAAAC2g/yIe4hzgx0xY/s400/madrones.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">“through the thick madrones” [ . . . ] “in the red bark’s sloping labyrinth”</span></b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>Shasta</b></i></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span> <br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BovaQmiO1EI/Umc6nWINxBI/AAAAAAAAC2o/aoaOpdnSzkk/s1600/Shasta.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-BovaQmiO1EI/Umc6nWINxBI/AAAAAAAAC2o/aoaOpdnSzkk/s640/Shasta.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">“Shasta great Shasta / Lemurian dream island . . .” </span></b></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">The
final poem in Meadowlark West, “Shasta” is a one and one-half page,
eleven paragraph prose poem. It also contains a few lines of verse.
The poetry here may not be entirely automatistic, but there is lots of
that. “Against the current words came looking for me,” the poem begins,
and in part Lamantia is putting down the language that arrived – it’s a
wild poem, unpredictable sentence-to-sentence and sometimes
word-to-word. <br /><br />“Shasta” for me is an exploration that spins
around the idea of Northern California’s Mount Shasta as the center or
namesake of a new land. Because of its relative isolation and dramatic
rise (almost 10,000 feet) from the surrounding terrain, Mt. Shasta is
not only considered especially majestic and beautiful by many, but also
looks like it stands apart. The poem is marked by Lamantia’s erudition
and hermeticism, contains language suggesting both crises and triumphs,
and is strongly visionary and prophetic. <br /><br />Lamantia’s prose in
“Shasta” can stun. Luxuriate, for example, in these sentences, which
close the poem’s fourth and begin its fifth paragraphs, respectively:
“The languorous green dew strokes the burning red beam. The succulent
pine resin writes kaleidoscopes between seasons. [¶] The roads are
closed by fire. The roads end, darken. Omens thicken, the psychic pain
of being born. Only the blue vapor endures like sidereal weaving at
the black seed, decay in the waters of the equestrian sea.”<br /><br />Your humble blogger says go read this poem!</span></span></span></span></span></span> </div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><b>Recall</b></i><br /><br />Previously unpublished, “Recall” is a part of the last section of <i>The Collected Lamantia</i>, which contains work from 1998-2001. The poem is relatively short, with relatively short lines, and is thus mostly different than most of the other late-life poems. It also does not have the same kind of freewheeling frenzy that marks many other Lamantia poems. </span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">That said, “Recall” does give off a </span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">heady energy. </span></span></span></span></span></span>You who have read this post this far deserve, I think, Lamantia’s poem in its entirety:</span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Recall </span></span></span></span></span></span></b><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">Fog be-numbed and stoned</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">on a cul-de-sac corner</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">enveloped by grey moist density</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">to myself invisible</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">on that edge of </span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">poised trance, hour </span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">lasting a lifetime</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">caught again as </span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">arrowed gift from</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">the next moment: those moving </span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">points of ductile thought.</span></span></span></span></span></span></blockquote>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">This poem beautifully gets at he workings of the mind as time and ideas come and go. That </span></span></span></span></span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">its eleven lines contain but a single complex sentence</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span> suggests the density of thought, and overall the poem shows, I feel, the particular intensity and visionary or mystical quality of Lamantia’s mind, particularly when -- if this makes sense -- thought is on the verge of its veer. </span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></span></span></span></span></span> </div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VheRZEnBBMQ/Umc79Vl0NwI/AAAAAAAAC2w/GWD629sSDhQ/s1600/foggyNightSF.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VheRZEnBBMQ/Umc79Vl0NwI/AAAAAAAAC2w/GWD629sSDhQ/s400/foggyNightSF.jpg" width="383" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-size: small;">“Fog be-numbed and stoned<br />[ . . .]<br />on that edge of / poised trance . . .”</span></b></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++++</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></span></span></span></span> <br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w1bzefhDvmg/Umc8FoAgJgI/AAAAAAAAC24/vg1bwrg5Mo0/s1600/Collected+Lamantia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-w1bzefhDvmg/Umc8FoAgJgI/AAAAAAAAC24/vg1bwrg5Mo0/s640/Collected+Lamantia.jpg" width="518" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++++</span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++++++</span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++++ </span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-57654751912887598342012-11-18T08:38:00.000-08:002012-11-18T11:44:55.883-08:00<br />
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<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">¡ ¡ ¡ Bruce Conner ! ! ! </span></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-size: x-large;"> </span> </span></b></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ufXFzDRlHkA/UKhFnwwD94I/AAAAAAAACvk/1XIi5b9xOdI/s1600/Conner+--+age+11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ufXFzDRlHkA/UKhFnwwD94I/AAAAAAAACvk/1XIi5b9xOdI/s640/Conner+--+age+11.jpg" width="534" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;"> ¡ ¡ ¡ Bruce Conner ! ! ! </span></b></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A5-gpaPWKDM/UKhGaNT86JI/AAAAAAAACvs/qa_sXIj5U0Y/s1600/Conner+--+ANGEL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-A5-gpaPWKDM/UKhGaNT86JI/AAAAAAAACvs/qa_sXIj5U0Y/s640/Conner+--+ANGEL.jpg" width="298" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">¡ ¡ ¡ Bruce Conner ! ! ! </span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-iAoCwG3_jM8/UKhKgpuEZXI/AAAAAAAACv8/18zDtJzNypU/s1600/Conner+-+psychedelicattesenowener.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-iAoCwG3_jM8/UKhKgpuEZXI/AAAAAAAACv8/18zDtJzNypU/s640/Conner+-+psychedelicattesenowener.jpg" width="548" /></a></div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: large;">I was home in the late afternoon with the sunlight coming through the window in my room. I was lying on the rug working on my homework. I decided to rest and I laid my head on the floor. The light started to change and became very bright. . . . Shapes and sizes were changing. It seemed like they weren’t inanimate. They were living things. I was part of them, and I was moving into them. I moved into a space that was incomprehensible to me. . . . I went through things, and places, and spaces, and creatures. I became them, and I came back to myself. . . . I went through all these changes until I was so old. I was so wrinkly. My bones were creaking and likely to break. . . . Then I began to realize that I was on the floor. I was back. . . . I became myself again, after eons of time. . . . It was the same room. Only 15 minutes had passed. </span></div>
</blockquote>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">¡ ¡ ¡ Bruce Conner ! ! ! </span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sA3dRTc1u-g/UKhL4b1kilI/AAAAAAAACwE/ABKqZeYw8s4/s1600/Conner+-+HANDPRINT+August+2010+Kohn+Gallery.GIF" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sA3dRTc1u-g/UKhL4b1kilI/AAAAAAAACwE/ABKqZeYw8s4/s640/Conner+-+HANDPRINT+August+2010+Kohn+Gallery.GIF" width="502" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;">¡ ¡ ¡ Bruce Conner ! ! ! </span></b></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<i><span style="font-size: large;">Yes, the Glade of Theoric Ornithic Hermetica today celebrates Bruce Conner, on the anniversary of his birth – November 18, 1933 in McPherson, Kansas. Conner died in San Francisco in 2008, but his work lives on. <br /><br />The two texts seen above are excerpts from interviews of or talks by Conner in which he recounts a pivotal childhood experience. The version at the head of this post was printed in 2011 by Jon Beacham at The Brother in Elysium, for the cover of a program distributed at a screening of Conner’s films. The second version was printed in the Walker Art Center’s catalog for the 2000 BC exhibition. <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=B3olW-sn3WAC&pg=PA28&lpg=PA28&dq=%22It+was+when+I+was+about+eleven+years+old%22+conner&source=bl&ots=sYGWYpa95E&sig=7r7Jsay08-JOmENCZ9QnrPKYn7U&hl=en&sa=X&ei=MFKoUMXsJeegiQLY2oHABg&sqi=2&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22It%20was%20when%20I%20was%20about%20eleven%20years%20old%22%20conner&f=false">A third version of this wondrous story told by Conner can be read by clicking here.</a> <br /><br />The first art work seen above, titled ANGEL, is one of a series of life-size photograms Conner made in collaboration with photographer Edmund Shea in 1975. In these self-portraits, Conner’s body appears made of light. <br /><br />There then follows a 1990 collage of wood engraving images by Conner, titled PSYCHEDELICATESSEN OWNER. What’ll you have, my friend?<br /><br />The final work pictured here, as indicated by the text printed over the bottom of the image, is HANDPRINT, made by Conner with his blood in 1965.</span></i><b><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></b></div>
</blockquote>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">¡ ¡ ¡ Bruce Conner ! ! ! </span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-size: large;">+(<span style="font-size: large;">+)+</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+++(+)+++</span></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">+(+)+</span></span></b></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-42830559441138070232012-10-23T09:12:00.000-07:002012-10-28T18:17:09.128-07:00¡ ¡ ¡ ¡ ¡ Viva Lamantia ! ! ! ! !<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6YHaPuiH04M/UIYnEldaxKI/AAAAAAAACvQ/JPLf2NT_hPw/s1600/Meadowlark+West.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6YHaPuiH04M/UIYnEldaxKI/AAAAAAAACvQ/JPLf2NT_hPw/s640/Meadowlark+West.jpg" width="443" /></a></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">Philip Lamantia</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;"><i>Meadowlark West</i></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">(San Francisco: City Lights, 1986)</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Meadowlark West</i>, published in 1986, was the last all-new collection of poetry Philip Lamantia published in his lifetime (he died in 2005). On this – the 85th anniversary of his birth on Sanchez Street in San Francisco in 1927 </span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">–<span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><b>yes, it’s</b> <b>Philip Lamantia Day!</b> – I celebrate the book, which after 26 years and dozens of re-readings remains gloriously invigorating and fresh. <br /><br />The poems in <i>Meadowlark West</i> - there are 34 in the book’s 73 pages - still jolt and inspire most fundamentally because of the hugely ambitious purpose that animates them. The poems were written, to quote a prose comment embedded by Lamantia in “Death Jets,</span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-size: large;">”</span> to “respond to the omnipresent threat of species suicide.” Against that possibility, the poems, to use the simile with which Lamantia<span style="font-size: large;"> begins</span> “Reached the Turn,” are “like opening a door to another land.” <br /><br />Another land where “Poetry magic love liberty” (to quote from another poem in the book) reign and where one might find (quoting here from various poems): </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Sirens at doorways on rocks in place of gutted rooms </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">rollicking maypoles of imaginary Canaans forgotten in redwood dust </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">motorific cyclones a bridge of garnet almost granite </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">the bronze raindrop</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">the flocculent chance of onyx leaves </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Lamantia in lines like these convincingly shows that, as he declares in one poem, “the jacknapes of surprise line my vision with orchidian trumpets.” It’s a vision he carries out in <i>Meadowlark West</i> with the deepest conviction of purpose. As he declares in “Exorcist Exercises,” it’s “my nomenclature against the orthodox.” He seeks nothing less, to quote the line that follows in that poem, than a “morphomatic revolution by the lyrical swarm.” <br /><br />And “swarm” is key. It’s a “frenzy mantic mania” (“Invincible Birth”) lexical field of energy, with (to quote another poem) “Mercury / Quick” shifts abounding. It’s a powerful experience, as Lamantia in that poem suggests:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">When you hear my words you will see them after coming home they </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> leave me</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">these palpable shadows that sparkle</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">show their sides </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">dance </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">blow out candles</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">grapple </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">diced in sand</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Just now a magnet of living juice has been whirling the mental plume</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">and death’s sacrifice on the stone below traveling the lingual stalactites</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Only the verbs glow on the absolute rim</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">With this sort of approach, line-to-line explication and logical explanation generally isn’t possible, for me at least, and it’s this (to quote Lamantia) “irrational factor” (“The mind is a black hole of beautiful chance encounters,” he also writes) that keeps the collection ever-vital. Lamantia’s leaps-of-thought-in-words energize the mind, no matter how many times the poems are read. <br /><br />The other key characteristic of the poems of <i>Meadowlark West</i> is their use of allusions and references. It’s a big-time parade of allusions, and to use just a few examples from but one of the poems, they range from the familiar (Sor Juana and John Donne), to those that can be unlocked with a bit of research (“the massacres at Humboldt Bay in the nineteenth century,” “the red obsidian light of Church's <i>Cotopoxi</i>,” and “Gilak in the Pomo legend,” for example), to a few which seem destined to remain mysteries (try “the <i>collini lombardini</i>,” and “the Canadian octophagic”). References to California and west coast lands, American Indian culture, and bird life are most common, but lots of other things come in – and this pulling in of much else also keeps the poems fresh.<br /><br />I’d al<span style="font-size: large;">so </span>like to point out – if only to underscore my love of this book, that this blog takes its name from a line in <i>Meadowlark West</i>. Here’s the final stanza from “America in the Age of Gold”:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">There's nary a Wilson but the warblers send cascades that wing</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"> the ears of the Choctaws</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Poetry magic love liberty</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">the unequivocally mediocre is an anti-meditation on bird houses</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">golden ringlets rare afternoons</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">the glade of theoric ornithic hermetica</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">a talon of deva dravidian bird</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">demon of legend</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">plucking the string</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">a diagonal of dew for the finches red-streaked</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">for the blush of the sun</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">the fifth note</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: large;">Happy Philip Lamantia Day! </span></div>
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-70032406156813888332012-08-19T00:00:00.000-07:002012-08-21T13:59:39.686-07:00Larynx Galaxy, by John Olson<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b><span style="font-size: x-large;">John Olson<br /><i>Larynx Galaxy</i></span><br /><span style="font-size: large;">(Boston: Black Widow Press, 2012)<br />[6" by 9" || 395 pages]<br />[cover art & design by Kerrie Kemperman]</span></b></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Larynx Galaxy</i>, John Olson</span><span style="font-size: large;">’</span><span style="font-size: large;">s first collection of poetry in four years (and first all-new collection in six) is huge. H-U-G-E as in almost 400 pages, comprising more than 180 works, all in prose, each alive aglow and awaiting a-you. <br /><br />Although <i>Larynx Galaxy</i> includes several straightforward essays, most of the book consists of prose poems. These include a substantial number that examine, or take flight from a look at, objects, places, or personal circumstances. For example, there are poems about closets, electric fans, the Palouse (the region in southwest Washington state), prepositions, a seemingly lost birth certificate, the funeral of a friend, a road in North Dakota, a new bookcase, speeding down the freeway, and elevators. There’s even a very entertaining flash-autobiography, “My Life In Five Paragraphs,” with its cut-to-the-chase opening lines:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The first punch sent me flying into a Christmas tree. The second put me on the floor on my hands and knees, blood dripping from my nose. I tumbled outside, caught a train to North Dakota, and went to college.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In these object/place/personal circumstance poems, Olson generally (but not always) keeps the focus tight on the subject, or on related tangents. And while the writing, and thought behind it, displays considerable verve, the denotations and connotations of language are mostly (though again not entirely) familiar.<br /><br />The other, and I would say more common, kind of work in <i>Larynx Galaxy</i> are what I call JohnOlsonian prose poems. That eponymous descriptor might sound nutty, but I believe it</span><span style="font-size: large;">’s appropriate: </span><span style="font-size: large;">the writing it describes is truly <i>sui generis</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">With regard to this </span><span style="font-size: large;">uniqueness, </span><span style="font-size: large;">no less an authority than Clayton Eshleman – who edited <i>Caterpillar</i> and <i>Sulfur</i>, two of the premier poetry magazines of the last almost half-century – calls Olson (in a back cover blurb for the book) “an original . . . whose prose poems do not remind me of anyone else’s work.” A related view was held by Philip Lamantia, who once told me that Olson</span><span style="font-size: large;">’s</span><span style="font-size: large;"> work was “extraordinary . . . the greatest prose poetry [I</span><span style="font-size: large;">’ve] ever read</span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Olson_%28poet_and_writer%29#cite_note-6"></a><span style="font-size: large;">.” <br /><br />The characteristics of a “JohnOlsonian” prose poem are in some ways hard to describe. Michael McClure’s suggestion (also in a back cover blurb) that Olson’s poems are marked by “surging perceptions” that “float in inspiration” suggests something of the character and energy of the writing. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">So too do the paradoxes in Lewis Warsh’s description (also in a blurb) of Olson’s writing as “hallucinatory” and “clearheaded,” texts that “verg[e] on the edge of infinity, yet [are] forever at home in the world.” Also on point is <a href="http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=14171939">the assessment of Christopher Frizzelle, long-time critic for <i>The Stranger</i> (the “alternative” paper in Olson’s hometown of Seattle) – that Olson’s poems are “wild and mercurial.” </a><br /><br />Olson himself perhaps best describes the what and why of his writing (<a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2009/05/john-olson-poetics.html">and click through here for a post, from three years ago, about that</a>). Many poems in <i>Larynx Galaxy</i> include declarations or hints about what’s going on with the words as words. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In “The Utility Of Futility,” for example, Olson proclaims, “I have a Jackson Pollock belt buckle and a cricket cantata hairdo.” That statement, I suggest, neatly captures both the abstract practicality and musical aliveness of his writing, and its good ol</span><span style="font-size: large;">’ surreal fun as well!</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">“I can tie water in knots and waltz the skeleton of a cloud,” Olson writes in the same poem, suggesting and at the same time showing his imaginative reach and confidence. He adds, “I can lean the ocean against a predicate in the scrotum of a moose and nail a drop of perfume to a blister of light.” I, for one, do not doubt that Olson could do all those things, and more.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />Olson more directly discusses his approach to words in “Brought To A Boil: An Essay On Experimental Poetry,” a four page work from near the start of the book. In the following excerpt from that piece, Olson begins with a kind of prologue of demonstrative poetry and then hammers on several key points: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Experimentation in words leads to the mustard of cacophony, unbridled granite, ecstasies in anvils, legends and dragons boiling out of fugitive metaphors. Mallarmé doing wheelies on a Harley-Davidson. Six nude somersaults and a buffalo in a tulip refinery. You cannot quite predict what words are going to do. That is the whole idea. This is exactly the kind of situation you want to be in: entering into a play with the language in which control is excused and revolutions begin. Revolution in both senses of the word: orbital motion about a point and a sudden or momentous change in a situation.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In Olson’s poems, language at play can result in a lot of de-familiar denotation, uncommon connotations, and super-elastic metonymy. Put some or all of that together with the swerve, spiral, and/or surge of ideas in the poems, and wow whoa wow. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Now, more traditional creative constructs – observed details, lyrical flights, and revelatory assertions, for example – do appear, even in the most experimental poems, and they are a delight. But when Olson gets out there, really out there, the lexical field energizes hard towards glorious abstraction. Here</span><span style="font-size: large;">’</span><span style="font-size: large;">s an example of that thing itself, from “Lapadarian”— </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">There is fat in the yell of the epaulet idea. Its chill was pink among that Democratic chemistry and lace hoists that made the calculus nasty with just the right dashboard. As pills to columns and garters to gargoyles, the oblique in the ketchup is inundated by quandary. Such pastels as yonder calendar persuade the eyes that reality is dome haphazard mirror, an apology to the toes and an occupation for the nose. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Or consider the following example, an excerpt lifted from the middle of the prose poem “Beet To Beet” because it ends with a question by Olson that suggests something important that’s going on in his poems, and in our reading of them:</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Applause cleats are ugly but some come to flap like harmonicas. It is vital to maintain good philosophy habits. Memory is an aperture to open in cypress. Zeppelin is more philodendron. Only a fire could mark this dent. This paint. This yellow wall. Scan screened through a waterfront is not a crocodile it is a scooter in scales. Here comes everybody with a fistful of haphazard castles and a sharp pencil. Who is in control of these words, you, me, or each other?</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>Larynx Galaxy</i>’s size and sprawl, its JohnOlsonian poetry, will challenge many readers. It’s not a sculpted book that one can place in the center of the room of the mind and take in with a simple spin about. <br /><br />For me, reading <i>Larynx Galaxy</i> is akin to a long trip through a wilderness area, one that you haven’t visited before. It’s a rigorous journey but one that’s grand and memorable. You</span><span style="font-size: large;">’</span><span style="font-size: large;">re far from the urban grid with its familiar commercial strips and mega-malls, and so the unusual and surprising are everywhere. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">In Olson’s book, as in any great wilderness excursion, what’s around the bend – in the next poem, paragraph or even sentence (or within a sentence) </span><span style="font-size: large;"> – </span><span style="font-size: large;">isn</span><span style="font-size: large;">’</span><span style="font-size: large;">t easily or at all anticipated. That’s part of the challenge and fun, especially since there are so many marvelous poems, turns within or between those poems, and plenty of sentences and paragraphs of spectacular imagination. <br /><br />Wilderness adventures require a special fortitude and attitude. A willingness to endure sometimes challenging conditions. An alert and curious mind that enjoys come-what-may unexpectedness, and delights in discovery. An enthusiastic diligence to figure out, or try to figure out, what’s going on when the territory becomes unfamiliar.<br /><br />But while difficult, wilderness adventures renew and reward, me oh my, in very special ways. This is what Thoreau, Muir and many others – let me mention <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldo_Leopold">Aldo Leopold</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Murie">Margaret Murie</a> – taught. Get really out there, these folks insisted, and lo and behold the world – you and the universe – come alive. I believe that’s so, and that it happens when reading deep in and through <i>Larynx Galaxy</i>.<br /><br />Yes, <i>Larynx Galaxy</i> is Wild Sky, Indian Heaven, Bright Star, and Passage Key. <br /><br />Arrow Canyon, Weepah Spring and Eagle Cap. <br /><br />Garden of the Gods and Craters of the Moon. <br /><br />Tatoosh too, of course, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Wilderness_Areas">hundreds of others</a> I could name. <br /><br /><i>Larynx Galaxy</i>: a poem-book wilderness in the best sense of that term: worthy of exploration, attention, recognition, and celebration. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The following is a small selection of excerpts from poems in <i>Larynx Galaxy</i>’s first approximately one hundred pages. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I’ve favored in these nine excerpts the short and snappy, or sentences that for one reason or another seemed worthy of showcasing. I don</span><span style="font-size: large;">’t</span><span style="font-size: large;"> aim here to represent the whole. Instead, I hope to provide a few snapshots of the wondrous JohnOlsonian wilderness. Many other examples could be presented, both from the first one hundred and the remaining almost three hundred pages. <br /><br />I’ve paired the excerpts with images, altered Olson’s prose by centering each excerpt and inserting line breaks at points, all in a probably futile attempt to make the words look better here on Blogger. All punctuation has been preserved. Enjoy, and to those who may go on to explore <i>Larynx Galaxy</i>: <i>Bon Voyage</i>! </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">or string of words. <br /><br />— from “Extreme Reading” </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">+(+)+</span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EXDLTphftN8/UDBhqCLzJvI/AAAAAAAACt8/pWOYd5QKu_Y/s1600/sunrise.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="480" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EXDLTphftN8/UDBhqCLzJvI/AAAAAAAACt8/pWOYd5QKu_Y/s640/sunrise.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">There is sometimes a sunrise in our consciousness, </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">our level of awareness, so that we leave the theatre </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">with something we did not have before we </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">entered into the darkness, </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">something like a jewel, or a song of ice. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">--- from </span><span style="font-size: large;">“Marquee</span><span style="font-size: large;">” </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">+(+)+</span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TB-66e0rLh8/UDBhkYife-I/AAAAAAAACt0/K2TUeqMLwLU/s1600/Majesty.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TB-66e0rLh8/UDBhkYife-I/AAAAAAAACt0/K2TUeqMLwLU/s320/Majesty.JPG" width="240" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GfT-eaMQ0tE/UDBkC_C76uI/AAAAAAAACuU/GP8JynJpqs8/s1600/volatility.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="230" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GfT-eaMQ0tE/UDBkC_C76uI/AAAAAAAACuU/GP8JynJpqs8/s320/volatility.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The majesty of thought is sometimes too volatile </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">to redeem by words alone. <br /><br />— </span><span style="font-size: large;">from </span><span style="font-size: large;">“The Thing Itself”</span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f6vT8_zyHgk/UDBcqFFFq2I/AAAAAAAACtY/rWzKxzmLFcU/s1600/marketplace.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-f6vT8_zyHgk/UDBcqFFFq2I/AAAAAAAACtY/rWzKxzmLFcU/s400/marketplace.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8i6m4d8pbxY/UDBcngMNrNI/AAAAAAAACtQ/NWbMrD0NKNQ/s1600/rainbow+bridge.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="266" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8i6m4d8pbxY/UDBcngMNrNI/AAAAAAAACtQ/NWbMrD0NKNQ/s400/rainbow+bridge.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The ecstasies of the poet are ignored in the marketplace </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">but trust me, the torsions and contortions of syntax </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">tremble with each attempt to drag a rainbow </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">over the bridge and watch it grow prodigal</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> as it leans into the coming night. <br /><br />— </span><span style="font-size: large;">from </span><span style="font-size: large;">“The Thing Itself”</span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZqYLdrGMwTI/UDBcYBn1wUI/AAAAAAAACtI/SSAVtIuQ3Fw/s1600/elephants+muddy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="425" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZqYLdrGMwTI/UDBcYBn1wUI/AAAAAAAACtI/SSAVtIuQ3Fw/s640/elephants+muddy.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Fold the air into words into birds into prepositions </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">ingots of gold in a musky room a slightly gnarled wrist </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">mute with the moisture of thought a workshop expanded </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">by description elephants bathing in a muddy river </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">a sentence caged in a paragraph bursting with rain. <br /><br />— </span><span style="font-size: large;">from </span><span style="font-size: large;">“Life Imagined As A Slither Of Syllables”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /><br />+(+)+</span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lbbhsemrDlc/UDBcUP3PE5I/AAAAAAAACtA/LbNfQmjobes/s1600/jellyfish.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lbbhsemrDlc/UDBcUP3PE5I/AAAAAAAACtA/LbNfQmjobes/s400/jellyfish.jpg" width="298" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Jellyfish never give advice. They just hang in the water </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">like music from a broken zither. <br /><br />— </span><span style="font-size: large;">from </span><span style="font-size: large;">“Listen”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /><br />+(+)+</span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZVpc8DcwxmY/UDBcJ_qWIgI/AAAAAAAACs4/3BJnEBsvtjI/s1600/aorta+soaked+in+glee.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="512" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ZVpc8DcwxmY/UDBcJ_qWIgI/AAAAAAAACs4/3BJnEBsvtjI/s640/aorta+soaked+in+glee.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">The lachrymose beak beckons its lurid appearance </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">and the variegated scold zigzags on like another incessant </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">humidity on the verge of majesty. The knack of appetite </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">hungers for iron. Eyes mill the vision of a quiet </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">identity, an aorta soaked in glee. <br /><br />— </span><span style="font-size: large;">from </span><span style="font-size: large;">“Niche”</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /><br />+(+)+</span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0XZXL58etCE/UDBcGzLcjpI/AAAAAAAACsw/Pbk9UvYojjc/s1600/Clark+Gable.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="356" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0XZXL58etCE/UDBcGzLcjpI/AAAAAAAACsw/Pbk9UvYojjc/s640/Clark+Gable.jpg" width="640" /></a> </div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">I am alone in my enzymes, but my enzymes are yours </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">as well as mine, limpid hammers of protein, </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">sequencing each of us into vengeance and boots. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">We are idioms of electricity. Pantomimes mirrored </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">on paper. Daydreams vivid as jewelry, </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Clark Gable in Nevada, </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">a mustang going crazy at the end of a rope.<br /><br />— </span><span style="font-size: large;">from </span><span style="font-size: large;">“Quartz Ukelele”</span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6OPSKuW1Qqo/UDBcD8QX4bI/AAAAAAAACso/Km9jmQYbVDI/s1600/camelia.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-6OPSKuW1Qqo/UDBcD8QX4bI/AAAAAAAACso/Km9jmQYbVDI/s400/camelia.jpg" width="400" /> </a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">A reverie which nails itself to a camellia </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">is precisely the sort of thing I’m looking for. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br />— </span><span style="font-size: large;">from </span><span style="font-size: large;">“Happy Little Tendons Swimming With Doors” </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">+(+)+</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"> </span><span style="font-size: large;">+++(+)+++</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">+(+)+</span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nW_HA9SoOcY/UDBhvqdwPwI/AAAAAAAACuM/A48NleX_vs8/s1600/LarynxGalaxy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-nW_HA9SoOcY/UDBhvqdwPwI/AAAAAAAACuM/A48NleX_vs8/s640/LarynxGalaxy.jpg" width="426" /></a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-53518025807980923802012-06-16T00:01:00.000-07:002012-06-21T11:24:08.410-07:00Bloomsday, 2012<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3KcoubYEzE4/T9rDegIEMxI/AAAAAAAACsQ/vSj8sISfFLI/s1600/Joyce+-+manuscript+Circe.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-3KcoubYEzE4/T9rDegIEMxI/AAAAAAAACsQ/vSj8sISfFLI/s640/Joyce+-+manuscript+Circe.jpg" width="515" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small;">James Joyce - manuscript page from the "Circe" episode of <i>Ulysses</i></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=20000118">Agenbite of inwit</a>, it’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday">Bloomsday</a>! <br /><br />And so today let’s celebrate James Joyce’s <i>Ulysses</i>, a novel of potent poetic force that I’ve been privileged to read, or at least re-read in part, just about every one of the last 40 years. <a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2009/06/sea-water-ulysses-joyce-yes.html">Three years ago, I applauded here in the glade a couple wonderful bits from the book about the sea and water (click here)</a>. <a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2010/06/and.html">Two years ago, I billboarded the famous final words of Molly Bloom’s book-ending soliloquy (click here).</a> <a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2011/06/may-sirens-sound.html">Last year, I luxuriated in the wonderfully sonic opening lines of the “Sirens” episode (click here)</a>.<br /><br />This year I herald the “Circe” episode, the 15th section of <i>Ulysses</i>. That episode, set in Nighttown, Dublin’s red-light district, takes the form of a script for a drama, including sometimes extensive stage directions and descriptions. Most compelling, Joyce in his dream-drama blends or animates the real and natural (including memories of events depicted earlier in the novel) with the characters' subconscious and/or anxiety-ridden impulses. Warped hallucinations often result, and they can scorch the imagination (and not infrequently be very funny). </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">So yes I said yes, let us this Bloomsday wow ourselves with a few passages of nightmarish wildness! Agenbite of inwit, indeed!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Let’s begin with a description of on-stage action from very near the chapter’s start. In this excerpt, the unusual and disturbing pile on one another here, and the writing – check especially the verbs – moves. Initially, Joyce presents a series of mostly lengthy and grammatically complex sentences, some of which include unwieldy portmanteaus, and which depict rather complicated sets of actions. Joyce then shifts dramatically, dropping in a triplet of short sentences (nine, seven, and six words each, respectively). These shorter sentences stun with the rhythmic variation they bring to the passage, their own internal staccato bursts (each of the three sentences has its own three-part energy), and the marvelous cinematic verve of the action conveyed in each. You’ll see, I do believe, and off – and into the wild – we go: </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><i>(A pygmy woman swings on a rope slung between the railings, counting. A form sprawled against a dustbin and muffled by its arm and hat moves, groans, grinding growling teeth, and snores again. On a step a gnome totting among a rubbish tip crouches to shoulder a sack of rags and bones. A crone standing by with a smoky oillamp rams the last bottle in the maw of his sack. He heaves his booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone makes back for her lair swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the doorstep with a papershuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts, clutches her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy ups with both hands the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a corner two night watch in shouldercapes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. A plate crashes; a woman screams; a child wails. Oaths of a man roar, mutter, cease. Figures wander, lurk, peer from warrens. In a room lit by a candle stuck in a bottleneck a slut combs out the tatts from the hair of a scrofulous child. Cissy Caffrey's voice, still young, sings shrill from a lane.)</i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ah, “a scrofulous child.” Don’t see that one used much, do we? This or different sorts of wildness (both in description, action, and dialogue) continues in the Circe episode for almost 5,000 lines of text, well over 150 printed pages in most editions of <i>Ulysses</i>. Maybe the best place to read it on-line, because of its hyperlink annotations and color-codes that indicate the various narrative approaches Joyce uses, is at <a href="http://www.columbia.edu/%7Efms5/ulys.htm">the columbia.edu site (click here then click on Chapter 15 (presented in two halves) a bit down the page)</a>. <br /><br />In the meantime, let’s wrap up our Bloomsday observance here by getting wild again, this time with an excerpt from a description of stage action taken from near the end of the Circe episode. The set up here, to simplify mightly, is that distant voices are heard to say, “Dublin’s burning! Dublin’s burning! On fire, on fire!” Joyce then goes apocalyptic, an epic of an apocalypse, including marauding birds and even a bit zombie-action. Dig the punch of the short sentences, almost twenty of them, as this begins, then the longer roll-out of our fine feathered friends, and finally the dead rising, the living plummeting, and all the rest. Yow, and wow, here it is: </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-large;"><i>(Brimstone fires spring up. Dense clouds roll past. Heavy Gatling guns boom. Pandemonium. Troops deploy. Gallop of hoofs. Artillery. Hoarse commands. Bells clang. Backers shout. Drunkards bawl. Whores screech. Foghorns hoot. Cries of valour. Shrieks of dying. Pikes clash on cuirasses. Thieves rob the slain. Birds of prey, winging from the sea, rising from marsh lands, swooping from eyries, hover screaming, gannets, cormorants, vultures, goshawks, climbing woodcocks, peregrines, merlin, blackgrouse, sea eagles, gulls, albatrosses, barnacle geese. The midnight sun is darkened. The earth trembles. The dead of Dublin from Prospect and Mount Jerome in white sheepskin overcoats and black goat-fell cloaks arise and appear to many. A chasm opens with a noiseless yawn. Tom Rochford, winner in athlete’s singlet and breeches, arrives at the head of the national hurdle handicap and leaps into the void. He is followed by a race of runners and leapers. In wild attitudes they spring from the brink. Their bodies plunge. Factory lasses with fancy clothes toss redhot Yorkshire baraabombs. Society ladies lift their skirts above their heads to protect themselves. laughing witches in red cutty sarks ride through the air on broomsticks. Quakerlyster plasters blisters. It rains dragon’s teeth. [ . . . ])</i></span></blockquote>
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+++(+)+++ </div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-35938737729332168992012-06-05T06:00:00.000-07:002012-06-05T06:23:40.611-07:00Transit of Venus<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: small;">It's a twice-in-a-lifetime thing, today's passing, or transit, of Venus across the face of the Sun. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus">The last time it happened was eight years ago, and after today it won't happen again for more than 100 years (and this pattern -- two transits about eight years apart, with each pair of transits separated by more than a century -- is exactly how it has always been, and will be)</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">So hold tight from 3:07 p.m. to almost 9:30 p.m. Pacific Time (and at the same corresponding time elsewhere) today. Assuming clear skies, <a href="http://www.sunaeon.com/venustransit/" target="">proper geographic location (click here and use the options to see where you fit in)</a>, and the right eye-wear (<a href="http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/webcasts/nasaedge/">or access to a computer webcast like the one found by clicking here</a>), Venus "<a href="http://www.blogger.com/%20http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2012/06/01/national/a010050D02.DTL#ixzz1wmJOrHkJ">will appear as a small black dot gliding across the disk of the sun." And Venus's glide will have a royally exquisite pace: given its six hour plus total transit time, the planet from our earthly perspective will slowly inch across the face of the sun</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">Wow! The rareness and balletic beauty of today's cosmic synchronicity excites my mind and passion. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">And so so too does the event's poetic energy. The Sun and Venus pack elemental symbolic power; at their metaphoric cores, they are fiery life and love, respectively, and each has been so associated for a long, long, time. When such potent tropes come together, especially when that happens but twice-a-century (including today!), getting giddy just can't be helped. And I also feel inspired by today's transit of Venus across the Sun: I'm ready and even full of lust for any and all unexpected pairings or unusual juxtapositions. Poetry, do thy thing!</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: small;">And in addition to all that, today's also the exactly right and perfect time to specially celebrate a book of poetry named after the celestial event: Harry Crosby's <i>Transit of Venus</i> (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1928, revised editions 1929 and 1931). </span></div>
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If you don't know about Harry Crosby, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Crosby">Wiki-P could be consulted (click here)</a>. Also on-line is <a href="http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/crosby/crosby.htm">a well-chosen cache of material at the Modern American Poetry site (click here for that)</a>. </div>
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Best of all would be to <a href="http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=wolff&bi=0&bx=off&ds=30&recentlyadded=all&sortby=2&tn=black+sun&x=0&y=0" target="">buy (many copies available for less than $10 including shipping) and read <i>Black Sun</i> (New York: Random House, 1976), Geoffrey Wolff's classic biography of the man</a>. Crosby's adult years included a stint as an ambulance driver in World War I, a ditching of Boston aristocratic life for expatriate high (and sun-worshiping) times in 1920s Paris, the founding (with his wife Caresse) of the important Black Sun Press, work on the avant garde magazine <i>transition</i>, and the writing of his own poetry. His life ended in December 1929 with what has been called a murder/suicide and/or suicide pact; the victim Josephine Rotch, shot by Crosby in a New York hotel room a few hours before he shot himself, was one of his lovers. Wolff's account of Crosby's life is superb, and his speculations and assessments are reasonable if not always entirely persuasive.</div>
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As I alluded to <a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2009/04/old-forms-made-new.html" target="">about three years ago when discussing a couple of Crosby's wildest dardanic poems (click here and scroll about half way down the post)</a>, I came to his work via Philip Lamantia, who greatly enjoyed and championed Crosby's rebellious surreal-tinged <i>Mad Queen</i> (1929), a book of "tirades" (there's much in the poetry that pointedly attacks Boston culture). It's definitely an under-appreciated American classic, and a primary reason why Crosby as a writer holds special appeal for me, even as most tend to categorize him as a minor poet. </div>
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The poems in <i>Transit of Venus</i> were written in the weeks following July 9, 1928, when Crosby first met and began his affair with Josephine Rotch, who would eventually die with him. Crosby at the same time had been reading about the sun; the July 5, 1928 entry in his diary (published as <i>Shadows of the Sun</i>) -- lists approximately three dozen facts about it that he'd learned. Crosby, in his first diary entry about her, called Rotch "the Youngest Princess of the Sun!" In the August 21, 1928 entry, he explained, "Decided to call my new book of poems Transit of Venus -- Venus being the Youngest Princess of the Sun. But occasionally at her inferior conjunction Venus passes directly across the disk of the Sun the phenomenon being known as a Transit."<br />
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Although <i>Transit of Venus</i> does not have the overall unconventional outlandishness and verve of Crosby's <i>Mad Queen</i>, it does have plenty of intensity and many memorable moments. Among its approximately sixty short poems (almost all are shorter than a half-page) are about a dozen that I always enjoy reading again, including the handful below that I present here today for our celebration.</div>
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The first poem in <i>Transit of Venus</i> is rather conventional, but importantly -- especially today -- it explicitly ties the astronomical phenomena of the book's title to the poet's new romance (and in fact is the only poem in the book that alludes to the transit):</div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">FIRST MEETING</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"> ("<i>lorsque Vénus est tout </i></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><i>entière entrée dans le disque</i>") </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">When you are the flower </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I am the shadow cast by the flower </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">When I am the fire</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">You are the mirror reflecting the fire </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">And when Venus has entered the disk of the Sun </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Then you are that Venus and I am the Sun.</span></blockquote>
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Several poems in <i>Transit of Venus </i>take a stuttering approach with at least some of their lines, featuring more-or-less incomplete phrases that seem to suggest a world of fragmented perceptions or thoughts It's a mode that seems to fit within the experimental verse of the era, and at times still feel that way today. Here are three examples:<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">SHADOWS</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">A shade, </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">A starless night, </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Death, </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Of death, darkness and the</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Of some unseen power, </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Thy wings under the </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">On the wall</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Of evening, let me call </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Shadows of a thought in green</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Shadows I have seen.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">ROOTS</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Tall ancestral </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Tongues in </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Unto the root of </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Dark-fingered</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">As the needle to the pole</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">As the shadow to the sun</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Fungi and mushrooms</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">And the root of the tree</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Dark-fingered </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Thrusting into </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">Infinity. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-size: large;">KISS</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This blessed fruit, this, </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">This goodly red, </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">This fire, this O, this, </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">This is the last of </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">This kiss. </span></blockquote>
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I really like that "Shadows of a thought in green" line in the first of these three poems. Crosby was a deep reader of poetry, so it'd not surprise me if he purposefully echoed there the "green thought in a green shade" line of A<a href="http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/garden.htm" target="_blank">ndrew Marvell's "The Garden" (click here to refresh your recollection, if you please)</a>.<br />
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I also really like the last poem in this bunch. The staccato in that one serves a mimetic purpose, effectively transmitting the rhythm, the passion, of the lovers' extended kiss, a kiss that's a series of mini-kisses, some long, some quick, some deep, probing here, lingering there -- well, you know how that works, don't you? -- with the commas signifying the pauses between each part, and the whole possessing a most dynamic and arousing intensity. Yes? Yes!<br />
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Even when he is more-or-less conventional, as he can be in <i>Transit of Venus</i>, Crosby almost always drops something interesting into his lines. Consider:<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">NEW EVERY MORNING<br /><br />New Every Morning<br />All brightness like an orchestra of swords<br />All flashing messages of joy<br />All gay as ladies with their lords<br />Meteor with comet spinning spun<br />New every morning with the sun.</span></blockquote>
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This, a brief lyric on the freshness each day brings, is very traditional in form and subject. Yet that second line simile, "All brightness like an orchestra of swords," surely isn't typical or tired. It's close to, maybe is, a surreal image, and memorable for that reason. The image's freshness also of course conveys exactly what Crosby wants to suggest about the newness of every morning. Memorable too is the next to last line of the poem, the way it doubles the not-of-this-world objects (the nouns meteor and comet both) to suggest unexpected abundance, and then puts those objects in a kind of time-traveling action whirl with its initially awkward sounding yet ultimately alliteratively smooth back-to-back present participle / past tense verbs ("spinning spun"). <br />
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I'll end this celebration -- and here's wishing you a fantastic transit of Venus / <i>Transit of Venus</i> day today! -- with the next-to-last poem in the book. I like its on-the-sleeve ecstatic affirmation of exact in the instant accuracy:<br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">YES<br /><br />One little<br />One golden<br />Of bliss wingéd<br />With flying feet<br />One vision golden<br />Of the sun and the sea<br />One precise moment<br />Of clarity. </span></blockquote>
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83923751899084745.post-62948586095605072042012-01-16T15:00:00.000-08:002012-01-16T15:07:16.868-08:00<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:180%;" ><br />Martin Luther King, Jr.</span><br /></span></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ggqpuj72Je0/TxSqQIKBGUI/AAAAAAAACrQ/CJzlRbp0BWw/s1600/mlk-in-birmingham-jail.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 272px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ggqpuj72Je0/TxSqQIKBGUI/AAAAAAAACrQ/CJzlRbp0BWw/s400/mlk-in-birmingham-jail.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5698366622574647618" border="0" /></a><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">King in the Birmingham Jail (1963) </span><br style="font-style: italic;"></div><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:180%;" ><span style="font-style: italic;" class="st"><em><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></em></span></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; font-size:180%;" ><span class="st"><em><span>"</span>L</em>iving in the <em>colony of time</em>,<br />we are ultimately </span></span></span><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; font-size:180%;" ><span class="st">responsible<br />to the <em>empire</em> of eternity.</span>"</span></span><br /><span style="font-size:180%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; font-size:180%;" ></span></span></div><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-style: italic; "><br /></span></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; ">-- Strength To Love (Harper & Row, 1963)</span></span><br /><br style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">+(+)+</span><br style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">+++(+)+++</span><br style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">+(+)+</span><br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0