Philip Lamantia Day -- 2024

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

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

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

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

. . .  your colophon [ . . .] that headless, bagpiping bird [. . .] has a weird ferocity (like Mickey Mouse and Lamantia) . . . so comes on like your best poets.

(Lew Welch, Letter to Dave Haselwood, May 25, 1960 [in Letters from Lew Welch (Beat Scene Press, 2010].)    

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

This section of “Fragments From An Aeroplane” also has a powerful intensity and wildness.  There is  passion, and undeniable momentum, the letter greatly aided by the thrice-repeated “I sing” and the second appearance, in the fifth line, of  “the far country!” with an added mark of exclamation. There are also “beasts,” “lions,” “houses of blood,” and “graves”  and thus the implied fierceness, violence, and death. There is,  to use Welch’s word, a ferocity to the poem, along with the weird.     
 
Narcotica – with its alternate title “I Demand Extinction Of Laws Prohibiting Narcotic Drugs” might be the ne plus ultra of Lamantia’s poetic ferocity.  In the pamphlet’s opening piece, Lamantia declares “fuck yr safety” and grandly and poetically inveighs:

you, turds, fuckedup middleclass liberals and notsoliberal intellectuals DROP DEAD WITH YR ASS HOLE MAMMON MOLOCH MONEY MOTIVATED LAWS ! ! !  It is I WHO AM THE LAW! I DEFY YOU TO SAY IT IS NOT MY HUMAN RIGHT TO USE ANY GOD GIVEN HERB PLANT AND POWER FOR MY PHYSICAL AND PSYCHIC WELL BEING . . .

[. . .]

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

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

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

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

Here, for example, are the final two stanzas of “The Ruins,” one of the poems featured in Lamantia’s first national publication, the June 1943 issue of the New York magazine View:

    Here is a hot wind of knives
    cutting my breath for sport,
    and leaving behind a limpid song
    heard by a million murdered stars.
    
    Balls of arson charge a flood of rats
    going down to pray with the blizzard bone
    and the sound burns through a tower,
    the highest light of forbidden magic.

There is plenty similar in other early poems.  For example, “I Am Coming” features a “valley of beautiful arson” and a sky covered with sparrow blood.  In  “Hermetic Bird” Lamantia declares, “here is a landscape on fire” and “the children will come out to murder.”  There’s also “the boulevard / of crawling veins” – “Don’t be afraid / blood is cheap!”  Lamantia writes – and  knifing clowns (“Automatic World”), floating corpses, “bleeding eyes of murder,” “two girls / raped at sunrise” and “wounded boys” (“The Enormous Window”), “burnt flesh” and a “bracelet of animal entrails” (“Infernal Landscape”), filicide and incestuous  rape while “a clown’s laugh is heard in church” (A Civil World), a hanged girl (“I am a criminal bare upon the universe”), the “hot bite of dogs” (“Awakened from Sleep”), a “goblet of suicide” (“Touch of the Marvelous”), and “the corpse of a dog” along with “a sublime bucket of eyes” (“There are Many Pathways to the Garden”).  This all is truly a weird ferocity.  

Arising from the disinterested play of imaginary thought, these are – to use terms used by Lamantia at the time or later – poems of dreams, vertigo, madness, and rebellion, which reveal that which is concealed (see Preserving Fire at 3, 6-7, and 94-95).  In this regard, recall that physical aggression is well-recognized as normal in dreams.

 

These first poems, products of a preternatural surrealist instincts, also relate to Lamantia’s experience listening to radio serials as a child and young teenager.  As he later wrote, those serials resulted in “audial reception of violence, mayhem, murder and terror” which “were generally salutary for children” because, among other things, they were necessary for psychological development, had a dream-like intensity, and were fantastically poetical and had an imaginary grandeur (see Preserving Fire at 105-120).

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

 

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Philip Lamantia -- February 1999

Harry Crosby Day!

“. . . the Sun is a lighthouse on a Sea of Clouds . . .”

Yes, so wrote Harry Crosby in his diary on November 7, 1927, after seeing “a giant revolving phare” at the Salon Nautique, Paris’ annual boat show.

This is but one of many metaphors relating to the Sun that the solar-obsessed Crosby wrote in his diaries, poems, and notebooks.

“Lighthouse on a Sea of Clouds” seems particularly picturesque and poetic, and for those reasons is a favorite. Let’s celebrate it here – 

today – 

the 126th anniversary of Crosby’s birth on June 4, 1898.  

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Philip Lamantia Day -- 2023

 

 

 

“and isn’t it with daydreams that poetry begins to dance?”

 

 

Ah yes!  And aha!  

Today’s the 96th anniversary of the birth of Philip Lamantia, in 1927, in San Francisco!   

Let’s celebrate!  

How about we luxuriate in and cerebrate on the rhetorical question pinned between the photos above?

The question – permit me please to repeat it –

 

“and isn’t it with daydreams that poetry begins to dance?”

 

– is a line near the end of Lamantia’s “Diana Green,” a major poem first published in 1987 and included in Bed of Sphinxes (City Lights, 1997) and Collected Poems (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.

Daydreams and creativity – free and wild creativity –  have long been linked.  See, for example, Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Day-Dream (1842)  –

     “. . . I too dream’d . . . And ordered words asunder fly”

– and Sigmund Freud, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming (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 – plenty similar in recent decades. 

 

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:

 

the rainbow leaps onto the gorge of daydreaming be it
ever the sandy castles
fleeting as mental blowtorches
into the crashing water
quicker than a chipmunk’s chess game
reverses the coyote’s invisible dart

 

I enjoy here how the first verb in these lines – “leaps” – brings to mind grand jetés and the like, and thus the dance of poetic association-al daydream-y thought.

 

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:

Chance to dream wide awake
With the antelope-necked tom-toms
Whose sinews of silence project
The perfect Edenic Reunion

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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,” 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.  

 

 

 

I also remember how Lamantia, in a 1975 essay available in Preserving Fire: Selected Prose (Wave Books, 2018), described the surrealist dance of Alice Farley as “poetry itself moving visibly” (italics in the original) and how, in the notes to his poem “Redwood Highway” in Becoming Visible (1981), he praised “the surpassing poetic beauty of the Kachina dance” which he had seen in the Hopi village of Walpi.

 

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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 – while rightfully insisting that it don’t, to say the least, come easy:

 

words coalesce: sudden seed
                                      “thought”
                        into
            trunk, branches, then, up a whole
solar splendiferic Tree!
                         (diffusion)
effervescence        A quality of
           subsumed quantum—
           there’s nothing harder to do
                                  like true love
                                  — like automatic
                                                pilot. 

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Philip Lamantia 

at the

Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center

Venice, California 

February, 1999

-- photo by Michael Hacker --

 

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¡¡¡ VIVA LAMANTIA !!!

 

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Harry Crosby Day!

 

Yes oh Yes on this day in 1898 Harry Crosby 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!

Here is a short poem by Crosby from Transit of Venus, 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 Collected Poems.  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: 

 

 

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!

Harry Crosby, sitting in the Sun

    While deep within our hearts . . . 

Strange fire growing young . . .

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Philip Lamanta Day --- 2022

 

“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 VVV, 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 —  

— 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.  

Even among the stellar array of writings and art in VVV 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!):

The energy in this poem is—yes, I will say it—marvelous.  I wrote about it about ten years ago, when it appeared in the lead off spot in Lamantia’s Collected Poems (University of California Press, 2013).  

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—

—The Penguin Book of Mermaids (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.

Reading The Penguin . . . Mermaids, 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?   

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.     

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 “camel” and “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.

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 tour de force—or is it a chef-d'œuvre? (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 and first man” (italics added, to emphasis the shape-shifting).  These transformations reverie-rev the imagination.

“Touch of the Marvelous” also reflects the relationship between mermaids and Sirens.  Professors Bacchhilega and Brown remind that Sirens, in Homer’s Odyssey, 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 . . . .”

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 . . . .”

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’s nimble fingers” going through the poet’s hair.  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.  

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 “the Marvelous.”   In this regard, consider what he wrote in the magazine Arsenal Surrealist Subversion (1976):

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.

Roman mosaic: Odysseus and the Sirens (Bardo National Museum, Tunis, Tunisia)

¡¡¡ VIVA LAMANTIA !!!

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Harry Crosby Day!

 

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.  

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 Shadows of the Sun, which almost surely is his crowning literary achievement.  It first appeared in 1928-29-30 in three gorgeous volumes, published by his and his wife Caresse's Black Sun Press in Paris, then again in 1977 in a beautiful unexpurgated version edited by Edward Germain for Black Sparrow Press.

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 into dated diary entries "in longhand . . . written with an eye toward seeming as if [they] had been sketched at white-hot speed."  The end result is an extremely readable, sometimes 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 by what editor Germain rightly calls Crosby's "active curious mind" and reflects his many enthusiasms, including reading, poetry, horse racing, woman, art, jazz, death and -- natch again -- The Sun.

There are many, many stellar entries in Shadows of the Sun.  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 inheritance of thousands of rare books (5/4/28).

One hundred years ago today -- June 4, 1922 -- Crosby, in his Shadows of the Sun diary entry, wrote [translation of the French provided in brackets]: 

To the Chateau de Madrid.  Changed clothes with a waiter (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!]

This sounds like a majorly fun birthday!  The 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.  The Chateau had magnificent gardens with "lush and tall deep-blue green trees," and was also near the Longchamp race track. Kefalin was a horse quite successful in the 1922 season, including winning the prestigious Grand Prix de Paris.

But giant exploding X-class solar flares, let's further celebrate today with a Shadows of the Sun entry that showcases an episode of Rimbaudian derangement, shall we?  Harry loved Arthur; Crosby in 1929, the last year of his life, declared "I believe that Rimbaud is the greatest poet of them all . . . ."  (Shadows of the Sun, 4/1/29.)

The following diary entry, dated 11/14/26, recounts what Crosby writes was his first real experience with kief, the substance Wikipedia describes as a "pure and clean collection of loose cannabis trichomes."  The experience described is perhaps relatively modest  compared to other mind-altering experience Crosby wrote about, involving prodigious amounts of hashish, opium, and/or ethanol.  But this one is still a, er um, high point:

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.

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 . . . ."   

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.

Instead, Crosby uses "chaste" in its lovely figurative sense, meaning, to borrow from the Oxford English Dictionary, "undefiled," "stainless," and "pure."  This use of "chaste" is not particularly common in literature (but see Shakespeare, Othello, V.ii.2), but it's exactly perfect here, given that kief, as said above, is a "pure and clean" substance.

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 Philip Lamantia memorably called "a true dandy of explosively Promethean desire," on the anniversary of his birth.       

 

Philip Lamantia Day -- 2021

 

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!  

How about we read and think about one of his many fine poems?  This one is from Lamantia’s Becoming Visible (City Lights, San Francisco: 1981 [Pocket Poets Series No. 39]):

Vibration

There is a wind torturing bats
there are the scorched feet of dead suns
the city spun into the sea
where the gulfs of the pterodactyl beckon
there is a whorl of terror livening my mind
there’s the hum-whirr of the skeleton of solitude
where angry corpses flower in a bottle
and red weapons vanish into mirrors
I look back by the blade of my double
there flies— through its eye— The Hanged Man
where a pyramid of water hovers in the dark victuals of the inner life

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.

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.  

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.   

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 Caterpillar 5 (October 1968), described Lamantia’s “high excitement” during public readings.  I definitely feel that in this poem.   

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.

“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.

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 “The Hanged Man.”  It’s a kind of horror scene to me, a place of suffering and anguish.

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.

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 Apocalypse Rose (Dave Haselwood: San Francisco, 1966), referred to Lamantia as an “American vibration artist.”  Indeed!
                                           
Happy Birth-Anniversary, Philip!

¡Viva Lamantia!