Today’s the 98th anniversary of the birth of Philip Lamantia, born in 1927, on Sanchez Street in San Francisco. And yes I said yes let’s celebrate!
This month also marks the 70th anniversary of the epochal poetry reading, held October 7, 1955 at the Six Gallery on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, at which Lamantia and five others read, including, most famously, Allen Ginsberg – who for the first time read “Howl” in public.
This confluence of anniversaries reminds, natch, that Ginsberg in the fifth (paragraph-like) line of “Howl” referenced an early 1950s visionary experience of Lamantia:
Lamantia wrote about this particular visionary experience at least three times: in a poem first published in 1961, in a second poem written that same year (though not published until 2001), and in a prose statement written in 1986 for the annotated edition of Howl. It’s interesting to read these three versions one after another, to consider the details that recur and those that vary, such that one might have a fuller understanding of the experience. And that’s how I celebrate the birth-anniversary of Philip Lamantia today!
This month also marks the 70th anniversary of the epochal poetry reading, held October 7, 1955 at the Six Gallery on Fillmore Street in San Francisco, at which Lamantia and five others read, including, most famously, Allen Ginsberg – who for the first time read “Howl” in public.
This confluence of anniversaries reminds, natch, that Ginsberg in the fifth (paragraph-like) line of “Howl” referenced an early 1950s visionary experience of Lamantia:
“who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated.”Ginsberg’s line, as explained in “High Poet,” the magnificent essay / introduction to The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (University of California Press, 2013), “took poetic license” with Lamantia’s experience, which Ginsberg had learned about from Jack Kerouac, who had been told of it by Lamantia. As “High Poet” explains, “the actual incident took place in an apartment on Polk Street in San Francisco.”
Lamantia wrote about this particular visionary experience at least three times: in a poem first published in 1961, in a second poem written that same year (though not published until 2001), and in a prose statement written in 1986 for the annotated edition of Howl. It’s interesting to read these three versions one after another, to consider the details that recur and those that vary, such that one might have a fuller understanding of the experience. And that’s how I celebrate the birth-anniversary of Philip Lamantia today!
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Lamantia’s first version of the experience appeared as part of two-poem suite titled “VISIONS”, the first part of which is an untitled prose poem that begins, “The marvelous unveils its face in front of me.” It was published in 1961, in the first issue of the little magazine Damascus Road. Here’s how that part of the poem directly about the vision appeared (and heads-up for the typographic glitches with the word “and” in the second and third lines, and the word “was” a bit more than half-way through):
Lamantia here presents his experience here as a memory, in an electric sentence-paragraph. For me, it has a delicious and nutritious you-are-there vividness, and effectively
uses both repetition (e.g., “. . . I was in bliss further out than any earthly one, great bliss, that I wanted to stay in that place of radiant bliss . . .”) and occasional ALL CAPS for emphasis. More generally, and without meaning to be reductive, these words’ verve reasonably raise the question of whether they reflect or a kind of mania. In this regard, Kay Redfield Jamison, in her classic Touched with Fire (New York: The Free Press, 1993) -- a book Lamantia knew well and praised in the late 1990s -- observed:
From virtually all perspectives – early Greek philosopher to twentieth-century specialist – there is agreement that artistic creativity and inspiration involve, indeed require, a dipping into pre-rational or irrational sources while maintaining ongoing contact with reality and “life at the surface.” The degree to which individuals can, or desire to, “summon up the depths” is among the more fascinating individual differences. Many highly creative and accomplished writers, composers, and artists function essentially within the rational world, without losing access to their psychic “underground.” Others . . . are likewise privy to their unconscious streams of thought, but they must contend with unusually tumultuous and unpredictable emotions as well. The integration of these deeper, truly irrational sources with more logical processes can be a tortuous task, but, if successful, the resulting work often bears a unique stamp, a “touch of fire,” for what it has been through.Perhaps Jamison's thinking is applicable here? Or perhaps Lamantia is simply extraordinarily receptive to matters most of us cannot perceive? Regardless, I love the unbridled energy here. The concluding exclaimed italicized Samadhi! underscores that energy while confirming the profound mysticism of the vision reported.
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Lamantia in 1961 also wrote of this visionary experience in the final lines of the long poem “Crystals”, the typescript of which he shortly thereafter gave to the artist Bruce Conner, who eventually donated it to the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, which in 2001 first published the poem in a small hand-set edition. Here’s how that final section looked there:
Compared to the Damascus Road version, this lineated and more detailed telling adds, among other things, “fire”, specifies that the lights were “multicolored,” shares the marvelous double (or is it triple?) synaesthetic “the sound of color the color of sound in a motion of Silence” and the circling flood of perfect unsayable happiness in the standout standalone line:
fire of bliss ekstasis of infinite bliss indescript ekstasisLamantia also adds “stellar space,” “planets,” and “lachrymous pearls” and, most impressively, at the poem’s end, after reporting that he shouted “I HAVE SEEN THE TRUTH”, a vision-within-the-vision, in which he reveals that he saw “THE LIGHT BEHIND THE STARS,” declaring “MY EYES WERE FULL OF IT.” This idea of a power, reality, or state beyond the visible seems very true to Lamantia’s broader poetics.
All told, this version of the vision takes the top of my head off, to use Emily Dickinson’s idea about how one knows something is poetry.
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Finally, here’s the 1986 prose statement, as it appeared in the annotated Howl:
This statement includes details of when and how the vision occurred (e.g., the year and season, Lamantia’s age, reading the Koran), and details about the vision itself (e.g., the contraction of consciousness to a single point, the specific colors of the lights) that frame and add to what was presented in the earlier poems. In addition to that, I found most interesting the repeating three times of “suddenly” -- a word that does not appear in the poems -- which neatly conveys the unexpected and mercurial quality of the vision as it unfurled. All told, the statement – two long compound-complex sentences – is a mighty rich and poetic paragraph.
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While extraordinary, this “was told I could return . . . after I had worked!” / “I must work to return” / “You can return, after you complete your work” vision is but one of many memorable recountings of or allusions to visionary episodes in Lamantia’s poetry. As The Collected Poems’ “High Poet” states in its first paragraph, Lamantia “welcomed . . . visions” and that essay thereafter more than two dozen times references his visions or his (or his poetr’s visionary characteristics. Similarly, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s foreword to he Collected Poem declares that Lamantia’s voice was “ecstatic and visionary.”
As such, it’s not surprising that Lamantia has not only a handful of poems that explicitly include “Vision” in their title, such as “Night Vision” in Erotic Poems (1946), his first book, but also, by my rough count, about 50 other poems in which the words “vision”, “visions”, or “visionary” appear.
As such, it’s not surprising that Lamantia has not only a handful of poems that explicitly include “Vision” in their title, such as “Night Vision” in Erotic Poems (1946), his first book, but also, by my rough count, about 50 other poems in which the words “vision”, “visions”, or “visionary” appear.
There are further many other poems that clearly or seemingly arise from a vision, even if that word itself isn’t used. These include for example, the “see[n] water over” The City and Berkeley in “Last Days of San Francisco”, and, in “Once In A Lifetime Starry Scape,” the “dream[ed] . . . moat between” what I believe is Telegraph Hill and the nearby “buildings of monolithic glass” in San Francisco’s Financial District. There are in other poems more internal visions, such as the “spell” referenced in “Inside the Journey” and the “butterflies of desire,” “eyes the dahlias of torrential ignition,” “[t]he stone . . . tossed into the air of chance” and much else envisioned in “The Romantic Movement.”
“High Poet” correctly states Lamantia “sometimes provoked” visions “through such vehicles as meditation, religious ceremony, and psychotropic substances (the editors – Garrett Caples, Andrew Joron, and Nancy Joyce Peters – marshal plenty of supporting facts for all that). “High Poet” also repeatedly references Lamantia’s episodes of manic-depression, as well as his ecstatic flights. These psychological and emotional states, as alluded to above in relation to Jamison’s Touched with Fire, may have precipitated some of Lamantia’s visionary episodes and poems, or provided openings for receiving these intense moments. And yet – based on repeated readings of his work as well as many conversations with him circa 1998 to 2001 – my abiding belief is that Lamantia’s visionary poetry is best considered as arising from his marvelous creative imagination, (preter)natural surrealism, omnivorous curiosity, and devotion to exploratory thought, all harnessed, at least in the best of times, to a deep commitment to lexical expression.
“High Poet” correctly states Lamantia “sometimes provoked” visions “through such vehicles as meditation, religious ceremony, and psychotropic substances (the editors – Garrett Caples, Andrew Joron, and Nancy Joyce Peters – marshal plenty of supporting facts for all that). “High Poet” also repeatedly references Lamantia’s episodes of manic-depression, as well as his ecstatic flights. These psychological and emotional states, as alluded to above in relation to Jamison’s Touched with Fire, may have precipitated some of Lamantia’s visionary episodes and poems, or provided openings for receiving these intense moments. And yet – based on repeated readings of his work as well as many conversations with him circa 1998 to 2001 – my abiding belief is that Lamantia’s visionary poetry is best considered as arising from his marvelous creative imagination, (preter)natural surrealism, omnivorous curiosity, and devotion to exploratory thought, all harnessed, at least in the best of times, to a deep commitment to lexical expression.
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¡¡¡ Viva Lamantia !!!
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| Philip Lamantia, in front of a part of his library (1987) |
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