"Poetry as Revolutionary Praxis:
Philip Lamantia & the Surrealist Movement in the United States"
Franklin Rosemont
"Poetry is neither tempest nor tornado.
It is a majestic and fertile river."
— Isidore Ducasse
"The deepest river makes the least noise."
— Jean du Vergier de Hauranne
The recent passing of our close friend and fellow surrealist Philip Lamantia calls to mind the “difficult first steps” of surrealism in the United States sixty years ago. More importantly, it reminds us of Lamantia’s own dynamic, inspired and inspiring role in the current and ongoing struggle for surrealist revolution — that is, for freedom now and poetry made by all.
Back in the early 1940s — shortly after his expulsion from a San Francisco junior high school for “intellectual delinquency” — Lamantia at fifteen was the first major voice of surrealism in the U.S. André Breton, author of the Surrealist Manifestoes, then living in New York as a refugee from Nazism, wrote him a letter saluting him as “a voice that rises once in a hundred years.”Beyond question, Philip Lamantia was one of the few truly great poets of our time, and a major player in the global resurgence of organized surrealism that began in the mid-1960s. His marvelous, luminous poetry is a liberating gift to definitive dreamers and seekers everywhere, resplendently anticipating what he called the “supreme disalienation of humanity and its language.” And with his poet’s passion for the freedom of all the senses, he also affirmed the crucial role of Black music in realizing that disalienation. From the mid-1940s on he was an ardent enthusiast of the magic sounds of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor, in whose work he recognized a musical analogue of surrealism’s “automatic message.”
Lamantia was also far and away the most learned poet of his generation. His knowledge of the ancients, the Renaissance Italians, the Elizabethans, the great Romantics, the early surrealists, African American poetry, and a legion of near-unknowns he admired (Jones Very, for example, and Samuel Greenberg) was staggering. His invaluable contributions to surrealist theory and criticism, though almost never even mentioned in literary/academic circles, are essential reading for anyone seriously interested in social transformation and the creation of a truly free society. A revolutionary, an anarchist, the opposite of an ivory tower littérateur, Lamantia was in the profoundest sense an exemplar of poetic action.
Inevitably, newspaper and internet accounts of his life and work have been superficial, uncomprehending, full of the usual journalistic mistakes and distortions. Many of these write-ups are further obfuscated by misleading quotations from supposed “acquaintances” whose views on just about everything differed sharply from the poet’s own. No doubt the literary quarterlies and “magazines of verse,” which Lamantia heartily despised, will soon be adding still more inanity to the disinformation already mass-produced not only by the daily press, but also by a plethora of pretentious websites and blathering blogs.
The aim of this article is simply to summarize the story, heretofore unrecorded, of Lamantia’s vital role in the history of the Surrealist Movement in the United States, and along the way, to correct at least some of the more egregious errors that have proliferated about him in the press and on the internet.
“My main important mentor was André Breton”
Mainstream obits and websites galore have relentlessly trivialized Lamantia’s involvement in surrealism, not only with foolish references to Breton as the surrealist “Pope,” but with all sorts of misinformation, omissions, lies — n short, a shameful, near-total ignorance of surrealism’s revolutionary project. The truth, however, is crystal clear: Lamantia’s identification with the surrealist cause — the triple cause of poetry, freedom and love — was absolute. In his 1943 letter to Breton, published in the surrealist journal VVV, he proclaimed his “formal adherence to surrealism,” and went on to declare that
a true revolutionary poet can not help defying every appalling social and political instrument that has been the cause of death and exploitation in the capitalistic societies of the earth. If he is one for the transformation of the world, as he should be, and if he is not stupid, in relation to to a method of approaching these vital issues, the poet will not be opposed to the surrealist attitude. . .
To rebel! That is the immediate objective of poets! . . .The poetic marvelous and the “unconscious” are the true inspirers of rebels and poets!
Nearly four decades later, when historian Paul Buhle interviewed Lamantia together with his old anarchist friend, Tony Martocchia, the poet affirmed: “My main important mentor was André Breton.” Meadowlark West includes these glowing lines:
The mind is a black hole of beautiful
chance encounters
as with André Breton the André Breton in whom Jacques Vaché is the
seminal gesture
Birth of the revolutionary rose
Indeed, even during the gloomy years that he called his “eclipse,” his admiration for Breton was boundless.
Lamantia’s involvement in anarchism also began in his teens, and fit in well with his surrealism. (Anarchism and surrealism teem with elective affinities. Breton himself felt close to anarchism, and the founding members of the Chicago Surrealist Group were anarchists one and all.) Tony Martocchia early on had been associated with Errico Malatesta and his group, and young Lamantia was well-versed in Italian anarchism: Cafiero, Malatesta, Berneri et al., and a regular reader of L’Adunata dei Refrattari. Later he also studied the libertarian currents of Marxism, especially Herbert Marcuse and E. P. Thompson. Anarchism and libertarian socialism remained basic to his social views, but surrealism was the very essence of his life.
He regarded surrealist poetry as “the only fundamentally new and original development since the beginning of recorded literature.” Striking fire in the reader’s mind and thereby revealing hidden truths, the practice of poetry involves nothing less than attaining “the highest principle of language” — “analogy pressed to the furthest limits” so that it becomes “a transformative value.” His surrealism was always true to the spirit of Breton’s Manifestoes: unfashionable, scandalous, defiantly out of step with the timekeepers. All of Lamantia’s work liberates and advances the Pleasure Principle, mad love, play, freedom, the Marvelous, and the “Universal Harmony” of Charles Fourier, just as it also at the same time invites and urges treason and transgression against the inhuman, spirit-destroying forces of misery and miserabilism: ecocidal corporations, police states, false poets, apologists for the work-ethic, witnesses for the prosecution, the deadly cults of greed, prison, whiteness, war, and all the rest of what he called the “CIA of the mind.”
In our own dire times, such an exalted and Promethean conception of poetry is sustained by very few. Indeed, the great bulk of what passes for “poetry” today is what Lamantia ridiculed as a “retrograde sentimental-death-eating bourgeois pastime” — the merest McPoetry, or belligerent “slams,” or other state- or corporate-funded commercial/competitive swindles.
Against the “false poets,” Lamantia wrote in Arsenal 3:
When I think of the lofty (and loftily researched) findings of the great philosopher Hegel as to the nature of poetic logic, its unity encompassing all the directions of human thought, and I am reminded of a few of us who have begun to practice what amounts to a collective restoration of the powers of poetic unity and as we appear, historically together intervening on the plane of American “culture” with all the chips stacked against us, situated against the monstrous shadow of “the new poetry” and another obscurantism of the students of those moribund minds that the false vanguards alleged to displace, I know that only armed with the living perspectives of surrealism, incarnated in Arsenal, am I permitted to make distinctions, draw up a relentless criticism and inveigh against those crimes now being committed against the human spirit by mystifiers, fabricators of confusion, and all our detractors, in the certainty that my comrades and I shall not fail to be heard over and beyond if even below, the current babble and noise of the sickening purveyors of literary and aesthetic darkness.
Meanwhile, the same uninformed sources that specialize in demeaning and denying all that Lamantia loved most in the world also grossly exaggerate details of the poet’s life that he himself considered inconsequential. He often told us — Penelope and me, Paul Garon, and others in the Chicago Surrealist Group — how irritated he was by the ballyhoo regarding his “influence” on the so-called Beat Generation, a “movement” he regarded as confused at best, and in many respects outright reactionary.
In truth, Lamantia’s revolutionary verve, extraordinary intellectual depth, uncompromising integrity, and abiding modesty were antithetical to “making it” and the “beat mystique” in all its forms. After the 1955 “Gallery Six” reading he tended to avoid Allen Ginsberg’s publicity-seeking machine, made no secret of his disdain for the then-much-touted neo-Poundian “New American Poetics,” and pointedly refused to be included in the special “San Francisco Renaissance” issue of Evergreen Review, which brought the Beats to wide attention. He was that rarest of rarities: an American poet utterly indifferent to fame and glory. Significantly, at the famous “Six” reading, he chose not to read his own poems, but only those of his friend, the anarchist seaman and fellow hipster John Hoffman, who had recently died in Mexico. Almost forty years later, in a 1992 telephone call, he described Hoffman as “the only really close friend I had in my youth . . . the only one who was also a great poet.”
As his longtime companion Nancy Joyce Peters put it in a 1983 article, Lamantia’s poetry
“never quite fit the Beat canon,” and indeed was “alien to the often semiliterate, populist conventions of the Beats.” Peters goes on to stress that, in vivid contrast to the Beats’ naive faith in “American values,” Philip “never abandoned hope for a world revolution of the greatest magnitude.”As a surrealist, however, he naturally “shunned topical political poetry.”
More recently, even Beat “authorities” have had to concede that Lamantia’s “place” among their heroes was in fact marginal. Ann Charters’ Portable Beat Reader (1992) — a volume of 645 plus xxxvi pages — devotes exactly four pages to his poems, all from the mid-1950s, i.e., from the period he called his “eclipse.” Charters’s headnote concludes by acknowledging that “Lamantia is the only American poet of his generation to embrace fully the discoveries of surrealism, and is a contributing editor of Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion.”
The Marvelous Against Religion
Second only to the ridiculous myth of Lamantia as “Founding Father” of the Beat Generation is the deplorable tittle-tattle alleging his “return to the Church” — a doubly misleading accusation in that he was not, in fact, brought up in the Church.
Surrealism has always been emphatically atheist and indeed, hostile to organized religion and its authoritarian institutions. The collective introduction to the 1997 book, The Forecast Is Hot!—a text Lamantia read and approved prior to publication — sums up the surrealist approach:
It was as poets that we developed a specifically surrealist critique of religious institutions, and a strategy to oppose them.
The fundamental experience of poetry enabled us to recognize religionists as the colonizers of the Marvelous: brutal exploiters whose means and ends are explicitly anti-poetic. Before the rise of the advertising industry, churches were in fact the most virulent institutionalized expression of the hatred of poetry. Religious belief-systems, a major obstacle to individual self-discovery, exemplify the imagination in chains.
Here as elsewhere, however, surrealists continue to insist on an open-ended and dialectical approach. Our resolute antagonism to the prevailing religious powers has never diminished our sympathetic interest in a wide range of hermetic and gnostic heresies and heterodoxies.
Superseding all approaches based on rationalism, surrealism's guerrilla war on religious oppression advances on firmly poetic ground, emphasizing the freedom of the Marvelous, eroticism and humor. Our aim is not to win points in a debate, but to uproot paralyzing fears, to stimulate emancipatory desire, to open the doors of poetry for all. The practice of poetry is not only the best means of discovering the sacred (in its secular sense, of course), but also the only means of preventing its reification into religion or other forms of inhibition.
The weird tales of Lamantia’s “conversion” take us back to his “eclipse,” and even beyond. Like many anti-clerical poets before him (including Blake, Burns, Shelley, Rimbaud, and his own surrealist friends), he was acutely sensitive to the cryptic messages of gnostics, alchemists, and other adventurers in the realms of heresy and the “occult.” Since earliest childhood, moreover, he had several times been touched by what he called “poetic hallucination-ecstasy” and “fever vision,” enigmatical and mind-bending sensations that later multiplied appreciably with the help of drugs. In the early 1950s his participation in Washo Indian peyote rites, near Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada, led to a full-fledged “mystical” experience in which he felt “an extraordinary connectedness with others; with everything.” As Nancy Joyce Peters has described it, Lamantia saw
the great achievement of primal peoples as the creation of a living poetic structure that wove the claims of the individual, the community, and the natural world into a richly satisfying whole. The ritual was in no sense a way to have personal visions but made its participants aware of a harmonious intersubjective reality. To Lamantia, it offered a clue to overcoming antinomies and reintegrating human life in such a way that poetry and poets, in the literary sense, would be transcended altogether.
A few years later, as a heroin addict at wit’s end, consciously self-isolated from everything Western civilization considered “normal” and wandering around Mexico ready to try just about anything, he took part in a nocturnal tobacco ceremony of the Cora Indians which suddenly, at a particularly intense moment, sparked his self-identification with a strange Native American variant of Catholicism. As Peters noted, his books Ekstasis (1959) and Destroyed Works (1962) reflect Lamantia’s
heretical conflation of nonwestern and traditional religious symbols of transformation . . . [an] attempt to recover, through the powers of darkness, Eros, and the Marvelous, what had been denied by rationalism. . . . Although “revelation, in manifestation, of beauty” . . . is his intention, he does not ignore demonic magnetisms along with the celestial. . . . With a lucidity akin to Lautréamont’s in Chants de Maldoror, Lamantia carries even further a “flight to unknowable knowledge” in Destroyed Works. The poems are striking for their raw Manichaean epiphanies.
Peters rightly emphasizes the wildly heretical character of these texts, which are, indeed, subversive of Catholic dogma. Writing in 1970, Lamantia himself described the experience as “this strangest contradiction to poetry.” Too many of his readers, however, mistook him for a dutiful albeit eccentric son of the Vatican, and gibes such as “Philip just wants to get a fix at the altar” followed him around for years. What he referred to, in our first telephone conversation (spring 1973), as his “famous Catholicism,” despite the fact that it owed more to pagan Mexican Indian mythology than to the theology of Rome, had misled many people, and he had come to regret it deeply.
How he happened to break, definitively, with even the smallest link to the church, is not without charm. As he explained to Paul Buhle in 1982, for six years he had been, in his own heretical way,
interested in a theist, mystical attitude. But Europe cured me completely. There I met the Spanish anarchists. . . . I got the message around Malaga. That will cure you forever of any sentimentality concerning Christianity.
Thus Philip Lamantia, in the 1960s, returned to the outspoken, free-spirited, integral atheism of Tony Martocchia and André Breton, a position steadfastly maintained in all of his subsequently published writings.
In 1976, after a three-week visit on the occasion of the World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago, he gave me, as a going-away present, the book Massacre at Montségur: A History of the Albigensian Crusade, by Zoé Oldenbourg — a harrowing scholarly chronicle of Church terrorism against dissidents, among them many outstanding poets. He recommended the book highly, urged me to share it with others, and added: “For those who think the Church’s bloody tyranny has been exaggerated, or that the Inquisition wasn’t really so bad, this book will set them straight.”
Anticlerical, blasphemous imagery occurs frequently in Lamantia’s poetry. In "Blood of the Air," for example:
Let fly the churches of memory they’re only prisons anyway
And "Meadowlark West":
Crab gore To give capitalism its due
duck-cracker the head of a christian fart
graveyard of sanctimonious filth
And here are a few lines from “Ex Cathedra,” first published in Arsenal (1989) and reprinted in his last book, Bed of Sphinxes:
To weave garter belts with chaos and snakes,
the nun’s toenail of crimson phallus. . . .
snake oil on a eucharistic tongue
plagues of scripture blown to smithereens
The absolute pulverization of all the churches will be the grace of love’s freedom
Philip described this poem as an act of “revenge” against the nuns and priests he had encountered in childhood.
On a chilly evening in 1998, Lamantia, seriously ill, was accidentally locked out of his apartment. After wandering the streets all night he was arrested and held in jail, incommunicado, for several days. Afterward, he approached a local priest with a remarkable proposal: a special midnight service in which he, Lamantia, wearing a Cardinal’s robe, would read aloud, at the top of his lungs, from Les Chants de Maldoror. Needless to say, the proposal was denied, and this gesture of pure Lamantian surrealist blasphemy remains unfulfilled.
Return to Surreality
Lamantia’s twenty-year “eclipse” began when he was still in his teens, in 1946, with the failure of the premier attempt to form a Surrealist Group in the U.S. (in New York). Breton and most of the other European exiles had returned to their native lands. With few exceptions, the few Americans who had frequented the group went on to other, safer and more lucrative isms, and made their peace with Cold War politics. Lamantia, a despondent Sicilian-American San Francisco high-school dropout, took up a lonely nomadic existence characterized by severe depressive illness, heroin addiction, and long spells in jail. For years, he consciously abandoned writing.
And then, in 1966 — coincidentally the year that the first indigenous U.S. Surrealist Group was formed, in Chicago — Lamantia suddenly resumed the “arduous and exciting” practice of “pure psychic automatism,” which eventually led him to declare his “ultimate ‘return’ to surreality.” Fittingly, this triumphal return occurred under the sign of love, for Lamantia had met the poet/painter Nancy Joyce Peters, who became his wife. A former theater director, librarian at the Library of Congress, and researcher of Egyptian myth, Peters herself was soon recognized as one of U. S. surrealism’s finest poets, theorists, and critics. It is to her that we owe what is to this day the best interpretative study of Lamantia’s poetry.
After a lengthy sojourn in Spain and elsewhere in Europe, the couple returned to the U.S. in 1968 — one of the twentieth century’s great revolutionary years. The whole decade, and the first few years of the next, added up to an exciting, revivifying time. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) raised the demand for Black Power. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) seized Columbia University and called for world revolution. All over the country, resistance to the U.S. war on Vietnam had reached the proportions of a huge mass movement. In May, the General Strike and youth rebellion in Paris took place under the grand slogan, “All Power to the Imagination!” And the San Francisco Bay Area, where Lamantia and Peters resettled after a year in Seattle, was the home of the Black Panther Party, the armed self-defense group which, more than any other, symbolized the mid-Sixties leap from “civil rights” reform to global Black Revolution. Adopting Malcolm X’s watchword, “by any means necessary,” the Panthers soon had lively chapters throughout the U.S.
It was in that exalting and prolonged atmosphere of revolt and revolution that Philip Lamantia — the “American Rimbaud,” as Ted Joans called him — rediscovered himself as a surrealist.
His actual re-involvement in the movement, however, took a while. In his August 1972 interview with Yves Le Pellec (published in a “Beat Generation” issue of the French journal Entretiens) he spoke enthusiastically of the revival of the surrealist movement in the U.S., centered in Chicago. A few months later, in the early Spring of ‘73, Lamantia formally identified himself with our group, via an “out-of-the-blue” telephone call, in which he declared his “unequivocal agreement” and “complete solidarity” with us. Immediately he became one of the Surrealist Group’s most active out-of-town militants, and one of our most prolific and inspired correspondents. For thirty years we worked together closely in perfect harmony.
The second issue of the journal Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion (1973) featured a suite of his newest poems, preceded by a statement on surrealist poetics titled “Between the Gulfs.” Under the subhead “By Elective Affinities, Then and Now,” he summed up his surrealist trajectory:
From having initially found the key (the road opening, 1943–1946) to having lost the key (the road closed down, 1946–1966) and since rediscovering the key (the road re-opening in 1967): my solidarity with the surrealist movement, represented in this time and place by Arsenal, re-invents itself without the slightest ambiguity.
For Lamantia, the 1970s and ‘80s proved to be an exceptionally fruitful period — a time of close collaboration with surrealist friends near and far, on matters poetic, theoretical, and political, as evidenced in numerous collective publications and tracts as well as surrealist games, interventions in public events, and the organization of exhibitions.
In 1974 he co-edited (with Nancy Peters, Penelope Rosemont and me) a special “Surrealist Movement in the U.S.” section of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Anthology — a hefty volume that brought U.S. surrealism to a large international readership for the first time. Included in the 52-page surrealist section was his splendid article, “The Crime of Poetry,” on the far-reaching implications of surrealist poetic activity.
In 1976, he not only helped prepare the huge World Surrealist Exhibition at the Gallery Black Swan in Chicago, but also actively assisted in the installation, and contributed to its large-format catalog — a major anthology of international surrealism: Marvelous Freedom/Vigilance of Desire. His poem commemorating the exhibition, “The Curtain of Magic Turns Over Motors of Sleep,” later appeared in his book Becoming Visible.
The 1976 exhibition, which brought scores of surrealist friends from Australia, France, Indonesia, Japan, Portugal, Spain, and from all over the U.S., turned out to be the largest international surrealist rendez-vous anywhere in many years. It was truly an “enchanting time,” as Nancy Peters recalled it recently. For three full weeks, Philip and Nancy were our house-guests and constant companions. The discussions we had, and the games we played — at our Janssen Street place, at the Gallery Black Swan, and at various nearby restaurants — were grand, far-ranging, and ran to all hours.
Philip was charmed that the Surrealist Group held its regular meetings at a workingclass Italian restaurant, Café Roma, a few blocks from our place. (Only later did we learn that the great outsider artist Henry Darger had his breakfast there for years.)
During his Chicago stay, Lamantia contributed texts to the program for Alice Farley’s Surrealist Dance, and to the catalog for an important Gerome Kamrowski retrospective.
The 1970s/80s also saw the appearance of four splendid new books of Lamantia’s poetry —The Blood of the Air (1970), Touch of the Marvelous (1974), Becoming Visible (1981), and Meadowlark West (1986). Each of these books marked an “event” for us all, and stimulated impassioned discussion. Meadowlark West played a particularly important role in the life of the group, hastening the development of a specifically surrealist “ecology of the Marvelous.” (Penelope and I fully shared Philip’s and Nancy’s passion for birds, bird lore, and the “language of birds.”) It was Philip, moreover, who first called our attention to the Earth First! movement, in which the entire Chicago Surrealist Group soon became active.
Critics who remained fixated on the Beat past were not paying much attention, but here was a one-man San Francisco Renaissance in full cry. Not the least of his achievements in that period was his own brilliant and hard-hitting critical and theoretical work. As he wrote me on May 30, 1973: “My confidence in the great possibilities ahead also continues to spark what shall be realized, I hope, as an intensive and surprising unfoldment on the critical plane.” Two years later he became a contributing editor of the journal Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion. Along with his later collaborations on Surrealism: The Octopus-Typewriter (a one-shot Chicago Surrealist Group newspaper), the two surrealist issues of Paul Buhle’s journal Cultural Correspondence (1979 and ‘81), and the large City Lights compilation, Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination (1982), these publications include his most important critical/theoretical/polemical writings.
The passage of time has not significantly aged these texts. Indeed, Lamantia’s spirited essays surely will continue to help define the surrealist movement’s orientation and activities for many years to come. “Poetic Matters” (in Arsenal 3,1976) remains the most incisive criticism of what still regrettably passes for the “official” poetry in the U.S. today. And his “Radio Voices: A Child’s Bed of Sirens” (1979), focused on the subversive poetic undercurrents in The Shadow, Chandu, Mandrake the Magician, and other 1930s/40s radio serials, opened exciting new approaches to the world of “popular culture.” As the art historian Michael Stone-Richards has remarked, this special concern for what we had long ago begun to call “vernacular surrealism,” and the related field of “infrapolitics,” is in fact among the most distinctive innovations of “Chicago Idea” Surrealism.
Speaking of innovations, I want to stress the fact that Philip Lamantia was one of the most original, most open-minded, and least dogmatic individuals I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. At seventy he seemed to me more youthful, more alert to “new tremors” in the intellectual atmosphere, than most people half his age. During the thirty-odd years that I knew him, he was receptive — indeed, zealously enthusiastic — about everything new and original in surrealism in the U.S. in our time, including the poetry of Jayne Cortez and Joseph Jablonski; Paul Garon’s writings on the poetry of blues; Alice Farley’s dance; the sculpture of Robert Green; the paintings of Schlechter Duvall, E. F. Granell, Leonora Carrington, and Penelope Rosemont; the sudden burst of automatic writing by Tristan Meinecke (an older Chicago artist who had joined our group); the photographs of Clarence John Laughlin; and Gerome Kamrowski’s wonderful windmills. When Penelope was completing her Surrealist Women anthology, Lamantia provided important recollections. He was fond of the Chicago Surrealist game, “Time-Travelers’ Potlatch,” and the first among us to include examples of it in a book (Becoming Visible). He was deeply impressed by our collaboration on the journal Race Traitor, and pleased to be represented in its pages. And in his late years he welcomed the work of younger poets and artists: I am thinking especially of Ronnie Burk and Laura Corsiglia.
More recently, Nancy Peters told me that Philip “really enjoyed” my study of Wrong Numbers, and “found it more engaging than any book he had read in years.”
In many and varied contexts, Lamantia made it a point to emphasize a simple truth overlooked by nearly all critics: that surrealism is never static — that it lives and moves and always awaits discovery.
The Last Years
The 1990s, alas, proved to be an exceptionally difficult decade. Ill health, a series of cancer operations, prolonged difficulties with medication, an increasingly depressing political climate, and what he called “all the usual problems of getting old” took their toll. His letter-writing slowed down, and eventually he gave up that form of communication except for an occasional postcard. However, a long tradition that we called our “marathon phone calls” — "marathon” not only because of their duration but also because of the amount of ground we covered — continued well past mid-decade, and these calls were invariably bursting with ideas, surprises, odd bits of information, poetry, and plenty of humor. Once we talked for four or five hours about Paschal Beverly Randolph, the nineteenth-century African-American crystal-gazer and “Affectional Alchemist,” whose books I happened to be reading at the time. Another time Philip read me a letter from a pompous academic, requesting that he “submit” some poems for some ill-conceived anthology; he also read me his hilarious reply, which began: “I shall not submit! Poets never submit!”
Although bad health diminished his active involvement in Surrealist Group activities, he did continue to suggest, co-author and/or co-sign collective declarations, most notably one “For Tyree Guyton” (the well-known Detroit African American artist whose colorful and lavishly embellished houses were systematically destroyed by a hostile city government), and a vigorous denunciation of the Columbus Quincentennial, “1492–1992: As Long as Tourists Replace Seers,” which he and Nancy helped edit, and which was signed also by surrealist groups in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, the Czech Republic, France, Spain, and Sweden.
In 1997, City Lights issued his great book, Bed of Sphinxes: New and Selected Poems, 1943–1993. His largest collection by far, it is filled with magical, moving wonders
from that dawn and night on the Nile
space
where all ends in a beginning
. . .
an unpremeditated pentacle of erotic song.
[“Passionate Ornithology Is Another Kind of Yoga”]
Verily, as Ron Sakolsky emphasized in the introduction to his Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings and Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States (2002), Philip Lamantia must be considered one of the central figures of U.S. surrealism, one of those “who have remained with [the group] the longest and done most to shape its evolving perspectives, [and who] have given surrealism in the United States its greatest social resonance.”
Philip Lamantia always wanted his poems to spark poetry in others. It is good to know that, through his books and scattered writings, he is still out there making trouble, “rethinking ‘the Idea’ in the commune of Anarchs,” “at the foreplay of liberty,” “where the void expands the warm heart of surrealist spring,” to quote from Meadowlark West.
In our copy of that book he added these words: “See you at the port of call. Love and poetry forever. Salud!”
—
April 2005
Principal Sources
In addition to Lamantia’s books and essays, cited in the text, I have drawn on the following:
Buhle, Paul. “Interview with Martocchia and Lamantia,” October 31, 1982, in the Oral History of the American Left collection, Tamiment Library, New York University; transcript.
Peters, Nancy. “Philip Lamantia,” in Ann Charters, ed., The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America, Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 16. Detroit: Gale Research/Bruccoli Clark, 1983, 329–335.
Roediger, David. “Surrealism,” in Mari Jo Buhle, et al., Encyclopedia of the American Left. Second edition. New York: Oxford, 1998, 807–809.
Rosemont, Franklin. What Is Surrealism? Selected Writings of André Breton. New York: Monad Press, 1978; new edition, Pathfinder Press, 2000.
—. “Surrealist, Anarchist, Afrocentrist: Philip Lamantia Before and After the ‘Beat Generation,’” in Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno, eds., Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America. New York: Routledge, 2003, 124–143.
—, with Penelope Rosemont and Paul Garon, eds. The Forecast Is Hot! Tracts & Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States, 1966–1976. Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1997.
Sakolsky, Ron, ed. Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings & Images by the Surrealist Movement in the United States. New York: Autonomedia, 2002.
A Project of Interactivist.net and Autonomedia.org
Re:"avowed Trotskyist"
The bind of Surrealisme supersedes all others. Thank you Franklin for the most comprehensive AND ACCURATE review of our departed comrade Philip......r.i.p. _ St. Louis Surrealist Group
Re:"avowed Trotskyist"
"Anonymous Comrade" is no surrealist and is just jealous that no surrealist group would put up with his pschitt.
An unexamined life
While I appreciate this article overall there are some problems.
1) How did such an 'anarchist' get on so well with an avowed Trotskyist such as Breton?
2) Two Marxist hacks are falsely conflated with ' libertarian socialism' . Anarchism IS libertarian socialism. And sticking with politics were the 90's really that politically depressing? If so, the present must seem like positively wristslashing material!
3) Phil's life as ' revolutionary praxis'. Well yes, sure , up to a point. If we see it as one pointing more toward the primacy and vibrancy of black music rather than the sordid goings on of some long forgotten and forgettable Marxist hacks.
Thanks for the review anyway Franky.
Re:"avowed Trotskyist"
Pschitt! You're just jealous.
Re:"Poetry — Immeasurably superior to Religion"
This, "tribute" to Lamantia written by Franklin Rosemont is innaccurate, too many mistakes.
Re:"Poetry — Immeasurably superior to Religion"
Yeah, Rosemont is way off mark. Lamantia was a Catholic.
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
You, my shit-headed friend, are full of shit.
Re:Philip Lamantia's coming out
I loved his poetry. He was so passionate about love for everyone. It made sense when he embraced the Catholic Church even though he was concerned about what they might think of him being gay.
"avowed Trotskyist"
Breton was an anarchist until he became interested in the Communist Party in 1924. He broke with them a few months later and become a virulent anti-Stalinist, being one of the first in Europe to denounce Stalin's dirty doings in Spain and the Moscow Show trials.
Breton met Trotsky in 1938. By the end of World War II, he had moved from Trotskyism to anarchism until his death in 1966.
Any other misinformation you want to puke out, pal?
Rosemont on Lamantia
Franklin Rosemont generally knows his onions but I think it is wrong for him to dismiss everything published in the press and internet after Lamantia's death as full of mistakes and distortions, and to assert or imply the corollary that he alone knows the truth.
To state a tautology, Philip Lamantia was Philip Lamantia: by which I mean, he was who he was, in all his glory and genius and even contradictions and imperfections. He was among many other things important as a surrealist, as a force in the "beat generation," as a friend to many, as a seeker of knowledge and beauty, and as an extraordinary poet. Can't we accept and remember him for everything he was?
More specifically, I think Rosemont in part misses the mark regarding Lamantia and religion. Even accepting most of what Rosemont writes about Lamantia and religion up to 1998 I notice that Rosemont does not write about the period 1998 to 2002. During that period, there can be no question but that Lamantia deeply believed in the central precepts if not the organization of the Catholic Church, and regularly attended the Catholic mass at the Shrine of Saint Francis in North Beach, San Francisco. More generally, throughout his life Lamantia had a strong interest and passion for the mystic. Lamantia openly talked about these things, including in published interviews, and in 2000-2001 wrote and published poems that clearly show a deep interest in the Catholic church. While Lamantia's late-life interest in religion might not fit some people's view of the man, it shouldn't be ignored or argued away. Instead, it should be accepted since that's the way it was. In any event, Lamantia's poems and other writings will forever serve as a beacon of the imagination, and that central fact should always trump any biographical details.
"Poetry — Immeasurably superior to Religion"
Anonymous pretends "there can be no question" of Lamantia's late conversion, but typically offers no evidence. Opposing evidence abounds, however. Here is just one more example: In the 1990s, Philip tried to convince City Lights to publish a translation of the 1940s French surrealist anti-religious tract, To Your Kennels, Curs of God!
As for the years 1998 through 2002: On a visit to Chicago in June 2001 Nancy Peters, who knew Philip better than any other individual, brought Penelope and me and our surrealist friends a warm message of "Surrealist Greetings" from Philip, concluding with the words: "Once a surrealist, always a surrealist!" It was Nancy who also relayed to us Philip's blasphemous fantasy regarding a midnight Maldororian church "service." Now does that sound like a convert?
Over a year later, in October 2002, Lawrence Ferlinghetti—Lamantia's longtime friend and publisher—joined the Chicago Surrealist Group for lunch. Asked whether there was any truth at all to the rumors of Philip's "conversion" and church attendance, Ferlinghetti unhesitatingly said no, and explained: "Philip is so reclusive, so withdrawn from the world, that he never even goes out for groceries, much less to attend church."
Yes, we should remember Lamantia for "everything he was." But doesn't this also mean that we should defend him from malicious gossip and defamation, and especially from those who seek to link his name to reactionary and anti-poetic institutions that he repeatedly reviled?
As Lamantia lived it, poetry is immeasurably superior to religion. Above all, in the spirit of Lautréamont and André Breton, his poetry is more useful and more daring, defying every illusion of success and failure. As he wrote in Meadowlark West: "Between the ecstasy and the secret / I've touched bottom I want to be lost."
More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
In reply to what I wrote, the poster above (who I presume was Mr. Rosemont himself) writes, "Anonymous pretends 'there can be no question' of Lamantia's late conversion, but typically offers no evidence."I'm not sure what he means by "typically" because I ain't ever posted here before! Or to my knowledge said or written anything of any kind that Mr. Rosemont (who I will throughout assume was the writer of the above comment) ever reviewed or evaluated! Heck, he doesn't even know who I am but feels empowered to comment on what I "typically" do! Hmmm.....I also don't understand what Mr. Rosemont means when he writes that I "offer[] no evidence" about Philip and the Catholic church. First, I wrote in my original post that Philip went to mass regularly in the period in question. Let me be clearer: Philip went to mass regularly for about three years and some months starting about August 1998. In late 2001/early 2002 Philip's depression caused him to withdraw from most public and social activities, including going to church. I know this because I saw Philip at mass several times myself, many times heard him say he had just gone or was going to mass, and met him right after mass (as he walked out of the church) at least three times. I'm sure many others can say the same thing.If, as Mr. Rosemont writes, Mr. Ferlinghetti in response to a specific question in October 2002 denied that Philip had converted or gone to church, then Mr. Ferlinghetti either answered falsely or was ignorant, or took the question to mean whether Philip at that very point in time was going to church, since by October 2002, as stated above, Philip had withdrawn due to depression.I also specifically wrote in my original post that Philip published poems that reflected his interest in Catholicism. That's also evidence I offered. Maybe I should have been more specific. Check out the poems "Seraphim City" and "Ultimate Zone," published in the anthology "Jubiliation" (2000) and also in the periodicals Ur-Vox # 1 (2001) and Communio, "The International Catholic Review" (Spring, 2001). See also the comments about Philip in the introduction to that issue of Communio.Consider also that those responsible for "making arrangements" after Philip's death arranged among other beautiful events a full Catholic mass for him at the Shrine of Saint Francis in North Beach, San Francisco (the church Philip went to). The mass included a before-the-altar display with Philip's ashes, photos of Philip in the church, and the strange beauty of Messiaen's organ works, a composer Philip greatly admired. Both Nancy Peters and Lawrence Ferlinghetti read at the mass (Nancy from the Bible, Ferlinghetti one of Philip's poems). I assume that Nancy Peters and Ferlinghetti or both arranged for the mass, and that they did so -- and would not have participated unless the mass was -- consistent with Philip's wishes.There's more "evidence" but frankly I wonder if any of it matters to Mr. Rosemont. I've a feeling that Mr. Rosemont just can't accept the idea of Philip as a Catholic, maybe because (1) it isn't consistent with what he, Mr. Rosemont, believes a surrealist ought to be; and/or (2) Mr. Rosemont can't accept that people, and Philip in particular, do and did change, sometimes radically so.I want to be kind, but Mr. Rosemont's assertion that those who say or write that Philip embraced the Catholic faith and went to mass are engaging in "malicious gossip and defamation" is the kind of sloganeering crap that dickheads like Agnew and Nixon ought to be remembered for, not a guy like Mr. Rosemont.Mr. Rosemont has written many interesting and useful essays over the years and his refusal here to accept all of what Philip said and did about the church I hope is simply ignorance. If Mr. Rosemont can't accept and acknowledge the facts, it would cause me, and might cause others, to question the accuracy of other things he has written.Philip during the time he went to church said he was still a surrealist (once a surrealist, always a surrealist), but his own kind of surrealist. He could and did explain to me and others how the two were related, while acknowledging that orthodox surrealism (and presumably people like Mr. Rosemont) thoroughly rejected the Catholic church and organized religion.I think it is interesting to think about how it all (poems, beliefs, ideas, actions, etc) worked for Philip. I think it is interesting how he included surrealism and the Catholic faith together during the 1998-2002 period. I think it is interesting to think about how and why he embraced that faith (as he similarly embraced it during the 1950s) even though it was at odds with statements and poems done at other times that true enough reviled both the Catholic church and religion. To think about how his beliefs were both very orthodox and not (including among the latter, according to Mr. Rosemont, the idea of reading Maldoror in cardinal's robes). I think all this is a lot more interesting than asserting that people who talk about these things are engaging in malicious gossip and defamation.I again say that Philip was who he was, even some of who he was is difficult or impossible for some to accept or reconcile with their idea of who he was or should have been. He further was who he was even his his ideas and beliefs about religion and the Catholic church changed -- radically changed -- more than once during his life.At least Mr. Rosemont and I seem to agree that with Philip's death the world lost a poet and thinker and talker and seeker of the highest order, and that the loss is immeasurable.
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
Nancy Peters reading from the Bible in a Catholic church, and Ferlinghetti participating in a Catholic ceremony, are far more disturbing than what Philip Lamantia may or may not have done, as both Peters and Ferlinghetti were supposedly upholding Lamantia's continued adherence to anti-clerical views.
Against God, Church, Capital, State & All Mise
Is it really important that Philip Lamantia attended church a few times during the mental breakdown that followed his nightmarish 1998 jailing? In evaluating a great poet's life and work, do such unfortunate lapses really matter very much?
What does matter—at least to those seriously interested in social transformation and the creation of a truly free society—is the anarchist and atheist position Lamantia defended nearly all his life, as manifested above all in his surrealist poetry which, like all poetry worthy of the name, is naturally against god, church, capital, state, and misery in all its forms.
Re:Against God, Church, Capital, State & All M
So Philip's going to church is now apparently acknowledged, but now an attempt is made to minimize it by asserting that it happened only a "few times," and by characterizing it as an "unfortunate lapse[]" that, the writer implies, resulted from "a mental breakdown."Sorry, but all this misses the mark too. And it's particularly mean-spirited and offensive to imply that Philip went to church because he was mentally ill.During the time that Philip regularly and routinely went to church, he went to poetry readings, read in public (in Frisco three or four times, Los Angeles, NYC, and Washington D.C.), traveled elsewhere (including to Seattle), and attended poetry readings, exhibitions in museums, and movies. He re-connected with many old friends and made new ones, interacting in person and by telephone with a fairly large circle of people.Philip was -- as he was most all of his life -- a manic depressive, but he was most definitely not during the couple years he attended church incompetent, irrational, deluded, or anything close to any of those. He knew exactly what he was doing when he went to church, He also did much demanding work during the period in question, including interviews and the editing of interviews, the previously mentioned readings, and (consistent with his life pattern) a prodigious and wide-ranging amount of reading and poem writing.It is obviously very hard for some to accept but Philip's late-life interest in the church was deep and sincere, just as was his similar interest in the 1950s. None of this changes that Philip at other times wrote and believed things that were the opposite of what he believed in during these periods. For some, including I think for Philip, life and ideas and beliefs don't always so easily fit into the strait-jackets that others might sometimes want people to fit into. Life and people can be complicated, and I think that's okay.Anyone of course is free to argue that certain things Philip said or did or wrote are more important than other things, I will never deny anyone their opinions about such things. Though to say Philip or his poems were but one thing when the work as a whole has many different aspects seems shallow to me, and contrary to the protean spirit of Philip's imagination.Further, although anyone may decide to ignore or consider less important certain parts of Lamantia's work, my love of facts requires that I at every turn challenge as wrong the characterization of reports about Philip and the church as "tittle tattle" or "malicious gossip and defamation" and to do the same with the attempt to minimize his going to church, including the implication that it was a consequence of mental illness.
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
Assuming that Philip wanted a funeral in the church, I am deeply puzzled why anyone would find it disturbing that his close friends helped make it happen, or helped make it gorgeous and true to the man. Doing such a thing strikes me as an act of great love and kindness, not something disturbing.
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
How could we hold Philip accountable as to what some friends did with his ashes? Philip is dead and people could have driven his ashes all over town without him being able to stop it. What happens if they took his ashes to McDonalds and ate a Big Mac in the car? Do we then say, my god, he was a vegetarian and now his ashes have transgressed........
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
Nice going, Franklin Rosemont! You are a total bonehead!!! "The International Catholic Review" (Spring, 2001) with Philip Lamantia, Surrealist Patron Saint of Anarchy! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!! What hypocrisy! You see folks, Mr. Rosemont claims to be the chosen one to lead the surrealist movement and write a bogus tribute to a, "surrealist" poet that become Super-Catholic! What amazes me, is the lame responses from other, "comrades" denying the obvious facts by the poster above. Lamantia embraced Catholicism and did attend Mass!!! Oh, brother! How embrassing to the, "Surrealist Movement". Franklin Rosemont is full of shit! Franklin Rosemont was always full of shit! Franklin Rosemont was full of shit back in 1968 and is full of shit today! Also, Franklin Rosemont never met Andre Breton, that account is false, unless we can all see a picture of Franklin Rosemont with Breton! Which I doubt we ever will! Now, since a great poet like Philip Lamantia passes away, and that is sad, Lamantia was a great poet, he was also a Church-going Catholic and that burns Rosemont! Admit it Franklin, you are full of shit!
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
Saying Mr Lamantia was "a Church-going Catholic" on the basis of a couple of years out of a lifetime of seven decades is below ridiculous. Yes, someone has to be a bit deranged to attend a church, esp a franchise of the biggest ignorance-promoting corporation in the world.
And Peters did not have to read from a Bible, did she?
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
You are a tool! Saying, "Lamantia was a Church-going Catholic" is a fact! You are lame! The best is that Lamantia's, "surrealist" friends even showed up to the mass to honor their Catholic Surrealist friend. Total hypocrisy! Let's get sur-real, folks! Franklin Rosemont is not the person to be writing the facts on Lamantia! Franklin Rosemont is not in any way, shape or form, the, "leader" of any Surrealist Movement!!! Lamantia himself was not a major figure if Surrealism!!! That is all hype!!! So what if Andre Breton welcomed Lamantia into the movement! The guy obviously dropped out and went Super-Catholic!!! Below Ridiculous!!! Yeah Sure, you are lame! Franklin Rosemont is lame and this, "tribute" to Lamantia is lame! Now, let's get real, Franklin Rosemont has based his entire career on a lie!!! Franklin Rosemont never met Andre Breton and that is the truth! Lamantia was a Catholic and Rosemont is full of shit!!!
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
Someone who still thinks he is a Surrealist and yet becomes a regular member of an organized superstition which stands opposed to everything Surrealism stands for, eg free thinking, open sexuality, rebellion,...is clearly demented. If Lamantia became a Catholic in late life due to giving up on the possiblity of human progress, etc., so be it, but the notion that he could still be a Surrealist is absurd, just like an anarchist who becomes a devoted Stalinist and says he's still an anarchist.
And saying Lamantia was a Church going Catholic is as valid as saying Jack Kerouac was an obese ultra-rightist.
PS *i* am not Rosemont.
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
Let me say a few things:1. Lamantia was a great poet, thinker, teacher, talker, and seeker. Whenever they are read, his poems and essays will fire imaginations. Fundamentally, these are the ONLY important facts.2. Almost everyone who has written about English language surrealist poetry has concluded that Lamantia's work is substantial and special. While Lamantia's poems probably are not for everyone, everyone ought to acknowledge that the poetry was important, and surrealist. To dismiss Lamantia as a surrealist because, as one post above puts it, he "went Super-Catholic" is amazingly shallow (see comments 4, 5, and 6, below).3. As important as he was a surrealist poet, Lamantia's influence on poetry is far wider, with poets as diverse as those associated with the "Beats" (e.g., Michael McClure) to a modern day romantic / court poet (i.e., Donald Sydney Fryer) to indigenous Americans (e.g., Ramson Lomatewama) having acknowledged his importance. This wide-ranging influence also does not somehow disqualify Lamantia as a surrealist; on the contrary, it makes him a more interesting one!4. Lamantia has many great poems, including some that are directly religious or have religious over or undertones. See for example "Still Poem # 9" from the 1950s, many of the poems in the book "Ekstasis," etc. Some of these poems were republished by Lamantia in 1997's "Bed of Sphinxes." If you read these poems, as well as the poems written later in his life (mentioned in the posts above) I think one can see that Lamantia had a most individual approach to faith and the church. Dismissing Lamantia's or any person's work or values on the basis of the person's religious beliefs is shallow, particularly when those beliefs are as distinctive or nuanced as Lamantia's.5. While Andre Breton and other of the French surrealists (see especially Benjamint Peret) were decidely anti-religious, Breton at least was not totally so. In the essay "The Automatic Message" Breton gives a fairly direct though qualified tip of his hat to Saint Teresa of Avila. See also the Carrouges affair -- as I understand it, Breton did not want to expel Carrouges (who in my opinion wrote the best book there is on surrealism) simply because he (Carrouges) was Catholic.6. I do not believe that surrealism can only be "this" but not "that." Surrealism changed radically even under Breton, who for example came to reject pure automatic writing as a useful method, even though if one reads the early surrealist texts and the first manifesto one might be very surprised or shocked at such a development. Leaving surrealism -- and writing surrealist poetry -- as Breton or Peret wrote it would be very boring, and ultimately impossible since as mentioned above it changed even under Breton. Lamantia specifically wrote about the importance of not being a clone of anyone, including the surrealist master-poets (e.g., Peret and Magliore Saint Aude), even though keeping the spirit of those masters in one's poetry was vital. Lamantia's book "Meadowlark West," an enormous achievement, is most definitely different than the surrealism of Breton and Peret, and different than surrealism of Lamantia's first poems. That it is different doesn't make "Meadowlark West" any less great! On the topic of surrealism changing and taking almost limitless forms, see Andrew Joron's illuminating and extremely well-written essay and chapbook "The Sun at Night."7. People posting here ought not to be mean with their comments. Philip's death causes grief to those who knew him or loved his poetry, and the most kind human response to such circumstances -- in fact the most kind human response to any circumstance -- is love and understanding and respect. Charges of "hypocrisy" and "total lie" are not particularly useful, to my sensibility at least.
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
Oh shut up! Lamantia was a Catholic and he was not a major influence on Surrealism. Yes, he was a great poet, but his, "role" in Surrealism was extremely minor, unless you want to bore me with more of your opinions! Lamantia was an embarrassment to Surrealism and so is Rosemont!
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
Sorry, I don't feel like shutting up just yet.You who asked me to shut up use the capital letter "S" when you speak of "Surrealism." Sorry again, but I'm not sure of what you speak. There's no official "Surrealism," etc.You who ask me to shut up believe that Lamantia, while a great poet, had only a minor role in "Surrealism." However, you don't explain why you believe that. In the USA at least Lamantia's role with surrealist poetry has been major, for reasons I've explained above and won't repeat.I strongly disagree with the view that because Lamantia was Catholic or had an interest in that religion he was "an embarrassment to Surrealism." I say his interest enriched surrealism and Lamantia's poems. The faith and interest in the church adds yet another angle to the many crystal-prisms in his work.Ultimately, though, its okay by me if someone wants to believe that Philip's ideas or actions related to the church during certain periods of his life somehow makes him unsuitable for surrealism because my belief is that Philip is bigger than surrealism or even Surrealism, by which I mean his life and work cannot be pigeon-holed. To paraphrase (borrow from) the Rosemont essay, Philip had a protean mind that was exceptionally open to new tremors. Is it any wonder that his work and interests were so diverse? Isn't that a cause for celebration?Finally, you who told me to shut up are also off-base when you write that Rosemont is an embarrassment. I did indeed challenge Rosemont's assertion that reports of Philip's Catholicism were "tittle-tattle." But I did say he (Rosemont) knows his onions and his essay on Philip is otherwise an engaging and at points grand memoir and an important appreciation. I regret that in my ferver to get after the "tittle-tattle" crap that I didn't acknowledge more directly the value of the rest of the essay.In addition, Rosemont's work related to the spreading of surrealist ideas in this country (USA) has to be acknowledged as major, starting way back when with (for example) the Radical America issue on Peret and (a little later) his editing of the great anthology of Andre Breton's writings.
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
If you believe that Rosemont's self-induced hallucination of a book, "What is Surrealism", that he edited so poorly, makes him out to be a major influence on Surrealism in the USA, you are more stupid that I thought you were. Plus, that awful, "Race Traitor" issue!!! Please!!! These people are white no less!!! As for Lamantia, well, his hypocrisy is evident! I wish Franklin Rosemont would admit that he is in the business of retro-surrealism and a fake! Pathfinder Press, please!!!
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
Okay, I will shut up now. The fourteen exclamation points in your last two lines got me too damn excited and I need to go lie down.
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
This Rosemont appears to be a fraud. I do not believe he met Andre Breton. What authority does he have to write about Lamantia, who was pro-Catholic?
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
All right, I've had my rest following my over-excitement caused by all the exclamation points a couple posts above.A person's work can take many forms, and spring from a multitude of ideas and inspirations. Take for example the French composer Olivier Messiaen, who I mentioned in a post above. Messiaen wrote what is regarded as the first musical piece of total serialism ("Mode de valeurs et d’intensités"(1949), inspired by his intellectual study of music. He also wrote great religious pieces inspired by his Catholic faith. He wrote piano music directly inspired by birdsongs. He wrote choral works based on the Tristan myth that have lyrics that feature surrealist images and pseudo-Sanskirt words. His famous "Quartet for the End of Time" was written while confined in a German POW camp and was in part inspired by the restrictions placed on him while a prisoner.Messiaen's achievement is all of what he wrote, not any single part of it. It would be absurd (inconsistent with the facts) to pigeon-hole Messiaen as a Catholic. Even more troubling would be to dismiss Messiaen and his work because he was a Catholic, since it suggests extreme narrow-mindedness and intolerance.Similarly, Philip Lamantia had many sources of inspiration. Not surprisingly (and thankfully, at least for me because I value unfetterd creative exploration), Lamantia wrote many types of poems and essays. He wrote pure automatistic surrealist poems, automatistic poems with conscious overlays, purely romantic or lyrical poems, poems of direct social protest, apocalyptic poems, neo-futurist poems, poems arising out of mania or depression, drugged poems, poems rich with erudition, poems imitative of others, funny poems, poems with an ecological grounding, poems reflecting an anti-church view and, yes, poems reflecting religious beliefs. Sometimes these characteristics overlap in particular poems.I celebrate this diversity of work, and believe that the achievement of Philip Lamantia cannot be confined to any single type of his writing. And although people can celebrate and write about particular types of his poems, the better approach, consistent with Lamantia's protean mind, is to appreciate all of his work, in its many manifestations.
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
Wigdor, you really need to get a hold of yourself.
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
Ro$emont writes that Lamantia was a, "major player in the global resurgence of organized surrealism that began in the mid-1960s." Oh, Please! There is no way you can convince me that Lamantia was a, "major player" and that surrealism became, "organized" after 1969. When Breton died in 1966, and when that groovy Prof.William Rubin held his shindig at the Art Institute in Chicago back in 1968, (yes Franklin, I read your work), the, "Chicago Surrealist Group" stage this bogus, "minimal" protest (yes Franklin, I did read the word, "minimal" in your shitty book), the Paris Surrealist Group contacts The Chicago Group in that March 1967 letter (if I am correct) and you need to re-ead carefully what was written, nothing really came about from this lot. Now, in regards to Philip Lamantia, he abandoned Surrealism and decided to come back to it on his own terms through Arsenal, so what? Why place so much importance on someone who spent a large protion of his life as a junkie! Heroin and Surrealism do not mix! Oh so what, in 1967 when the USA was going through its imitative, "revolution", that is when Lamantia decides to save the day by coming back to Surrealism and joining forces with the Rosemonts!!! Man, David Peel was more of a surrealist than Philip!!! Please Mr.Rosemont, Please shut up! No more essays from you, unless you really have something to legitimately produce! Now, be a good little entrepreneur and go back to your publishing company and sell those books!!! Ka-Ching!!!$$$$urrealism!!! Franklin, I do recommend that you get off your lazy ass and have another, "World Surrealist Exhibtion", the 70's was a long time ago! Yes, Surrealism is alive, but never in Philip Lamantia or his phone-buddy Mr.Ro$emont! Please.
Re:"avowed Trotskyist"
"St.Louis Surrealist Group"! Oh, brother, another scam group!
Re:"Poetry — Immeasurably superior to Religion"
So now Ro$emont quotes Ferlinghetti on Lamantia, ""Philip is so reclusive, so withdrawn from the world, that he never even goes out for groceries, much less to attend church." So, please tell us Mr.Ro$emont, if Philip Lamantia was so reclusive and so withdrawn from the world, where did he find the time to be active in surrealism? Mr.Ro$emont, you are again full of shit! Please Mr.Ro$emont do us all a favor and shut up! Now be a good little entrepreneur and go back to your publishing business! Franklin Ro$emont cashes in on Surrealism and he is not the person to be writing on Lamantia. As for Lamantia, he should have stayed off drugs and lived for surrealism!
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
To the person who is writing the lengthy, cogent responses to the rather incoherent, inflammatory comments,
You are being "trolled." The best way to get rid of a "troll" is to ignore it. They generally discredit themselves.
"Don't feed the trolls."
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
I agree, but this poster does have a valid point. Philip Lamantia was no major player in Surrealism. There are way too many gaps in Mr.Rosemont's account on this poet's life.
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
No, Lamantia was not a major player in Surrealism, because as has written elsewhere, he had a general disdain for organized groups in general.
However, you need to ignore the slanderous postings of the anonymous poster who is probably Keith Wigdor, a borderline case who makes a hobby out of slurring and slandering the Chicago Surrealist group and other surrealist groups.
There are many legitimate criticisms of Rosemont et al. Wigdor's is not among them. Don't encourage him.
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
Lamantia was a major figure in surrealism and the surrealist movement. What is this person above talking about? The author of this tribute to Lamantia, Franklin Rosemont is accurate on the facts. I did a google search on this Wigdor, that is mentioned above and it appears he is a surrealist too. This is a tribute to Philip Lamantia, remember that.
Re:"avowed Trotskyist"
Ranter 1679 is not a surrealist, there is no St.Louis Surrealist Group and Philip Lamantia was not a surrealist. Franklin Rosemont is not a surrealist.
Re:"avowed Trotskyist"
Hey Ranter 1679! What surrealist group do you belong to? What surrealist group did Philip Lamantia belong to? Philip Lamantia did not belong to any surrealist group. Surrealism passes you by as usual.
Re:More on Mr. Rosemont and Philip Lamantia
Sorry moron, Philip Lamantia was full of shit, a lot of it too, Heroin!
Re:"avowed Trotskyist"
Now now, control yourself, or you'll pschitt your pants in a jealous rage.
Re:"avowed Trotskyist"
Ranter 1679, why are you so stupid? Philip Lamantia was not a surrealist, he was a pschitty poet and he is dead! Hahahahahaha!!!!!
Re:"avowed Trotskyist"
Poor Anonymous Comrade, the unrequited lover of the surrealist movement. Like an awkward high schooler with a crush on another student, he has no other way to attract the attention of the object of his affection except by hurling taunts and insults. No doubt he cries himself to sleep at night and has wet dreams about the surrealist movement. He sits by the phone, pining away, hoping that surrealism will call and ask him to the senior prom.
But the surrealists never call, they just ignore him....
Re:"avowed Trotskyist"
Awwww poor little Ranter 1679 as boring as usual. Awwwww, your insults are so surreal! This goes to show you that nothing here, including this terrible article written by gasbag Rosemont has anything to do with surrealism. Poor little Ranter 1679 mourning the death of their junky friend.
Philip Lamantia's coming out
Philip Lamantia was a great poet and an asset to the gay community. When Philip admitted his homosexuality and denounced surrealism, we all knew that he was reborn.
Re:Philip Lamantia's coming out
When did this event (gay outing and denunciation of surrealism) occur?
Re:Philip Lamantia's coming out
Lamantia's involvement with surrealism, anarchism, and the Catholic church are documented and reflected in his verse. Aside from a mention in the memoirs of Tennessee Williams, there is no evidence anywhere of Lamantia being gay. If he did come out as gay some evidence for it should be produced. When he embraced the Catholic church in the mid-50s one might expect he would have written something if he had problems with them about his sexuality.
Re:Philip Lamantia's coming out
Even though Andre Breton and his surrealists friends were racists, with them being against homosexuals and catholics, Philip Lamantia really had a very limited and fleeting role in this surrealism jive that Breton was about. I still respect Philip Lamantia for his all work. I do have doubts over his alleged involvement in this surrealism movement that nobody really cares about. Everyone in the gay community should look up to Lamantia for his coming out, that is more important, as well as him being catholic too.
Re:Philip Lamantia's coming out
It is strange to see Breton accused of racism, although his attitude toward collectors of "primitive art" was a bit too indulgent; i.e. he loved the art but didn't care much about the ambience, as when he defended Malraux for stealing Khmer statuary and violated the rules while watching a Hopi ceremony on the argument that he was interested in art, not religion (he was stopped by a Hopi policeman.) But when did Lamantia come out? Coming out suggests something that happened in public, no? Where and when did this happen?
Re:Philip Lamantia's coming out
How does one, "see" Breton as racist? One does not see Breton as racist, he was racist against homosexuals and people who were Catholics, that is old hat. As for Lamantia being gay, so what. Who cares if he was gay. The cult of Breton was played out back in the 50's. Why is this Rosemont character so wrapped up in this nonsense and where does he get off writing about Lamantia is such a manner? I read this piece and there is so much left out about Lamantia, besides his contributions to this stupid surrealism movement which ended when the french-fag hater Breton died. Didn't Louis Aragon come out?
Re:Philip Lamantia's coming out
Aragon was outed, after his death. He did not voluntarily come out. Breton may be described however you wish regarding gays, but he was a great admirer of Jean Genet, something known only by those who knew Breton well (a copy of "Querelle de Brest" showed up in his library when it was sold). Breton never really gave up his affection for Gide, or renounced his personal friendship with Rene Crevel who was gay, or with the lesbian photographer Claude Cahun. Life is always much more complicated than it seems. It is, however, very interesting that Mr. Lamantia's Catholicism was apparently not of the run-of-the-mill sort. COMMUNIO, the magazine that published his late Catholic verse, was cofounded by none other than Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now known as P.P. Benedictus XVI, Bishop of Rome. You may have heard of him. The whole affair has the feeling of a final and massive surrealist prank by Lamantia against Rosemont and others.