 Lamantia’s first published poem [update 3/21, thanks to commenter Steven Fama: were five poems published in View in 1943: "I'm Coming," Apparition of Charles Baudelaire," "The Ruins," "By The Curtain of Architecture," and "There Are Many Pathways to the Garden." He then sent some work to Breton, which was published in VVV. Among these] was “Touch of the Marvelous”—the name already Fortean (or Ripleyan, if that neologism is acceptable). The first lines are
“The mermaids have come to the desert
They are setting up a boudoir next to the camel
Who lies at their feet of roses.”
These, too, have a Fortean ring. But, capturing what Fort mean to Lamantia is not so easy. The Fortean overtones in his other poems are less obvious; more to the point: as far as I know, he never wrote about Fort. It’s possible to offer a plausible reconstruction, though.
Let’s start with surrealism.
 So what did Lamantia mean when he wrote that he had died in 1945? Certainly, part of it may have been his break with surrealism. He had invested a lot of himself into the movement, had defined himself as a revolutionary—both socialist and surrealist—and seeing this movement flounder would have been difficult. But he did not act like a dead man: he continued to study and investigate other forms of cultural radicalism.
 In New York, Lamantia found two mentors, Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler. It is worth noting here that New York surrealists were fascinated by H. P. Lovecraft, as Lamantia had been (and probably still was). The issue of VVV following the one that first published Lamantia, in fact, had a pioneering study in Lovecraft’s work by Robert Allerton Parker called “Such Pulp as Dreams Are Made of.” According to Franklin Rosemont, the works of Lovecraft and his circle are a “ central source” for surrealists. During his time here, Lamantia was exploring a kind of automatic writing, his poems held together by the hidden—esoteric, occult, one might say—connections between otherwise dissimilar images. The poems he wrote are, in a very real sense, impenetrable. Images are repeated—especially fire, rape, hair, clowns, the moon—but they are not subject to textual exegesis. They are meant to experienced—to be entered and to enter the reader. The poems that came out of this period were variously collected in his Erotic Poems (1946), Touch of the Marvelous (1966; 1974), and Selected Poems (1967). Potted biographies of Lamantia have it that he broke from surrealism around 1945, after having found it stagnant. His papers at the University of California Berkeley give a more . . . dramatic . . . interpretation to this period. An undated autobiographical note, probably written around 1961 or 1962, offers this brief biographical nugget: Born Oct 23, 1927. Died 1945. Resurrected 1954. Dying, it must be admitted, is something different than finding a particular artistic movement decadent and returning home.
 The poet Philip Lamantia was not only interested in Forteanism—his life, with its lost works and drastic changes of viewpoint—is itself almost a Fortean artifact.
Lamantia was born in San Francisco on 23 October 1927 to Nunzio and Mary Tarantino Lamantia, both of whom had emigrated from Sicily and settled in with San Francisco’s Italian community. He was interested in poetry from a young age—but also in the growing mass culture of the time. He took great enjoyment in radio plays—he called them “A child’s bed of sirens” later in life. Lamantia also delighted in comics—and the weird. A scrapbook in his papers at UC Berkeley, apparently put together when he was about twelve, included numerous cut-outs from Ripley’s Believe It or Not comics. In junior high school, he started reading Poe and Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith. According to some reports, these enthusiasms had him tossed out of school for “intellectual delinquency.”
When he was fourteen, he saw the surrealist works of Dali and Miró at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. It was a signal moment. He read through all the works on surrealism available to him, eventually quitting school for New York, where he was welcomed enthusiastically by Andre Breton and other European exiles who had fled the war and Nazism for safer shores. He first published a poem in View and the surrealist organ VVV when he was only fifteen.
At the time, it seems, Lamantia was a committed materialist. In a series of lecturing letters to George Leite, he complained that Circle was too eclectic and tended to publish poor work. Surrealists, by contrast, had a definite agenda. Surrealism, he said, is based on materialism and is uninterested in mysticism or religion. But it is fascinated by magic: because magic preceded mysticism and was a way of manipulating the universe. Science was thus its heir. Mysticism, he said, supplicates, while magic transforms: it was revolutionary, and he was interested in revolution. He disavowed any connection with Stalinism but was in sympathy with the Trotskyites.
 Two examples. The first comes from a letter written by Edward F. Ricketts to Don Emblem dated 3 November 1943. Ricketts was a marine biologist who developed into something of a philosophe. He is best known for his friendship and work with John Steinbeck. At the time, Ricketts was living in the Monterey area, where he was also friendly with Henry Miller and Joseph Campbell. Emblem was a poet.
Ricketts wrote, “Your speaking of Henry Miller reminds me to say that Janko met him down there, and Miller speaks of coming on here again. I think he is a good man. Charles Fort makes my tired ache, although I realize I am one of a minority. Many people whose minds I respect admire him: Janko; at one time John; Toni. Most of the writers whose work appears not to be circumscribed by form are those who have got to use it as familiarly as a person uses his senses.”
The context of the reference to Fort is not exactly clear; Emblem’s article, as far as I know, has not survived. But it seems fair to say that Emblem probably brought up the subject of Fort. The important point here is to note that in early 1940s, Fort was well-known among the Monterey-area Bohemians. In particular, Ricketts specifically references Janko—Jean Varda, a Greek painter who had been in the U.S. Since 1939. Janko and Henry Miller (another Fortean) were good friends. (At the time of the letter, though, Miller was in southern California.)
 The Godfather: Kenneth Rexroth
Little remembered today, Kenneth Rexroth was a major influence on the art world through the middle of the twentieth century, especially in San Francisco. In a fittingly Fortean way, he both recurs throughout the history of Forteanism and is peripheral to the subject. He never wrote directly about Forteanism, and his work shows no influence from Fort. But, it is impossible to write about the development of Forteanism without referencing him.
Rexroth was born in South Bend Indiana in 1905. He was raised in a family that had extensive ties to socialism and had been involved in abolitionist movements, including working on the Underground Railroad. These would have significant effects on Rexroth throughout his life.
His father, Charles Rexroth, had originally intended to become a doctor, but never finished his schooling and instead feel into pharmaceutical sales. If socialism was one influence on Rexroth, then his father’s alcoholism and philandering was another, causing drastic shifts in the family’s fortune—from mansions to shared rooms—and putting the boy into untenable situations, as when the young Rexroth was forced to live with his paternal grandmother, who was senile and beat him mercilessly for no reason. (Rexroth would, in turn, become abusive.) Kenneth was close to his mother, Delia, but she had many illnesses and eventually died in 1916, when he was about eleven. (His father died two years later.)
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