The Surrealist: Philip Lamantia, part ii

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.

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