Philip Lamantia was an American poet and lecturer. His poems were often visionary, ecstatic, terror-filled, and erotic, exploring the subconscious world of dreams and linking it to daily experiences, while sometimes incorporating typographical arrangements a laconcrete poetry. He has posthumously been regarded as "the most visionary poet of the Americanpostwar generation".
Biography
Lamantia was born in San Francisco to Sicilian immigrants, and was raised in the city's Excelsior neighborhood. His poetry was first published in View magazine in 1943, when he was fifteen, and in the final issue of the Surrealist magazine VVV the following year. In 1944 he dropped out of Balboa High School to pursue poetry in New York City. He returned to the Bay Area in 1945 and his first book, Erotic Poems, was published a year later. Lamantia was one of the post World War II poets now sometimes referred to as the San Francisco Renaissance, and later became involved with the San Francisco Beat Generation poets and the Surrealist Movement in the United States. He was on the bill at San Francisco's Six Gallery on October 7, 1955, when poet Allen Ginsberg read his poem Howl for the first time. At this event Lamantia chose to read the poems of John Hoffman, a friend who had recently died. Hoffman's poetry collectionJourney to the End was published by City Lights Bookstore in 2008, bound together with Lamantia's own Tau, a poem-cycle also dating from the mid-fifties. Tau remained unpublished during Lamantia's lifetime. Lamantia was also known for his journeys with native peoples in the United States and Mexico in the 1950s, participating in the peyote-eating rituals of the Washo Indians of Nevada which often inspired his poems. In later life, he embraced Catholicism, the religion of his childhood, and wrote many poems on Catholic themes. Nancy Peters, his wife and literary editor, said of Lamantia, "He found in the narcotic night world a kind of modern counterpart to the Gothic castle -- a zone of peril to be symbolically or existentially crossed."
