Philip Lamantia

Philip Lamantia Poems

The Due D'Aumal's cannonballs
Are being marshmellowed 370 years from their masonic inception
Now lie on the Potomac
The Due D'Aumal's balls cannonaded
...


crashes thru air
where Lady LSD hangs up all the floors of life for the last time
Blue Grace leans on white slime
...

Choppers in the night husk the brilliants of thought
Beyond the cities of patina grow caves of thought
Coyote Hummingbird Owl are rivers of thought
...

Because the dark suit is worn it is worn warm
with a black tie
and a kiss at the head of the stairs

When you hear the dark suit rip
...

Philip Lamantia Biography

Surrealist poet Philip Lamantia was born in San Francisco in 1927, the son of Sicilian immigrants. Largely self-taught, he started writing in elementary school and became interested in surrealism after seeing the work of Joan Miró and Salvador Dalí at the San Francisco Museum of Art. He dropped out of high school and moved to New York City, where he eventually became assistant editor at View magazine. In New York, Lamantia became acquainted with André Breton and Max Ernst, publishing his first book of poems, Erotic Poems (1946), before he was 20. Other collections include Narcotica (1959), Ekstasis (1959), Destroyed Works (1962), Becoming Visible (1981), Meadowlark West (1986), and Bed of Sphinxes: New and Selected Poems, 1943–1993 (1997). In the 1940s, Lamantia returned to San Francisco and took courses at University of California, Berkeley. He traveled in France, Mexico, northern Africa, and the United States and lived for a while in Spain. During his US travels in the 1950s, he explored the use of peyote with Washoe Native Americans in Nevada. Lamantia’s surrealist poetry influenced Allen Ginsberg and other Beat poets. The poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti noted of Lamantia’s work, “Philip was a visionary like Blake, and he really saw the whole world in a grain of sand.” Interested in poetry and jazz, Lamantia was a member of a jazz and poetry group with Jack Kerouac, Howard Hart, and David Antrim in the 1950s. In his later years, he returned to the Catholicism of his youth, writing poetry that reflected his rediscovered faith. Lamantia lectured at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute and was married to Nancy Peters, his editor at City Lights Books. He died in 2005.)

The Best Poem Of Philip Lamantia

A Little Washington DC Dream

The Due D'Aumal's cannonballs
Are being marshmellowed 370 years from their masonic inception
Now lie on the Potomac
The Due D'Aumal's balls cannonaded
Split
Through mirror teeth Washington D.C.
Black City of white rectangular bits of fear
Blown fluff of fear
O the Duke of Aumal's balls are raging
Yellow vermin white houses of fear
And beautiful funky people
Diamond heart D'Afrique
Human blood human need
Black booming emotional vibes of life
White geometry of abstract cerebral death
I really saw at Fort McNair
In front of American General's mansion
A fir-tree tied down to a black coffiny box
Jefferson's phantom always rides tonight
There's a solar splendor burst from Eighteenth-Century Cannon of the Due D'Aumal
I'm sure Citizen Lafayette was no dixiecrat

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