Murió Philip Lamantia, poeta beat de referencia y surrealista californiano.

El llamado Papa del surrealismo, André Bretón, al leer en 1943 los primeros poemas del joven de 15 años Philip Lamantia, dijo: "Es una voz que se yergue sólo una vez en 100 años". Al paso del tiempo, Lamantia se convirtió en una presencia fundamental de la "generación beat" y el mismo Lawrence Ferlinghetti lo comparó con William Blake, pues ambos vieron al mundo como "en una lluvia de arena".

Publica La Jornada en su edición del 29/3/2005

Sin embargo, sólo unos cuantos se enteraron en el mundo de su muerte, el pasado 14 de marzo. Lamantia nació en la ciudad de San Francisco en 1928. Hijo de inmigrantes Sicilianos, fue uno de los pocos elegidos que escucharon la primera lectura del satanizado poema “Aullido”, entre jazz y vino tinto en la legendaria Six Galery.

Jesse Hamlin, del Chronicle de San Francisco, California, ciudad donde vivió y murió Lamantia, reseña amorosamente los mejores instantes de la vida de este poeta, quien tuvo una influencia definitiva de los surrealistas y a su vez permeó la poesía beat, entre cuyos cómplices también está Michael McClure, quien dijo que la poesía de Lamantia fue "hiperpersonal y de un surrealismo visionario".

De la página oficial de los poetas beats:

Philip Lamantia was born in San Francisco on October 23, 1927, the son of Sicilian immigrants. He began writing poetry in elementary school and was briefly expelled from junior high for "intellectual delinquency" when he immersed himself in the work of Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. At age sixteen, after being introduced to surrealism by the Miro and Dali retrospectives at the San Francisco Museum of Art, he began to write surrealist poetry, realizing that "the purely revolutionary nature" of surrealism "even before my knowledge of Surrealist theory, was part of my own individual temperament." Shortly afterward, Lamantia left home to join the Surrealists in York City and was welcomed by Andre Breton as "a voice that rises once a hundred years".

Lamantia"s poems were published in 1943 by Andre Breton as VVV. His first book, Erotic Poems, was published in Berkeley in 1946. His second book, Ekstasis, appeared after the Six Poets at the Six Gallery reading, and City Lights published his Selected Poems 1943-1966. "High", "The Night is a Space of White Marble", I Have Given Fair Warning" and "There is the Distance Between Me and What I Seek" are from that volume. "Fud at Foster"s" describes Foster"s Cafeteria, a popular hangout for San Francisco poets and artists, the place where Ginsberg met Robert Lavigne, who took him home and introduced him to Peter Orlovsky.

Like the work of many of his Beat colleagues, Lamantia"s poetry demonstrates the tension between what his biographer calls "the exultation of reality and an omnipresent sense of the pain and terror inherent in life. 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.

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O beato solitudo! Where have I flown to?
stars overturn the wall of my music
as flight of birds, they go by, the spirits
opened below the lark of plenty
ovens of neant overflow the docks at Veracruz
This much is time
summer coils the soft suck of night
loan unseen Eagles crash thru mud
I am worn like an old sack by the celestial bum
I"m dropping my eyes were all the trees turn on fire!
I"m mad to go to you, Solitude - who will carry me there?
I wedged in this collision of planets/Tough!
I"m ONGED!
I"m the trumpet of King David
The sinister elevator tore itself limb by limb

You cannot close
You cannot open
You break your head
You make bloody bread!


I Have Given Fair Warning

I have given fair warning
Chicago New York Los Angeles have gone down
I have gone to Swan City with the ghost of Maldoror may still roam
The South is very civilized
I have eaten rhinoceros tail
It is the last night among crocodiles
Albion opens his fist in a palm grove
I shall watch speckled jewel grow on the back of warspilt horses
Exultation rides by
A poppy the size of the sun in my skull
I have given fair warning
at the time of corpses and clouds I can make love here as
anywhere


There is this distance between me and what I see

There is this distance between me and what I see
everywhere immanence of the presence of God
no more ekstasis
a cool head
watch watch watch
I"m here
He"s over there ... It"s an ocean ...
Sometimes I can"t think of it, I fail, fall
This IS the book of love
there IS the Tower of David
there IS the throne of wisdom
there IS this silent but a lot
Constant flight and air of the Holy Ghost
I long for the luminous darkness of God
I long for the superessential light of this darkness
Another darkness I long for the end of longing
I long for the
it is nameless what I long for
a spoken word caught in its own meat saying nothing
This nothing ravishes beyond ravishing
There IS this book of love Thrown Silent look of Love

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The crime of poetry

(El crimen de la poesía)

By Philip Lamantia

Fabre d"Olivet, prodigious philologist of the early 19th century, contradicted the classical-academic etymology of the words "poetry" and "poet" as, respectively, "making" and "maker", thereby superseding the false consciousness exuding from connotations of this dictionary and literary "definition" persisting to this day even among the allegedly "avant-garde." Fabre d"Olivet"s erudition discovered that the Greek word for poetry derived from the Phoenician which translated signifies: "the superior principle of language."

Developing correspondences with this central etymological key in the length preface (The Essence and Form of Poetry) to his book, The Golden Verses of Pythagoras, Fabre d"Olivet signaled his profound agreement with the poetics of Sir Francis Bacon who, from the following viewpoint, can be justly claimed as a precursor of surrealism: "Poetry does truly refer to the Imagination, which may at pleasure join that which nature has severed and sever that which nature has joined and so make unlawful matches and divorces of things... it does raise and erect the mind by submitting the show of things to the desires of the mind, whereas reason does buckle and bow the mind to the nature of things."

Rejecting "craftsmanship", the surrealist viewpoint, respecting sovereignty of mind, the primacy of human desires and oneiric exaltation, considers and finds true poetry to be an instrument of knowledge, of discovery, of unveiling, and of human freedom. Authentic poetry is certainly the highest principle of language, but one which has generally been lost and which surrealism aims to restore, illuminating André Breton"s saying: "Language has been given to man so that he make surrealist use of it," together with Benjamin Péret"s genial affirmation, "poetry is the source and crown of all thought."

Surrealism"s fifty years of poetic evidence demonstrate the initial steps taken towards this supreme disalienation of humanity with its language, an emancipatory leap in opposition to the civilized debasement and fragmentation of language by reason, that is, language conditioned to serve as aesthetic object, submission-to-reality, national chauvinism, entertainment, neo-formal energy-fields, stylization, mirror-mockery, everyday speech, pseudo-revolutionary mystification, personal confession, conscious self-expression and other idiocies -- all of which, I insist, can be summed up in the self-condemned monstrosity that was Ezra Pound, his worthless emulators and what generally passes for poetry and good writing in this country.
*

Furthermore, the object of surrealism is moral. The demands it may elicit from you do not fall short of a furious revolutionary perspective concerning language, poetry, love, science, eroticism, politics, dependent on an imaginative exaltation of disquieting materials and potential renewal of latent powers requiring a purification of means well within your grasp, as easy as the day swallowing the night.


From City Lights Anthology, 1974

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Notes toward a Rigorous Interpretation of Surrealist Occultation

(Notas para interpretar con rigor la ocultación surrealista)

Only in the moral certitude of vanquishing what resists the restoration of a blazing crown to a headless voice at the rites of permanent transgression and at the demarcation of the elected sacral site, where starlight is made to trace the initial human footprints, shall we witness the supersession of the habitual apparatus set up by external administration. Meanwhile, there remains the ongoing, permanent necessity of criticizing as well the pernicious other-side of the conformist coin constituting the many pseudo-revolts, cultural dispersals and mystification proliferating these days at a rate proportional to their assimilation and recuperation by the general administration. The spirit that may be permanently invoked and instigated is one of partisan affinities whose shields and arsenals are forged from invariable principles of liberating expression to be realized entirely on their own terms, and whose movement in the field against the superstructural obstacles must continue to be one of implacable distance and distancing, to appear as magically tempting as the Medusa, impenetrable as an interplanetary Behemoth and as resoundingly hostile to recuperation as any original violation of language.
*

Of labyrinths there are none more formidable, it seems to me, than those which ensorcell while extending like those "waves of snakes" whose variations multiply as one reads a mile of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs - mazes that bewitch, I say, at the seemingly inverted pyramid whose apex reaches the heart as the sinuous path of seduction unravels, variably slow and quick, in the mind of love, in the psychic atmosphere, that is, of one who would grasp the dialectic interstices of a moment and eternity, each transcending the other, the horizon a steady fluidic flame, the constant quivering of desire, the "volatile" going-over to the "fixed" chambers about to dissolve into materialized secrets, a winged sphinx dilating whose extremities become blazing words! Actions, being-in-becoming, are explosively recognized as intrinsic to the language of "the traditional sciences," the gesture which is transmutation; that is, a "heightening" of immanent powers, forces and structures. (This perspective coincidentally is worth borrowing as an "occult lever" and set afloat in that area surrealism is privileged to reveal: "a wave of dreams," the "perfect moment" of the Marvelous and toward Breton"s "…of the mind in neutral gear…").

*

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.

*

What is proposed ultimately and permanently: the Promethean gesture, the gesture that supersedes the cultural commodity, "the author," "the artist," "the poet," and dialectically subsumes these vain and masochistic inventions of our elders, the obnoxious enemies of desire and human freedom, who are parasitically ranged around and within us. In this pursuit we continue Rimbaud"s program of the seer, who listens for the unheard-of, that is, the absolute becoming of what we are yet not free from, what we have yet to conquer, to supersede, namely this "tyrant" of cultural habituation, the sniveling dog of heritages, and deeper, the chattel-slave of atavism: the repressive patriarchal family structure. With Rimbaud, we must conceive of the Great Adventure as going ahead of action; we "steal fire," fire which is alchemically, psychologically, metabolically, erotically, the sole source, origin, lever, pivot - the libidinal principle itself. It is from the transformations of libido that desire takes wing and the cultural producer and product are essentially transcended for a phoenix-like rebirth of what shall become, of what shall be. Herein rest the secret correspondences, by immanent revelation, of our most profound "self" and all others; herein I discern surrealism as an organism transcending the aggregates of which it is composed; here I witness the full flowering of each individual personality by a permanent annihilation of the interior slavocracy, the becoming of that resolution; by mediations of psychical exaltations and unconditional inspiration, of the Hegelian master-slave contradiction. Otherwise I risk the mediocrity of being but another "artist" or "poet" producing what shall not bear in its secret core - but only "secret": for those who have not known the power of self-transcending desire - the flower of fire Prometheus sublimates out of his desire of desire, that is, SUBLIMES from the libidinal fire transformed by psychical powers, the highest source of conscious desire to unleash the buried treasures, so that we may pass back and forth, masters of consuming and persevering fire!

Let us not forget that the Promethean pathways are uniquely vital as opposed to the programs of saints, contemplatives, artists, anti-artists, philosophers, and anti-philosophers, merely outdistanced categories for those who insist on the priorities of the mad lover of freedom, the masterless master and the poetic criminal!

From Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, #3, 1976


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