Philip Lamantia (October 23, 1927 – March 7, 2005) was an American poet, writer and lecturer. His poetry incorporated stylistic experimentation and transgressive themes, and has been regarded as surrealist and visionary, contributing to the literature of the Beat Generation.
Lamantia was born in San Francisco to Sicilian immigrants and was raised in the city's Excelsior District neighborhood.[1] His poetry was first published in View magazine in 1943 when he was fifteen, and his poetry appeared in the final issue of the Surrealist magazine VVV the following year. He dropped out of Balboa High School to pursue poetry in New York City, and appeared the same year in American filmmaker Maya Deren's At Land. [2] At just sixteen, he was hailed by Andre Breton as "a voice that rises once in a hundred years."[3] 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 where 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.[1]
Lamantia was also known for his journeys with native peoples in the United States and Mexico, participating in the peyote-eating rituals of the Washo Indians of Nevada which often inspired his poems. In the 1950s, Lamantia wrote multiple political texts, including a polemical prose text criticizing federal prohibitions of drugs.[4] He additionally re-embraced Catholicism in the later half of his life, and his poetry onward began to explore Catholic themes. American writer Nancy Peters, who was Lamantia's wife and literary editor, commented that "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."[5]
^Charters, Ann (1992). Portable Beat Reader. New York: Penguin Books. p. 317.
^"I Demand Extinction of Laws Prohibiting Narcotic Drugs!". The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia. University of California Press. 2013. pp. 107–108. ISBN978-0520269729.
