Becoming Visible (Pocket Poet Series: No. 39) [Paperback]

Philip Lamantia (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: City Lights Books (June 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0872861295
• ISBN-13: 978-0872861299
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,879,744 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Philip Lamantia (October 23, 1927-March 7, 2005) was a United States poet and lecturer. Lamantia's visionary poems -- ecstatic, terror-filled, erotic -- explored the subconscious world of dreams and linked it to the experience of daily life. The poet was born in San Francisco to Sicilian immigrants and raised in that city's Excelsior neighborhood. His poetry was first published in the magazine View 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. The poet spent time with native peoples in the United States and Mexico in the 1950s, participating in the peyote-eating rituals of the Washo Indians of Nevada. In later life, he embraced Catholicism, the religion of his childhood, and wrote many poems on Catholic themes.and his first book was published a year later.

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5.0 out of 5 stars A manifesto from the aether, February 18, 2009

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This review is from: Becoming Visible (Pocket Poet Series: No. 39) (Paperback)

Philip Lamantia's "Becoming Visible" nothing less than one poet, all on his own, descending into the smoky depths of imagination which Novalis and Blake termed "the eternal night". Out of everything Lamantia creates something, be it the most banal or the most extraordinary; rather than giving some prose filled excuse for a poem about Keats and the Romantic movement, he defines it in his own language:

"The boat tilts on your image on the waves between a fire of foam/and the flower of moon rays/these the flags of your dreaming lips/I'm watching Venus on the ogred sky/and a continent in cocoons. Soon all the butterflies of desire shall manifest o prescience of life becoming poetic/and poetry the incense of the dream/A street and a forest interchange their clothing, that tree of telephones, this television of nuts and berries--the air edible music."

Philip Lamantia's life represents in itself a rejection of any and all constrictions on the poetic imagination. Leaving home at 16 to join Andre Breton in Paris (who termed him "the kind of voice that rises once in a thousand years"), he pursued vision first through narcotics, then through unrestrained erotism, engaging himself very heavily in what Rimbaud termed "le dereglement tu la sens", the derangement of the senses. Finally, Lamantia found God in a moment of imaginative epiphany and converted to Roman Catholicism.

Lamantia's work is not for everybody and is liable to confuse some at first; but until one is ready to relish this kind of thing, how can there be great readers for poetry? Unreservedly recommended.