Tau & Journey to the End (City Lights Pocket Poets Series) [Paperback]

Philip Lamantia (Author), John Hoffman (Author)

Book Description

Series: City Lights Pocket Poets Series | Publication Date: April 1, 2008

Two long-lost volumes from the classic Beat period. Tau is Philip Lamantia’s mystical second collection of poems, originally slated for publication in 1955, but suppressed by the poet due to his evolving religious beliefs. Journey to the End contains the poems of the legendary John Hoffman (1928–1952), whose poems were read by Lamantia in 1955 at the 6 Gallery reading where Allen Ginsberg debuted “Howl.”

Lamantia’s closest friend, a character in Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, and the inspiration for two lines of “Howl,” Hoffman moved between San Francisco and New York before his death in Mexico at the age of twenty-four. This volume includes biographical notes and Lamantia’s commentaries on Hoff man’s poetry.

Editorial Reviews

Review

". . . Tau is the very stuff of literary archeology... nothing short of being--dare I say it?--'a touch of the marvelous.'" --Rain Taxi Review of Books

About the Author

Philip Lamantia (1927-2005) became a nationally-known poet at 15, published by surrealist magazines View and VVV. He became a major twentieth century poet, precursor to and fellow traveler with the Beat Generation. Reflecting his esoteric mysticism and use of consciousness-expanding drugs, Lamantia's poetry is considered the primary link between the European avant-garde and American counterculture. John Hoffman (1928-1952) is a legendary member of the original Beat Generation poets. Dying of unknown causes on a trip to Mexico, he remained unpublished during his lifetime. In 1955, Philip Lamantia read Hoffman's poetry at the 6 Gallery reading where Ginsberg debuted "Howl." This is the first appearance of Hoffman's poetry in any widely-available form.

Product Details

• Paperback: 150 pages
• Publisher: City Lights Publishers (April 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0872864855
• ISBN-13: 978-0872864856
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #587,336 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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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Blueness of crows", April 30, 2010

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Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Tau & Journey to the End (City Lights Pocket Poets Series) (Paperback)

Invited to read at the "6"Gallery reading of October 1955, surrealist Philip Lamantia declined to read any of his own poems, and instead read, from an onionskin manuscript, pages of an unpublished collection that his late friend, John Hoffman, had left behind. Editor Garrett Caples, who knew Lamantia in his final years, and who shepherded his papers into the archives of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, posits that the decision to read Hoffman might have been the lucky byproduct of another decision Lamantia made--to reject the poetry of "Tau," his then recent project, in the face of a volcanic conversion (or re-conversion) to Catholicism. This has the effect, for me at least, of showing Lamantia's human side, one prone to snap judgments and error just like anyone else.

Of course it was an accident, or nearly so, that made the "6" Gallery reading a famous event in poetry history, thus pinning, like a fixative, John Hoffman's name into position, and yet it has been a curious immortality, hasn't it, since no one has actually seen any of the poems in question until now. This City Lights "Pocket Poets" Edition reunites the young men who bonded together in the late 1940s in North Beach with such passion and vigor, by printing all of Hoffman's extant poems, with the manuscript that Lamantia was working on in the mid 1950s, poems he recanted but, tellingly, never actually destroyed. "Tau" turns out to be one of Lamantia's most interesting achievements. From the moment it begins it plunges us into the mind of one who saw the way Tanguy painted, in a poetry of edges, splinters, riven landscapes still crackling with dead energies. I read these poems while the TV showed us the footage of Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano in Iceland, and I clutched the book harder. Half horror, half sublimity, the features of "Tau" take a long time to emerge from the smoke cloud. "His color is green green,/ to distend him from the earth," writes Lamantia in "The Owl." "He does not fly./ You meet him while walking." I wonder if Lamantia knew Hawthorne and Melville well, --it feels like it to me.

As for John Hoffman, he isn't as dazzling and his metrics aren't as menacing, but he has a great sadness to him, the sadness of youth (he died at age 23, far away from home, in Mexico under disputed circumstances). "Do, re, mi, fa--how lugubrious!" is the refrain of one piece. The enormous pleasure of seeing this work arrive after so many years in shadowland, for now, makes it hard for me to feel very glum, but I can always go back once the initial high has subsided, right?