BECOMING VISIBLE
By Philip Lamantia
City Lights 1981
83p. Paper $3.95
Reviewed by Nanos Valaoritis
At the age.of fifteen Philip Lamantia wrote poems of such accomplishmer.
in the Surrealist style that he was. hailed as the Rimbaud of American
Surrealism. First published in the New'York Surrealist magazine View,
edited by Charles Henri Ford, the other important Surrealist poet in
the US, and Parker Tyler, he was noticed by Andre Breton, then living
in New York with many other exiled artists and writers in the early
forties.
After the return of the exiles to Europe the Surrealist mo-
vement in the US.lapsed and gave place in the fifties to the Beat move-
ment. In his book Destroued Works , Lamantia , a native of Sân Francisco
follows this curve, joins in with the Beats, Jack Kerouak, Allen. Gins-
berg, Lawrence Ferlingetti, who display a strong Surrealist influence
in some. of their work, with Rimbaud,*pollinaire, and automatic writing
in the background. This exchange of influences remained a permanent
feature of the Beat movement when it was joinedlater by other poets
such as Michael McClure, Harold Norse and Bob Kaufaan:
This period,as well as the earlier Surrealist work, is
reflected in the City Lights Selected Poems, 1969. Then in 1970 appears
the collection Blood of the Air, which marks a return to the earlier
Surrealist style. In Becoming Visible Lamantia continues and enlarges
what he had already achieved with his mature phase of Surrealist expres-
sion.
Can one talk of development in Lamantia's work? To a certain


2 Laueutin/BACCMING VISIBLE
extent yes.The early poems of Touch of the Marvellous, were a beati-
fic and ecstatic vision and use of language. They had the light
magical quality of Paul Eluard's verse, also very apparent in the
poetry of Charles Henri Ford of the same period. The Beat period
seems to correspond to a drop from grace and nightmare emerges in
the writing. The last phase draws from both these experiences, often
joined in an uneasy partnership, as if the poet hadn't quite made
up his mindto celebrate or hurl invective at the world.
These later poems display a kind of baroque con-
voluted quality , highly articulated, which sets them apart from
ordinary lyrical expression. For the admirers of early Lamantiaa
these make much more difficult reading, yet in a sense the real
Lamantia emerges here with his favourite themes. The hagiography
of authors such as Fourier,Hegel,Freud, Paracelsus, Bruno, painters
like De Chirico, Hermetic philosophy, the Gnostics, Alchemy, figures
of myth and history, the fairy Melusine and Gilles de Rais the medi-
aeval mass murderer, etc. Add to these many Amerindian names of tribes
find
and sites and you will/them all littering the poem Redwood Highway.
For the outsiders of this highly referential internal Surrealist
view of the world, a set of notes is provided at the end of the volume
Is this system. of writingpermissible in poetry? Surrealism
has been connected with a great deal of erudition, yet this appears
more rarely in poetry with the exception of some of Breton's later
work. In Mad Love he had once analysed one of his own poems, The
Sunflower, in terms in-terme of telepathic and prophetic intuitions.
Personally I have nothing against notes. On the contrary I rather
like them, because I think they contain a kind of delirious quality
of an explanation of an explanation, which a poem already is.
Towards the end of Redwood Highway there is akind of rheto-
rical question,


3/lamantia/ BECOMING VISIBIL
Am I really of the butterfly clan?
which sums up the cross-references involved in the poem. Fourier's
Papillone ( butterfly) aspect of human nature, in connection with
the classificatory totemic Indian tribal associations. In a way
Lamantia chains himself to his references as a Prometheus chained
to his rock. One has the feeling that if he let go he would either
fall or rise out of view,
Lemuria is a shade of pink on green
The myth a hundred years old
Rolling out of the fog to the voices
Found divining the"lost land 11 in a Wintun grove...
I cannot help making associations with the Waste Land, the Lost
Land, being a version of it more likely to appeal to a Surrealist,
in his utopian search for a lost Paradise, not unconnected with the
existence somewhere of the purgatorial Inferno of modern life,
Night blooms beyond the plague of day..
Cryptomaniacally following
Over. the gangrene of the world..
Redwood Highway
Following Lamantia in his labyrinthian path one has the impression
of being back in a Poundian world of allusions, fragmented technique,
shattered language, coupled sometimes with Eliotian associations,
The anteater ways I stumble on..
I feel Lamantia is much more an heir of modernism than he would like
to think. After all the two branches co-existed once in Rimbaud,
Mallarme, Apollinaire, and modernism is not only.characterised by
classical brevity, but also by redundency, as in Gertrude Stein.
If for the Surrealists,the imagery dominated over erudite allusion,
recent studies have shown that the Surrealist associative technique
is a'system_atic subverter of another language, literary or ordinary,


4/Lamantia/BECOMING VISIBLE
(seein Michael Riffaterre,La production du Texte, La metaphore
filée dans lafpoèsie Surrealiste etc) and in that sense not as
direct or innocent as all that.
In many of theother poems of this collection one finds imagery
in Lamantia's old style,
Racing out of town
the veined hair swallows the road..
the day heaving straw giants
if you can see them..
Bed of Sphinxes
or as in the prose poem Primavera a line shoots out like a falling
star,
Icatch hold of a train inside an iris
The neat imagist in Lamantia has not altogether disappeared even
if he has given way to a more abstruse and baroque style,
to crystallize
dialectically
a lattice of tooth marks from the Gnome King's terraplane
arriving with the velocity of squirrel tails
carvi ing tunnels into our radiant osteo-paths..
Bile Nature
On the whole I prefer him when he writes as in Drama Set, with
a kind of sophisticated lyrical simplicity,
Beneath the moss of eyesockets
the tower vanishes into the golden night
spoon of rasperry
chocolate flight


5/ Lamantia/ BECOMING VISIBLE
The blooming vitriol of May
kneads autumn's honeysuckle
The city sprung open like a bird cage
becomes a rainbow of mule feathers
sailing through the jail bars of the. earth
Admirable little poem rising far above a mannerism which is sometimes
painfully conscious of itself, as expressed in the two lines from
Violet Star , showing his ultimate self-awareness,
while I continue to rave
over dissimilar modes..
I think here Lamantia understands himself as a post-modern artist,
although he hangs on desperatly it seems, to the gossamer threads of
the Surrealist myth. The problem of the post-modern poet, writer,
artist,is how to weave in,the dissimilar modes inherited from the
past into a smooth continuous surface, unified under the umbrella
of a single sensibility, or on the other hand, to leave them exposed
in their difference by uniting them under a common theme.
Whatever the choice is finally, I believe Becoming
Visible, illustrates ther difficulty which besets all poets writing
in this age, who want to say something that goes beyond their own
backyard. Yet the only way to unify, or sew together as Homer would
have done it,disparate oral material,is through the uncompromisingly
subjective eye, such as these poems call for constantly,
at the grating of the historical jungles..
to the ignition of the levitated glance..
Violet Star
Lamantia no doubt is still trying to scale the heights and
has not given in to the me.chanically pedestrian hiding behind an
anti-rhetorical stance. Sometimes his discourse remains perilously


6/Lamantia/ LECOMING VISIBIE
suspend ded in mid-air, inconclusive and almost unintelligible. Yet
this is wafit it takes, I feel, to go up there, even at the risk of
occasionaly falling into a dark hole. Here is one,
The lure of a skyspeck garners hidden vortical ellipses :
by which photons fan out contrary to the normal retinal
gobbling..
Bile Nature
Indeed worthy of Lautreamont denouncing the grand iloquent and
land ing on the absurd. I : love him all the more' . for this daring
to go II where Angels fear to tread ".


CLIEN ITS


Bob boehtol- auy Quenenp - mon Thur thun
Tuey-ged people
Bob Stewart
beroll
665-1544 (Pam lilloge
Tely
Kadlyn
finda.
Yelson
anenhue
/Helen Canpheld 343-7940 CJem Coucky
marg genat Hoyor
Sala Cny
chouh Vito Tueni -540-6430
MaReUS 5286022
neus
Stale A
Phges Rophle
MAA- DX M
Sedonia
aily pradary Y08 -738-0888
SILVIA


Def. D
A NDREW
GooD M Anl
menay
Wypur
LESLIE PEAK ( TÉAN MACHVSKY)
6OEKSHOP?
431-4658 (Weekdeg)
sguthiout 824-6622
RACHEL KALISKI Dk. ApL D.
)35 SEMINARY 9471
sent
DLL VALLEY
gho Mormp 115
oct. 15
ghe punin
JUDY FAGIN
CLARA APT 57
24900 SANTA
HAYWARD 94544
MATS HELLSTEN
Snt,
Po Box 40134
octiis
BERKÉLEY
DARIS
ARCHER
wulcue
i utereshol % he
LUCIANO 2
Z/fah. lale pih.


iht sn Your soulfora HAPPY RE-BIRTH DAY
Sutenriy th d luel - onyyo L Re ISi tv Las
16L
of elrasd and conf 1 Lo Ao ur - M.B 1
Yeufu
wne drsame mi d


THE APE OF
SORROWS
BOOK LAUNCH
23 February 2010
Daunt Books
158-164 Fulham Rd London
rowdoxy@aol.com
annabelhuxley@google.com
From Stranger to Destroyer:
The Inside Story ofHumans
MAURICE ROwDON
www.theapeofsorrows.com


THE APE
AUTHOR
OF SORROWS
From Stranger to Destroyer : The Inside Story of Humans
Maurice Rowdon
An examination of the human as he is, not as he thinks he is.
"The only measure we have to judge of any animal's intelligence is whether
it leaves its habitat enhanced or depleted, and by this measure the human is
the least intelligent of all the creatures. 11
THE FALL OF VENICE
ITALIAN SKETCHES
= ..enthralling essays... 1
Artistically exhilarating. Often piercingly accurate - "
Cyril Connolly, Sunday Times
The Guardian
contact: rowdoxy@aol.com / www.theapeofsorrows.com


Pézenas, le 15/01/2010
juprimerie
DOMENS
Facture No 8029
é di - - ti I O n S
22, rue VictorHugo
M. ROWDON
bp 21
6, place du 4 Septembre
34120 Pézenas France
PEZENAS
www.domens.fr
Code client
RIB : 16607 00242 09391122019 46 BP du SUD PEZENAS
DATE
DÉSIGNATION
PRIX UNITAIRE H.T. PRIX TOTAL H.T.
15/01/2010 200 cartes 10x21 cm "Book launch du 23.02.10" - impression
numérique couleurs sur bristol blanc 250 g fichier fourni
Total H.T.
Base TVA 131,00
Base TVA
Base TVA
Total TTC euros
MODE DE REGLEMENT
Nos relations contractuelles sont régies par les usoges professionnels et conditions générales de
ventes, établies par la Fédération de l'Imprimerie et de lo Communication Graphique. En cas de
litiges, seul le tribunal de commerce de Béziers est compétent.
CHÈQUE
Nous nous réservons la propriété des marchandises, mêmes livrées, jusqu'à leur paiement intégral.
Aucun escomple ne sera accordé en cas de paiement anticipé
e.u.r.l. idé au capital de 7 700 euros siret 440 961 324 00017


Anna -


18712 I Recd uttttuh
Sen