Contents "Preserving Fire":

An Introduction to the Prose of Philip Lamantia
Letter to Charles Henri Ford
Surrealism in 1943
The Tchelitchew Cover
Young Poets
An American Opinion
Conscientious Objector's Statement
Letter from San Francisco
Editorial from The Ark (1947)
Conscientious Objector's Statement II
Two Introductions to John Hoffman
Hymns to St. Geryon (1959) by Michael McClure
Biographical Note in The New American Poetry, 1945–1960 (1960)
Vision and Instigation of Mescaline 1961
The Beat Generation
Mental Cement
RevelatNewsPort by Raphael Kohler
Notes Towards a Poetics of Weir
Testament of the Inter-Voice
Introduction to The Wounded Mattress (1970) by Sotère Torregian
Philip Lamantia
Statement for Contemporary Poets of the English Language (1970)
Between the Gulfs (with "By Elective Affinities, Then and Now")
Vital Conflagrations
The Crime of Poetry
Harmonian Research
The Oneiric Light of Alice Farley
Poetic Matters (with "Notes Toward a Rigorous Interpretation of Surrealist Occultation")
Invisible Webs
Gerome Kamrowski: The Revelation of Night
Radio Voices: A Child's Bed of Sirens
The Future of Surrealism
Alice Farley: Dancing at Land's End
Marie Wilson
Clark Ashton Smith Plaque Dedication Address
Statement on "Howl"
Letter from Egypt
Preface to Crossroads of the Other (1992) by Ken Wainio
Program Note from a Reading at the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church, April 1999
Surrealism & Mysticism
Statement Bibliography by Steven Fama

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"Philip was a visionary like Blake, and he really saw the whole world in a grain of sand."—Lawrence Ferlinghetti "Philip Lamantia's Collected Poems is beyond scale, weight, or measure. There is no proportion in this intertwining of soul-buildings. These are the inexorable and ineffable projects of an inspired consciousness set at full tilt in raging protest, kisses, prayers, blessings and outraged demands. All from the deepest silence and farthest travel. The reader's excitement is carried by Lamantia's spiritual and physical beat. This surreal and mantic project drives farther than anything before or after. Breathtaking! These works are of synesthetic beauty to the eye, the ear, and the open interior of the heart. They come from the peaks and herbs and forests where the meadowlark speaks."—Michael McClure

Notes Towards a Poetics of Weir

Dear Bob Hawley:

Certain practical matters—including short trip to Gibraltar—caused some delay in finalizing the [Touch of the Marvelous] ms; but here it is!—including special dedication, statement by Parker Tyler, chronology & biograph for dust/jacket&photo. I hope you will find it as interesting to read & publish as your anticipatory enthusiasm inferred. At least, I think it is a great improvement over my first book—by continuity & selectivity which by deletion on one hand unifies the mainstream of that period and by addition of two other sections, aptly qualified by the two section/titles, marks development & tangents—since it contains, also, about 15 pages never before collected (Erotic Poems was, incidentally, someone else"s suggested title!) as well as carrying a poem "The Image of Ardor"—recovered from Mr. Tyler—never before published! If I hadn’t, as the biograph relates, "burnt manuscripts" from that time I certainly might have had much more to represent those years; however, I do feel that qualitatively the best I have to show for first 7 years does actually appear between the pages of the present MS. Having re/acquainted myself with the work during these past few weeks, I"ve been led to wonder just how much, also, of the "lost" work might actually finally be recovered. I remember many instances sending copies to editors & friends (perhaps never recovered as in Tyler"s case, to whom I made such a request on a hunch few weeks ago!) which I could very well attempt to contact in the future, not surely for the present edition, but perhaps for a future OYEZ edition, if indeed you also continue over the years…who knows, perhaps a further, more compendious, edition of early work can be realized? Altogether, it has been a vital experience editing Touch of the Marvelous and you will excuse this possible nostalgia on my part!

***

I have—except for deletion of superfluous punctuation—kept the poems almost exactly as the originals. This may look somewhat old/fashioned at times—the hyphens for one thing & often poems with capitalized first letters—but it retains the spirit of youthful unconcern thereby with what are, I still think, very minor technicalities. The more important matter of linear & stanza structure I have adhered to absolutely—except, again, in a few minor places—where it is a question of retaining the "formal" coherence of rhythm & sense. Nevertheless, I suspect the general "linguistic" definition of poetry as "a certain highly concentrated language"—in contradistinction to the "more loosely concentrated one of prose"—to be generally correct, in so far as one can recognize the poetry as such even if it were presented as "conventional prose."

As was the case with the bulk of this present MS, the poems were a direct & rapid transcription from certain states of trance and I personally considered it a fault to alter anything but misspellings or excessive & therefore distracting grammatical errors, convinced as I was then of the orthodox surrealist dictum going something like: " . . . thought"s dictation in the absence of all conscious control & censorship. . . . "

But it is—more so after the passage of two decades of further poetic experience & experiment—that the essential vitality of this manner of writing is due to a general synthesis of feeling & ideas which profoundly directed the aforementioned "method" and this I entertained & pursued as a conscious aim, the effects of which established a rhythm of incongruous imagery, a prosodic mystique, so no matter to what formal arrangement I subjected the flow of images to afterwards, if I remained faithful to the primary condition of releasing the images from a heightened state of trance, through the sluicegates of "contradiction" and incongruity, the possibility existed and still exists of making a significant kind of Revelation. Though the orthodox surrealist definition & practice associated this with a revelation of the Unconscious and generally conceded to characterize states of dream, hallucination, fantastic/juxtaposition, etc., I find more interest in recognizing a far/wider meaning & value than the now/academic categories—Freudian or Jungian—to the degree that such poetry & its attendant prosody does reveal through the music of incongruity & imagery of the non-rational, vital "rapports" of a direct, intuitional comprehension of Reality—beyond "logical-rationalist" or common-sense appearances—otherwise unrepresented except in the vaguest "mystical" or didactic descriptions which often fail miserably because they are founded on a process of making common/sense logical statement of human experience & understanding which is ultimately non-rational, connected, as it is, to a source and cause which is beyond linguistic definition or presentation! See, in this respect, a very pertinent line in the poem "A Winter Day" which also could serve as emblem for this book: " . . . a whole world which seems to go beyond its own existence." Precisely! It is, then, a poetry most definitely of the world of appearances but giving by the very juxtaposition of images/in/apparent/contradiction—form to a universal aspiration: quest & need for evolution to a higher state of consciousness, naturally evoked by a certain rhythm & language of incongruity, fantastic juxtaposition of images & thoughts, often the speech of trance, but also opening up possibility of a consciously/directed Evocation of the Something & SomeWhereElse sensed generally as source/cause of all existence, being & becoming! This I believe again remains a fecund enough direction, now—unencumbered by merely relativist "surrealist" or "Jungian" ideas; an ever/verdant Vehicle of Amazing Marvels which I have christened elsewhere as "WEIR," both as recall to one of the supreme ancestors of this pursuit—Poe—& in order to evoke further progressions in this time & beyond. I am convinced, no matter what new "names" for it manifest, that what I am talking about (and for which Touch of the Marvelous can serve as, at least, one seminal model) is a vital vein in western thought & art, rooted in a most ancient Tradition rarely understood even today, yet recognized, generally, by a few, as "the Mediterranean genius of Analogy": our fundamental poetic heritage & most distinctive western line of apprehending reality which, at this reading, I have come to understand bears by vital cognition the key to "vital laws of Harmony" throughout the universe: For it is in the rapport of "things different from one another" that the poet reveals & communicates his vision commingling the visible & invisible, the heard & unheard, seen & unseen, intuitive and cerebral knowledge, the concrete & abstract; hence: the purely sensorial level of apprehension connected to the inborn, instinctive, cordial & supra/harmonic levels of understanding (prophecy) which are weir, a designation/emblem of analogy, a homonym/translation derived from the Latin word "to see" (vidi)!

For me, then, the poet must be the herald of all "that goes beyond its own existence," the vital link to the universal order, attested by philosophers & mystics—hence defined only abstractly or not at all—by a deliberate evocation at once representing the world of appearances—or sense/datum—but entirely transformed, reversed, vitally "destroyed," turned/up/side/down, if you will, which makes—it is evidentially true!—for an intense poetic experience conveying often the living marrow of the BEYOND! Moreover: That Beyond which I insist is the causal realm of which the sensible world is the effect (not directly the effect, but BY ANALOGY!) .... Therefore a complete re/definition of Analogy must begin. It is not a question of one image to another, aesthetically or cerebrally brought into relation, but of evoking through a consciously understood play of images to reveal the hidden rapports; they may or may not develop according to surrealist rules or any other kinds for that matter, since it is primarily a matter of Hearing & Seeing in another way beyond the ordinary, including the "ordinary" fantastical or the too/obvious ornamentally "surreal," that I mean to imply: THE EYES & EARS OF THE HEART IN VITAL TOUCH WITH THE SECRET CENTERS OF THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS! As an example, from the most traditional western source of this very Synthesis, I refer you to the Sphinx of Egypt itself, one of the most perfect & generally misunderstood surrealist images! There is a pure representation of the SomeWhereElse & the Weir for which Poe"s Ulalume is, in another instance, the sonic bridge!

******

1965/1966