Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Andre'Breton said language was to make surrealist
use of
at the core of the meaning of those words is
a surrealist

much has been said about just what that is
Philip Lamantia said you cannot know what
it was like to be a surrealist in the 1920's

he said that to me over the telephone in 71
he then spoke of a lot of things that sounded
just like a surrealist would,

he created intricate images in my mind's eye
that played at the edges of reality like mimes
like harlequins dancing in a surrealist circus

his words moved me beyond time and space
through a vast opening at the universe city gate
I ran down streets with his words that looked like
San Francisco, but also looked like streets
that seemed to shift thought different ages
and extend infinite

this was what he was trying to tell me
about the meaning of consciousness streams
the place where it resides in the surrealist poem
and I was about to take a walk through
the arcades of madness and poetic will

Philip's words seduced my naivete'
and at the same time charged my imagination
I later showed him a poem I wrote at a reading
in North Beach, something about hat racks
strolling through the park

I don't know why but this reminded me of poets
walking in the park and heatedly talking about
the meaning of certain lines in poems by French
poets

Bobby Kaufman saw himself as a Symbolist
I saw him walking down Broadway in North Beach
he was like seeing a poem become a man
he whirled in his jazz hoodoo cape of becoming visible
the last time I saw Philip he was reading his poems
in Berkeley, I think he looked like a mystic owl
that perchance winked and Breton winked back

and maybe I cannot know what it was like to be
a surrealist in the 1920's but I picked up a piece
of poetic thread that Lamantia dropped like infinity
and even though Philip did not get to read Maldoror
at the midnight mass in the North Beach Catholic
church, i can still hear him say, Surrrrraaaaaalist

Fascinating and intriguing poem
Surreal is a word that often crosses my mind to describe the never ending elections. Not sure if it is the right word to describe it but is seems put the nonsense into a a frame of reference I can relate to. Our politicians are unintentional surrealists.




The politics of Surrealism

I think I can imagine what it was like to be a surrealist in the 20's.
I think it would feel a lot like now.

Thanks for the poem
I am going to read
Maldoror


please pardon the ramble
I found the poem satisfying, but I do not mean to imply that I got it. It just worked for me.

Surrealism was
the initial influence, as I first began seriously reading and writing,
the French poets, Rimbaud and Baudelaire and the author
of Les Chants de Maldoror by Lautreamont or his real name
Isidore Ducasse, precursors of Surrealism, and then the Dadaists
like Tristan Tzara, and then on into the whole Surrealist movement.
my mentor proclaimed himself a surrealist, and he began translating
French and Spanish surrealists, that was something he could do, so
I read a lot of that, and I also read a lot of books that were surrealist
like or fellow travelers.But I branched out, and read anybody that seemed
to have that kind of intensity, like Henry Miller.Also William Burroughs
was always along side, and of course any of the Beat writers.Philip
Lamantia who passed away several years ago, was a San Francisco poet
that lived in North Beach, who was a famous American Surrealist, who
had met Andre' Breton the leader of the Surrealists who had come to
America to escape the war in France.Philip was only sixteen when he
met Breton.At any rate, there was the Chicago surrealists who was
led by Franklin Rosemont who also passed away several years ago,
and there are still some left in Europe.So it remains to be seen where
all that creative poetic vision has come and gone, I still just write, as in
my novel, Gone Hallucinogen Freeway, otherwise i have yet to make a
book of just poems.
I read a interview with Ferlinghetti on the http://www.guernicamag.com/
that is interesting.