The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia
The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia represents the lifework of the most visionary poet of the American postwar generation. Philip Lamantia (1927-2005) played a major role in shaping the poetics of both the Beat and the Surrealist movements in the United States. First mentored by the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, the teenage Lamantia also came to the attention of the French Surrealist leader André Breton, who, after reading Lamantia’s youthful work, hailed him as a “voice that rises once in a hundred years.” Later, Lamantia went “on the road” with Jack Kerouac and shared the stage with Allen Ginsberg at the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, where Ginsburg first read “Howl.” Throughout his life, Lamantia sought to extend and renew the visionary tradition of Romanticism in a distinctly American vernacular, drawing on mystical lore and drug experience in the process. The Collected Poems gathers not only his published work but also an extensive selection of unpublished or uncollected work; the editors have also provided a biographical introduction.
1113799049
The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia
The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia represents the lifework of the most visionary poet of the American postwar generation. Philip Lamantia (1927-2005) played a major role in shaping the poetics of both the Beat and the Surrealist movements in the United States. First mentored by the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, the teenage Lamantia also came to the attention of the French Surrealist leader André Breton, who, after reading Lamantia’s youthful work, hailed him as a “voice that rises once in a hundred years.” Later, Lamantia went “on the road” with Jack Kerouac and shared the stage with Allen Ginsberg at the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, where Ginsburg first read “Howl.” Throughout his life, Lamantia sought to extend and renew the visionary tradition of Romanticism in a distinctly American vernacular, drawing on mystical lore and drug experience in the process. The Collected Poems gathers not only his published work but also an extensive selection of unpublished or uncollected work; the editors have also provided a biographical introduction.
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The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia

The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia

Overview

The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia represents the lifework of the most visionary poet of the American postwar generation. Philip Lamantia (1927-2005) played a major role in shaping the poetics of both the Beat and the Surrealist movements in the United States. First mentored by the San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, the teenage Lamantia also came to the attention of the French Surrealist leader André Breton, who, after reading Lamantia’s youthful work, hailed him as a “voice that rises once in a hundred years.” Later, Lamantia went “on the road” with Jack Kerouac and shared the stage with Allen Ginsberg at the famous Six Gallery reading in San Francisco, where Ginsburg first read “Howl.” Throughout his life, Lamantia sought to extend and renew the visionary tradition of Romanticism in a distinctly American vernacular, drawing on mystical lore and drug experience in the process. The Collected Poems gathers not only his published work but also an extensive selection of unpublished or uncollected work; the editors have also provided a biographical introduction.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780520324817
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication date: 10/22/2019
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 504
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Garrett Caples is a poet and editor for City Lights Books and the editor of the American poetry series, City Lights Spotlight. Andrew Joron is an award-winning surrealist poet and translator. Nancy Joyce Peters is the co-owner of City Lights Books; for much of its history, she served as its executive director and publisher, until her retirement in 2008. She is co-author, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of Literary San Francisco and has edited countless books for City Lights.

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The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia

By Garrett Caples, Andrew Joron, Nancy Joyce Peters

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-26972-9

CHAPTER 1

TOUCH OF THE MARVELOUS

1943-1949


    The Touch of the Marvelous

    The mermaids have come to the desert
    they are setting up a boudoir next to the camel
    who lies at their feet of roses

    A wall of alabaster is drawn over our heads
    by four rainbow men
    whose naked figures give off a light
    that slowly wriggles upon the sands

    I am touched by the marvelous
    as the mermaids' nimble fingers
    go through my hair
    that has come down forever from my head
    to cover my body
    the savage fruit of lunacy

    Behold the boudoir is flying away
    and I am holding onto the leg of the lovely one
    called beneath the sea
    BIANCA
    She is turning
    with the charm of a bird
    into two giant lips
    and I am now falling into the goblet of suicide

    She is the angelic doll turned black
    she is the child of broken elevators
    she is the curtain of holes
    that you never want to throw away

    she is the first woman and first man
    and I am lost in the search to have her

    I am hungry for the secrets of the sadistic fish
    I am plunging into the sea

    I am looking for the region
    where the smoke of your hair is thick
    where you are again climbing over the white wall
    where your eardrums play music
    to the cat that crawls in my eyes
    I am recalling memories of you bianca

    I am looking beyond the hour and the day
    to find you bianca


    Plumage of Recognition

    A soul drenched in the milk of marble
    goes through the floor of an evening
    that rides lost on a naked virgin
    It gains power over the dull man:
    it is a soul sucked by lepers

    What liquid hour shall rivet
    its song on my cat
    with the neck of all space?

    Morning and I may lose
    the terrible coat of ill feeling
    that has curled me into a chained dragon
    the flower bursting with eyelids

    Ah! a fever the skeleton of arson!
    comes to rest on the citadel of the immortals;
    the diadem flickers and dies away
    while running toward the vat of salted babies

    They are creeping upon the wall my dagger
    they are bulging with cradles
    the era of the lunatic birds has arrived!
    They have come to rape the town
    infested with iron-blood clerks
    and to send the hairless priests
    to the pool of deadly anchors

    Parades are the enchantment of a brain
    piled-up like the water of an ocean
    I enjoy the creation of a human table
    to be in the center of the delirious crowd
    There are birds perched on my bones
    that will soon flood the avenues
    with their serpent-like feathers
    I am at a house built by Gaudi
    "May I come in?"


    The Islands of Africa

    to Rimbaud

    Two pages to a grape fable
    dangles the swan of samite blood
    shaping sand from thistle covered fog
    Over sacred lakes of fever
    (polished mouths of the vegetable frog
    rolling to my iron venus)
    I drop the chiseled pear
    Standing in smoke filled valleys
    (great domains of wingless flight
    and the angel's fleshy gun)
    I stamp the houses of withering wax
    Bells of siren-teeth (singing to our tomb
    refusal's last becoming)
    await the approach of the incendiary children
    lighting the moon-shaped beast

    Every twisted river pulls down my torn-out hair
    to ratless columns by the pyramid's ghost
    (watered basin of the temple stink)
    and all the mud clocks in haste
    draw their mermaid-feather swords
    (wrapped by Dust) to nail them
    into the tears of the sea-gull child
    The winter web minute
    flutters beneath the spider's goblet
    and the whores of all the fathers
    bleed for my delight


    I Am Coming

    I am following her to the wavering moon
    to a bridge by the long waterfront
    to valleys of beautiful arson
    to flowers dead in a mirror of love
    to men eating wild minutes from a clock
    to hands playing in celestial pockets
    and to that dark room beside a castle
    of youthful voices singing to the moon.

    When the sun comes up she will live at a sky
    covered with sparrow's blood
    and wrapped in robes of lost decay.

    But I am coming to the moon,
    and she will be there in a musical night,
    in a night of burning laughter
    burning like a road of my brain
    pouring its arm into the lunar lake.


    Apparition of Charles Baudelaire

    When an ocean of pain moves rivers and bridges
    and black eyes flash in grave dust, then
    the rapture of Baudelaire strikes a flaming note.

    By the blood of somber countenance
    hang all fifty chambers of voluptuous girls,
    entranced by the poet's pulsating gleam
    that nails love only onto his giant queen
    sifting in the rays of forgotten children.

    Over the laughing brothel and pale garden,
    he sings on the pipe of languor
    and prays on a flying altar
    drowning with every touch of the sun.


    The Ruins

    Falling from tear-drops of time,
    the well of hidden dreams
    seems like broken ice over the sun.

    Beneath its feathered mirror
    love is lying, a wounded flavor
    never again to steal,
    when ragged for plastic honey,
    the moon's long frigid kiss.

    Here is a hot wind of knives
    cutting my breath for sport,
    and leaving behind a limpid song
    heard by a million murdered stars.

    Balls of arson charge a flood of rats
    going down to pray with the blizzard bone
    and the sound burns through a tower,
    the highest light of forbidden magic.


    By the Curtain of Architecture

    To all religions that never began, but had to sleep
    in the fountain of forgotten engineers; they have come
    to the altar of a new history ...

    Over the banners of Oedipus flies the deluge,
    a tower of chafed metaphors,
    miles of antique lamps,
    incantations of a soiled planet
    and the weary litanies of drunken dust.

    A saint pauses, reads the fire
    and nails his heart on the laughing altar.

    Somewhere beside child-like hands on a cross
    two men meet to bleed their bones of furniture
    to preach a sermon in the halls of Africa
    to raise their arms to a glass heaven
    resting in the jellied clock of Diogenes
    to voice a music from the ruins of cities
    laid dry upon ages of ritual
    and to serve an idea of marble
    rolling over the clown's pre-historic martyrdoms
    continually breathing a shadow of decayed pianos.


    There Are Many Pathways to the Garden

    If you are bound for the sun's empty plum
    there is no need to mock the wine tongue
    but if you are going to a rage of pennies
    over a stevedore's wax ocean
    then, remember: all long pajamas are frozen dust
    unless an axe cuts my flaming grotto.

    You are one for colonial lizards
    and over bathhouses of your ear
    skulls shall whisper
    of a love for a crab's rude whip
    and the rimless island of refusal shall seat itself
    beside the corpse of a dog
    that always beats a hurricane
    in the mad run for Apollo's boxing glove.

    As your fingers melt a desert
    an attempt is made to marry the lily-and-fig-foot dragon
    mermaids wander and play with a living cross
    a child invents a sublime bucket of eyes
    and I set free the dawn of your desires.

    The crash of your heart
    beating its way through a fever of fish
    is heard in every crowd of that thirsty tomorrow
    and your trip ends in the mask of my candle-lit hair.


    Automatic World

    The sun has drowned
    virgins are no more
    there is no need for understanding
    but there is so much to see

    So come with me
    down the boulevard
    of crawling veins
    Don't be afraid
    blood is cheap!

    A paradise song?
    A dirty story?
    A love sonnet?
    Scream it out!
    Then we'll have the human walls
    tumbling down to meet our march
    into the raw-meat city!

    The velvet robes are strewn
    across the landscape
    We step upon the sidewalk
    that goes up and down
    up to the clouds
    down to the starving people
    Don't ask me what to do!
    Keep on going
    we'll end up somewhere fast
    on the moon perhaps!

    Rainbow guns are dancing
    in front of the movie queens
    Everyone is laughing
    flying dying
    never knowing when to rest
    never knowing when to eat

    And the fountains come falling
    out of her thistle-covered breasts
    and the dogs are happy
    and the clowns are knifing
    and the ballerinas are eating stone

    O the mirror-like dirt
    of freshly spilt blood
    trickling down the walls
    the walls that reach the stars!

    O the flock of sheep
    breaking their flesh open
    with bones sucked
    from the brothels!

    O the grave of bats
    sailing through shops
    with the violent hands!

    When will these come?
    When will these go?

    The sun is riding into your eye
    virgins are bursting
    from under my flaming palms
    and we are slowly floating away


    Hermetic Bird

    This sky is to be opened
    this plundered body to be loved
    this lantern to be tied
    around the fangs of your heart

    Lost on a bridge
    going across oceans of tragedy
    across islands of inflammable virgins
    I stand
    with my feathers entangled in your navel
    with my wings opalescent in the night
    and shout words heard tomorrow
    in a little peasant cart
    of the seventeenth century

    Breath by breath
    the vase in the tomb
    breaks to give birth to a roving Sphinx
    Tremble, sweet bird, sweet lion
    hunger for you
    hunger for your mother

    The children in the lamps
    play with our hair
    swinging over the void

    Here is a landscape on fire
    Here are horses wet by the sour fluid of women

    On the pillars of nicotine
    the word pleasure is erased by a dog's tongue
    On the pillars the bodies are opened by keys
    the keys are nailed to my bed
    to be touched at dawn
    to be used in a dream

    If one more sound is heard
    the children will come out to murder
    at the bottom of the lake
    at the bottom of the lake
    If the children murder
    the owls will bleed
    the wanton humans
    who parade in basements of the sun

    When the columns fall into the sea
    with a crash involving prophecies and madmen
    together in a little cradle
    lifted into the robes of desire
    and with our mouths opened for the stars
    howling for the castles to melt at our feet
    you and I
    will ride over the breasts of our mother
    who knows no one
    who was born from unknown birds
    forever in silence
    forever in dreams
    forever in the sweat of fire


    Moments of Exile

    This is the air that will not allow us to breathe.
    This is the sea that will not allow us to swim.

    But we shall spin wildly in the air
    we shall go far out to sea.

    Knives that cross and recross our bodies
    hidden wounds
    lust to love
    image before me:
    heart of hearts
    so rich and yet raped by horses
    in the athlete's tower of estrangement.

    We sleep.

    Tonight heated by mist
    growing in rabid flesh,
    a cloud to the wind:
    murdered in darkness
    ankle upon ankle
    we sleep
    as thrust below the sand
    your delicate hands cry out to be cut.

    Love wanders over the hair of your mouth,
    lustful child,
    toy circling in the constellations of the heart
    surprising the quick gaze of the moon with your caprice
    rounding the velvet eye
    that is hidden from light

    as your blood rushes down to the sea
    flows gently over the water
    to the fish, luminous,
    fins knotted,
    their eyes inflamed, burning deeply into our hearts,
    their heads breaking the mist,
    their tails flashing like diamonds.

    Released, they linger in silence
    as we do in this moment; inflamed in sleep
    with our eyes thrown like dice upon the sand
    rolling toward the rocks

    over them and into the sky,
    shining, waiting for the clouds to take them:
    to breathe, to sigh, to swim
    into hidden caverns, to be loved.

    But as quickly as we came we are sucked away.
    We are not asleep now
    there is no knife to cut constantly into our hearts
    no comb to unknot our venomous hair.

    Awakened now, imprisoned in the deep well of longing,
    we can see through the green moss
    the air that will not allow us to breathe,
    the sea that will not allow us to swim.

    * * *

    Beneath this bed the caverns gather me like water
    to throw me upon moth-eaten women
    who sleep violently
    in a knot of newly born suns

    The arrows that protrude from drunken animals
    are swept away to the bottom of the sea
    where the most handsome men stand barefoot
    over their lovers' bodies rent by young witches
    whose hands are in gloves of stone

    Sweet renegade, I am before you with burnt flesh
    with a heart that wears only a mask born in great storms
    to rest in your closet of pain
    where a child's body lies open to the hatchets of love

    * * *

    I am a criminal when your body is bare upon the universe
    I am there to steal your amorous fangs abandoned before me

    Between the thick folds of a tropical bed
    bullets into tears fall swiftly upon your wounded hands:
    eyes secreting poisons
    over forgotten testaments written by me
    in days when I saw your double in a dream

    I open a seashell and find your heart
    which returns to the storm of storms, Desire's mate
    raging on the desolate beach of our bed

    The hanged girl in my mirror watches with horror
    as I exchange my eyes for yours
    But, too late
    I pull the gun's trigger
    and the mirror shatters

    Our images multiply and the earth turns into a midget
    as arrows are shot into my eyes at dawn


A Civil World

In a moment their faces will be visible.

You shall see the women who walk in a night of offensive sunlight that cuts through their cardboard thighs.

As the street is cleaned by the presidents of the nation, I can see the bowlegged men moving over to copulate with the maniacs.

As a rose runs down an alley, a purple nugget, giving off some blood, is suspended in air.

The children who are ten feet tall are wet.

Their faces are scorched, their eyes cut by glass.

They play their games as a steeple topples, as a clown's laugh is heard in church. Quietly the mothers are killing their sons; quietly the fathers are raping their daughters.

But the women.

The eye wanders to a garden in the middle of the street.

There are poets dipping their diamond-like heads in the luminous fountain. There are grandmothers playing with the delicate toys of the chimera. There are perfumes being spilt on the garbage. There is a drunken nun flying out of a brothel.

The women are all colors.

Their breasts open like flowers, their flesh spreads over the park like a blanket. Their hair is soaked in the blood of their lovers, those who are the mirrors of this night.

The naked lovers! All of them, fifteen years old! One can still see their hair growing! They come from the mountains, from the stars even, with their handsome eyes of stone. Ah, these somnambulistic lovers, with their bellies full of arrows!

After the street has recaptured its loneliness, a precious stone casts its light on the perambulator I am to enter. One perambulator in the center of a world. A poet—far away in the mountains—can be heard chanting like an ape. I wonder when he will stop?


    Invisible

    The day announces a bather
    slipping under the white plumes of a bird
    too much in love with its own image to murder its mate

    A day forgotten in swimming pools
    where a nude girl repairs revolvers
    for her criminal midget

    But the day has its little white breasts
    of the sadistic virgins from the font
    They are caught up by a rose
    black and trailing its eye down the street

    The brutal clouds meet us on our way
    and almost strangle us with their arms and legs
    that disappear too quickly for us to see them

    And the flags with holes in them
    larger than those in the sky
    come flowing over me
    and singe my hair with invisible flames
    The flags have written over them
    death is a pearl in the seashell of love

    Now the flags are turning into faces
    and the words are gone like smoke
    A fist, bruised and holding the sun,
    opens for night to unfold its assassin
    going out to meet his laughing lion
    far away where death is extinguished with a sigh

    The burning manes of the midnight jungle
    announce sleep coming on the fatal horses
    of love
    an explosive pearl in the seashell of sleep

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia by Garrett Caples, Andrew Joron, Nancy Joyce Peters. Copyright © 2013 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Foreword, Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Acknowledgments
High Poet: The Life and Work of Philip Lamantia
Editorial Note

Touch of the Marvelous (1943–1949)
The Touch of the Marvelous
Plumage of Recognition
The Islands of Africa
I Am Coming
Apparition of Charles Baudelaire
The Ruins
By the Curtain of Architecture
There Are Many Pathways to the Garden
Automatic World
Hermetic Bird
Moments of Exile
Beneath this bed the caverns gather me like water
I am a criminal when your body is bare upon the universe
A Civil World
Invisible
The Enormous Window
Mirror and Heart
Infernal Landscape
A Winter Day
Awakened from Sleep
The Diabolic Condition
Celestial Estrangement
Submarine Languor
You and I Have Nothing to Fear
The Image of Ardor
To You Henry Miller of the Orchestra the Mirror the Revolver and of the Stars of Stars

From Erotic Poems (1946)
Upon the earth eyes opened in wonder
You flee into a corridor of stars
Scenario
From Dark Illusion to Love’s Reality
I open for you an ancient book
Nativity of Love
Autumn Poems
Answer from a Place of Waiting
I am forlorn
Sorrow
Night Vision
Unable to move and hardly breathing
Spring’s Entry
Two Worlds—1946
A Simple Answer to the Enemy

Poems 1943–1955
Ages in the Wind
Symbols
Another Autumn Coming
The New Year
Revelations of a New Order
Break of Day
This Room Is My Cosmos
Descent
Inside the Journey
Animal Snared in His Revery
Elementals
Beneath occidental peripheries

From Tau (1955)
To see this evil from its core
The Owl
Shot into the Sun
Going Forth by Day
Ground grade guard the crucible
Out of crystal beginnings
In a garden that isn’t, but will be
Flame gates open to water gongs
She sped to me a winter word
To the Music
Question
To the flat lands by the hills of Suum Nar
18 beings and The Other
Broken language hisses

Ekstasis (1959)
Preface
Christ
Fragments from an Aeroplane
Interior Suck of the Night
Iguana iguana
Les Langueurs Allongées
Sheri
What gift to bring
Ball
Mysterium Mysticus Ecclesia
Dead Smoke
Deirdre
In a grove
Confirmation
John Hoffman
Ah Blessed Virgin Mary
Man is in pain
As some light fell
The Poor Paradoxes
Scorpion Bite
Our Lady of the Snow
The New Evil
Boobus
PUT DOWN
McClure’s Favorite
Observatory
What made tarot cards and fleurs de lis
Terror Conduction
Intersection
It’s summer’s moment in autumn’s hour
It was a time I didn’t see the beast
Binoculars

From Narcotica (1959)
I Demand Extinction of Laws Prohibiting Narcotic Drugs!
Bones
Opium Cocaine Hemp
Opium, Put Down of Laws against Opium!
Memoria
Poems 1955–1962
Scenes
1. Füd at Foster’s
2. Immediate Life
For Real
Rest in Peace
Inscription for the Vanishing Republic
Orphic Poem
The Call
Politics Poem
Lava
That I burned by the screech owl castle in Berkeley Hills
New York Blank Poem New York
Cool Apocalypse
Apocalypses
Blank Poem for Poe
Visions
The marvelous unveils its face
Did I appear in angeltime
Last Days of San Francisco
34 Words Six Lines
Time Is as Eternity Is: On the White Road: The Muse
Witness
Advent
All Hail Pope John the Twenty Third!
A Poem for John Wieners Written on His Paper
Shooting down to L.A. in an open car
The Juggler in the Desert
Scat
In every way i am dazzled by you
Jet Powered Suicide
My Labyrinth
Why write about “things”?
Chrism Song
Make a poem your heart contained in mine
It is because i cannot have you i have you
Poem for Indians
Ceylonese Tea Candor (Pyramid Scene)
Rompi
Crystals
Kosmos
Year of Weir
Origins of Weir

Destroyed Works Typescript (1948–1960)

Destroyed Works (1962)
Hypodermic Light
It’s absurd I can’t bring my soul to the eye of odoriferous fire
That the total hatred
Old after midnight spasm
They shot me full of holes
U.S.S. San Francisco
Immense blank void
In camera of sempiternity you walk
This World’s Beauty
Resurrections
It is I who create the world and put it to rest
A theater of masked actors in a trance
I have never made a poem
Mantic Notebook
Apocamantica
Fin del Mundo
The poem says the bombs of America went off
At the sleeper of inveterate cars
The Apocalyptic
The gods made a circle
A gazelle fixated in clock work
Lost in a crowd
I’ve come to the time of brain crashed stars
This is the night holding gum
Sick of you, owl, talking nonsense in my head
Empty visions blur my soul
Secret Weapons
Table of Visions
Opus Magnum
Deamin
From the Front
Still Poems
Vacuous Suburbs
This is the grey limit
There’s a mountain of houses upside down
The night is a space of white marble
There is this distance between me and what I see
I have given fair warning
Spansule
Jeanlu
Morning Light Song
High
Infernal Muses
Crab
The Bride Front and Back
Till the End of Time
Peroxide Subway
Subconscious Mexico City New York
How depressing here I am
Parades melt eternally
I cut out, I mean there was no proper head to the time
A Note on DESTROYED WORKS and later

Poems 1963–1964
Song for the Intellect
Babbel/Is a lanaguage extending the sonic level
Babbel/Ali ben buri de asalium
New Babbel
J. Weir
Mumbles
Bloody Neons
From My Athens Terrace Ruin
Going west east directionless pack to Indis
At Random
She’s Appeared and Disappeared at Once

From Selected Poems (1967)
The Third Eye
Blue Grace
The Sun Is Bleeding over the Sky!
The Ancients Have Returned Among Us
She Speaks the Morning’s Filigree
Gork!
Voice of Earth Mediums
What Is Not Strange?
Gothic Games
Towers of the Rose Dawn
Capricorn Is a Wounded Knee
Astro-mancy
After the Virus
Coat of Arms
Difficult First Steps

Poems 1965–1970
Without Props
There is no death, only sempiternal change
Thorn of the Air
The Flying Fix
Poem for John Hoffman the Poet
Interjections
Let the tree shaped minion pinion the wonder of drugged dogs

The Blood of the Air (1970)
To the Reader
The Libran Age
I Touch You
You wait you wail
Altesia or the Lava Flow of Mount Rainier
Blue Locus
The Talisman
Flaming Teeth
Open your head of cisterns
San Francisco melts as I come together
The maginot line of poetry has not been invented
With the opening of light in my soul
Ephemeris
Out of My Hat of Shoals
Smile Berries
Fantast
The Faery Chambers
Seattle
Little hole of black hallucination on the wall
The mosque of your eye has exploded
Horse Angel
The Comics
Tonight Burned with Solar Slime
Flaming Teeth
Penetrant Tumors
The Analog
World without End

Poems 1970–1980
A Little Washington DC Dream
3 Poems
On the plain/of the angels
A gorgon of the language cabal
Flying beasts/are riveted on the air’s toiling
The Hand Moves the Word Flies
Liberty
Luminous Lady
Only Creative Violence Reveals the Beauty of the Marvelous
With the opening of light in my soul
Panty Hose Stamped with the Head of the Medusa
Between Sleep and Waking
Tobacco of Harar
Weight

Becoming Visible (1981)
Redwood Highway
The Romantic Movement
Bed of Sphinxes
Primavera
Becoming Visible
Visibilities
In Yerba Buena
Oraibi
Bile Nature
Drama Set
Ultima Thule
Mask of Geometry
Beyond This Trail of Crystal Rails
Poe-Baudelaire, one echo-in-two
Dissolving Lead
The Erotic Limned
Vibration
Below the Surface
Oneiric Reversal
Openers
Violet Star
This Moment Eternal Medusa
Precipitous Oracle
Modular Prey
Pulsate with stoppages
Radiant Opal
To Begin Then Not Now
Life Sciences
The Curtain of Magic Turns over Motors of Sleep
The Fulcrum Loaded
At the Emu’s Domain
The Jewels of the Vatican Board the Atlantic Cipher
The Days Fall Asleep with Riddles
The Uncertain Sciences
Green Lion
Oblique and Direct
Hypochondriac Weather
A Slice of the Atmosphere
The Element You Love
Time Traveler’s Potlatch
Notes

Poems 1981–1985
Willow Wand
Meadowlark West
Sentiment for the Cordials of Scorpions
Birder’s Lament
Poetics by Pluto
Itinerary of Drift Bane
Mexico City Central Moon
Bird: Apparition of Charlie Parker
Elegy on the Migrating Nightingales Massacred by Nuclear Physics at Chernobyl

Meadowlark West (1986)
Isn’t Poetry the Dream of Weapons?
Native Medicine
Tree
Surrealism in the Middle Ages
West
Ship of Seers
Haven Root
Invincible Birth
Black Window
America in the Age of Gold
Wilderness Sacred Wilderness
Sweetbrier
The Romantist
Reverie Has Its Reasons
Virgo Noir
Irrational
Game’s the Right Title
Words I Dream
Phi
The Marco Polo Zone
Zanoni A Western Border Town
Buncombe
Death Jets
Fading Letters
The Mysteries of Writing in the West
Spring
An American Place
Fourth of July
The Geometric Hallucination
Reached the Turn
Exorcist Exercises
Other States
There
Shasta

Poems 1986–1993
From No Closure
Haiku for Satie
Once In A Lifetime Starry Scape
From Triads
From Bed of Sphinxes: New and Selected Poems (1997)
Poem for André Breton
Ex Cathedra
Unachieved
Diana Green
Egypt
Egypt II
Passionate Ornithology Is Another Kind of Yoga

From Symbolon (1998–2001)
To be served continually with this platter of nothingness
Ultimate Zone
Seraphim City
Theoria
Recall
Pure Automatism
Not with the cerebrating head
Echo of St. Therese of the Child Jesus
Facing branches of a flowering tree
Hyper Sleep
Humans Have Just a Few Genomes More Than Fruit Flies
Today and yesterday are fusing
Triple V: The Day Non-surrealism Became Surrealist
Hidden Truth

Selected Bibliography, Steven Fama
Index of Titles and First Lines
From the B&N Reads Blog
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