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“Philip was a visionary like Blake, and he really saw the whole world in a grain of sand.” —Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“An inspired consciousness set at full tilt in raging protest, kisses, prayers, blessings, and outraged demands. All from the deepest silence and farthest travel.” —Michael McClure
Preserving Fire recounts the life and thought of the Surrealist, Beat Generation, and San Francisco Renaissance poet Philip Lamantia through his fugitive prose works. Ranging from poetry to politics to mythology to dance, from manifestos to travelogues to wartime declarations of conscientious objection, these writings, expertly collected by friend and longtime City Lights editor Garrett Caples, offer a dynamic picture of Lamantia’s multifaceted intellectual life and the artistic movements he helped shape.
Philip Lamantia (1927–2005) was an influential Surrealist, Beat, and San Francisco Renaissance poet. He is the author of many books, including Erotic Poems, Touch of the Marvelous, Meadowlark West, Tau and Journey to the End, and The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia.
Garrett Caples is the author of many books, most recently Power Ballads and Retrievals. He is the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia and is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series.
"After decrying interpretation, Sontag notes that the ‘world, our world, is depleted, impoverished enough. Away with all duplicates of it, until we again experience more immediately what we have.’ This—experiencing immediately what we have, and being open to that experience—strikes me as the broad point of Lamantia’s work. It also seems a sound approach to reading Lamantia’s extensive body of poetry, and now his prose too. Which I recommend you do."
—Kevin O'Rourke, Kenyon Review
Garrett Caples is the author of Power Ballads (Wave Books, 2016), Retrievals (Wave Books, 2014), The Garrett Caples Reader (1999), Complications (2007), and Quintessence of the Minor (Wave Books, 2010). He is the editor of Preserving Fire: Selected Prose (Wave Books, 2018) by Philip Lamantia, and the co-editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (2013), Particulars of Place (2015) by Richard O. Moore, and Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems (2016) by Frank Lima. He is an editor at City Lights Books and curates the Spotlight Poetry Series there. He was also a contributing writer to the San Francisco Bay Guardian. He has written articles and blogged for the Poetry Foundation and occasionally blogs for blogcitylights.com. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in San Francisco.
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