Late in life, Philip Lamantia drafted fragments of a memoir under the working title

Bed of Sphinxes: New and Selected Poems 
1943– 1993 in 1997 and a brief return to Catholicism following a 1998 vision in the 
National Shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi in San Francisco’s North Beach. This final 
burst of poetic activity resulted in a handful of published poems before he fell silent 
once again, in late 2001. He spent the rest of his life withdrawn from the world. On 
his death in 2005, the 
New York Times acknowledged Lamantia’s vital contribution 
to twentieth-century poetry by quoting French literary critic Yves le Pellec, who once 
identified him as “a living link between French surrealism and the American coun-
terculture at its beginnings.”
3
Early Life
Philip Nunzio Lamantia was born at home, at 1715 Sanchez Street, in San Francisco, 
on October 23, 1927, the only child of Sicilian immigrants Nunzio and Mary Laman-
tia. His paternal grandmother, Mattea, also lived with the family, and among Philip’s 
earliest memories were the Sicilian folktales she told him in her backyard rose gar-
den. Nunzio had immigrated from Palermo to the United States in his late teens and 
had served in the American army in World War I. Mary (née Tarantino) came from a 
large, impoverished family from the tiny Sicilian island of Ustica; her oldest brother, 
Paul Tarantino, a produce distributor, served as the head of the family. After the war, 

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Nunzio was hired by Tarantino as a produce broker, becoming known in the trade by 
the Anglicized name “Nelson.” Nunzio became successful enough to buy a house on 
Russia Avenue in San Francisco’s Excelsior district, then on the outskirts of the city, 
where Philip spent most of his childhood.
Throughout his childhood, Lamantia was drawn to what the surrealists called 
“the marvelous”— manifestations of the uncanny, the sublime, or the impossible, 
that resist or exceed rationalization. On the one hand, this is perfectly ordinary, inso-
far as surrealism associates the ability to perceive the marvelous with the unfettered 
imagination of childhood. On the other hand, Lamantia’s childhood taste for the 
marvelous— insofar as it can be known— is remarkably consistent with his adult pur-
chase on the topic. Among his papers, for example, are two scrapbooks containing 
newspaper comics depicting scenes from exotic cultures as well as illustrations from 
Ripley’s Believe It or Not, asserting the marvelous as fact. As noted in his essay “Radio 
Voices: A Child’s Bed of Sirens,” Lamantia also gravitated toward what he calls “mys-
tery fantasies,” whose characters powerfully resonated in all media: comics, movies, 
and radio.
4
“I can trace a profound awakening of the poetic sense of life and language 
directly to the exemplary magical myth of 
The Shadow.”
5
“On the poetic plane,” he 
continues, “
The Shadow and Mandrake are paragons of hermetic knowledge: modern 
forms, respectively, of the fairy tale wonder-worker and the sorcerer.”
6
That these uncanny, fantastic elements of pop culture influenced the poetics of 
the precocious Lamantia is evident from his earliest days as a poet. Lamantia first 
began writing poetry in middle school, under the tutelage of a flaming-haired Irish 
immigrant named Griffin, whose English classes consisted purely of the reading and 
discussion of poetry and whose standing policy was that anyone who wrote a poem 
didn’t have to do that evening’s homework. Lamantia’s choice to embark on an orien-
talist fantasia modeled on Edward FitzGerald’s 
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam already 
seems characteristic of his prior interest in the marvelous (even as its inherently open-
ended nature allowed him to avoid homework indefinitely). From the