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

Becoming Visible. Although his 
relationship with Rexroth had been strained at times, Lamantia, in the years follow-
ing Rexroth’s death, always spoke of his old mentor with the greatest respect.
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In one sense, Lamantia’s earliest mentor had been Edgar Allan Poe; in later years, 
he enjoyed reading Poe’s twentieth-century inheritors, the fantasy-horror writers, 
among them Fritz Leiber, with whom Lamantia met occasionally in San Francisco, 
and Clark Ashton Smith, perhaps the most gifted member of a group of Symbol-
ist poets led by George Sterling in World War I–era San Francisco. Around 1980, 
Peters introduced him to Donald Sidney-Fryer, the executor of Smith’s estate.
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In 
1985, Fryer asked him to speak at the dedication of a Clark Ashton Smith plaque in 
Auburn, California; Lamantia remarked that Smith was a writer who (much like 
Lamantia himself) “followed his poetic genius to reveal the heights and depths of 
a rich cosmic revery.”
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The mid-eighties were also marked by occasional readings 
in small venues, and, in 1987, Lamantia and Peters read at the Santa Barbara Poetry 

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high poet liii
Festival, organized by his friend Daniel (Abdl-Hayy) Moore, the creator of the Float-
ing Lotus Magic Opera Company, a spectacular ritual theater group in the Bay Area.
A significant turning point for Lamantia during the eighties was his engagement 
with birding and bird lore, an extension of his ongoing studies of the cabala of the 
Western biosphere. Lamantia accepted an invitation to read (with Robert Duncan 
and Susan Griffin) at the 1983 Bisbee Poetry Festival in Arizona so that he could use 
the occasion to visit a nearby hummingbird refuge. Through binoculars, Lamantia 
observed, in an epiphanic moment, the dartings of hundreds of hummingbirds: the 
becoming-visible of the secret, sacred text of nature. One of the festival organiz-
ers then led him on a vigorous hike along the San Pedro River, where he was over-
whelmed by the sight of so many rare and colorful birds. Lamantia’s fascination with 
what he perceived as their magic potencies and role in culture— manifested in their 
plumage, their behavior, their songs— continued for the rest of his life.
Whenever possible during this period, Lamantia and Peters sojourned up and 
down the West Coast, with Lamantia attentive not only to bird life but to all aspects 
of what, in a poem called “America in the Age of Gold,” he termed “mystic geog-
raphy.” This concept he derived from his reading of Native Californian legends in 
anthropologist and linguist Samuel A. Barrett’s 
Pomo Myths (1933), a book that 
became as important to Lamantia as Schwaller de Lubicz’s 
Le Temple de l’homme. 
The exploration of locations crucial to Pomo Indian mythology, such as Clear Lake 
(including Daladano and Mount Konocti) and Fort Bragg (site of the creation of the 
world), formed the basis of Lamantia’s “many centers of mystic geography,” invoking 
“the time of joy with the supernatural beings” in the pre-Columbian world. Lamantia 
was fascinated with the extraordinarily poetic metaphysics of Pomo culture, as well 
as its ethical system, as embodied in the marvelous actions of characters such as 
Coyote, the creative spirit Madumda, Resin Man, Obsidian Man, and the Squirrel 
Girls, to name a few that are referenced in his poems. As in Egypt, every animal and 
stone and imaginal spirit-being had specific meanings, which interrelated in some-
times astonishing ways. But unlike the system of Egyptian symbols, where meanings 
were recorded on man-made artifacts, in Pomo thought, meanings were embodied 
in features of the physical world and expressed in a complex and imaginative oral 
literature. This revelation led to his and Peters’s involvement with green politics and 
bioregionalism, and their friendships with figures in this movement such as Peter 
Berg and Judy Goldhaft, directors of Planet Drum Foundation.
These influences resulted in Lamantia’s final full-length collection of new poems,