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

Destroyed Works”— though the book wouldn’t be printed until 1962.
64. Lamantia’s Auerhahn books are unpaginated, but this poem is the sixth section of the opening 
suite, “Hypodermic Light.”
65. Peter Conners, 
The White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary and Allen 
Ginsberg (San Francisco: City Lights, 2010), 154.
66. Autobiographical notes, Carton 11, Folder 11, of the Philip Lamantia Papers, 1944– 2005 (BANC 
MSS 2006/179) at The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

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67. Previously, during the period of his ostensible silence, Lamantia had written a longer poem, 
“Kosmos,” relating to his LSD experiences, but deemed it unworthy of publication.
68. Nancy Joyce Peters, address at the memorial for Philip Lamantia, San Francisco, March 31, 2005.
69. The back-cover copy further stated that, after Lamantia was “welcomed by André Breton into 
the Surrealist movement,” there “followed a long, transitional period of mystical orientations & 
silences.”
70. José Pierre, 
Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives (Paris: Terrain Vague, 1982).
71. In his 1973 prose statement “Between the Gulfs,” Lamantia wrote: “From having initially found 
the key (the road opening, 1943– 1946) to having lost the key (the road closed down, 1946– 1966) 
and since rediscovering the key (the road re-opening in 1967), my solidarity with the surrealist 
movement . . . re-invents itself without the slightest ambiguity.” 
Arsenal 2, no. 2 (1973): 32.
72. See Andrew Joron, 
Neo-Surrealism; Or, The Sun at Night: Transformations of Surrealism in 
American Poetry 1966– 1999 (Oakland, CA: Kolourmeim, 2010).
73. See Ron Sakolsky, ed., 
Surrealist Subversions: Rants, Writings and Images by the Surrealist 
Movement in the United States (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2002).
74. Lamantia’s long essay “Poetic Matters,” published in 
Arsenal 3 (1976): 6– 10, stands as one of 
the clearest statements of his own poetics while offering a sustained critique of the American poetry 
scene in the midseventies.
75. A decade earlier, Donald Allen had included selections from Lamantia’s work in the landmark 
anthology 
The New American Poetry: 1945– 1960 (Grove Press: New York, 1960).
76. The book’s epigraph gives a definition of “Lamantines” as a species of “mermaid-like mammals 
native to Africa. . . . They play, in West-African myth, a role similar to that of the Sirens in Europe.” It 
is telling that the listing of previous books by Lamantia on the copyright page of 
The Blood of the Air 
includes only the two published after his return to surrealism in the midsixties.
77. See Pete Winslow, “What American Surrealism Is Fanatical About,” in 
The Forecast Is Hot: 
Tracts and Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States 1966– 1976 
(Evanston, IL: Black Swan Press, 1997), 111.
78. Ron Sakolsky, “Surrealist Subversion in Chicago,” in 
Surrealist Subversions, 79.
79. This phrase occurs in Breton’s 
Second Manifesto of Surrealism, written in the wake of the Paris 
group’s failed attempt to join forces with the Communist Party.
80. Lamantia attempted in 1999 to write a poem, entitled “Mentor,” about his relationship to 
Rexroth (the poem begins: “An old mentor mourned / 
many a night you opened / 
with the ancient 
learning we / 
met eternity at its only juncture / 
for the living”), but left it unfinished.
81. Peters had contacted Sidney-Fryer in the course of writing, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 
Literary