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

Destroyed Works. Judging from both stylistic and internal evidence, moreover, the 
majority of 
Destroyed Works consists of poems written between 1958 and 1960, thus 
making its contents roughly contemporary with its publication.
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The title refers to 
the event itself, in other words, rather than the actual poems in the book. Lamantia 
seemingly used the “Destroyed Work” typescript as a model— using bullet points 
rather than numbers to separate the various poems— but filling this structure with 
more recent content. Unlike the typescript, the book is divided into four suites of 
poems: “Hypodermic Light,” “Mantic Notebook,” “Still Poems,” and “Spansule.” 
Stylistically, 
Destroyed Works grows out of the manic denunciations of Narcotica, 
continuing that volume’s emphatic use of capital letters and tending toward long 
lines and prose poems. While the Catholic content of 
Ekstasis remains, its quiet, 
reverential tone has disappeared in favor of fervent but unorthodox pronouncements 
like “Christ is a rocket ship.”
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Notably, the book’s cover is a photograph of Bruce 
Conner’s assemblage “Superhuman Devotion,” which itself had been destroyed by 
the time the book was printed. Conner and Lamantia met as early as 1955 in San 
Francisco and continued their friendship in Mexico City, when Conner moved there 
in the early 1960s.
Lamantia’s second deportation from Mexico, in 1962, effectively put an end to his 

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relationship with Lucile, who would initiate divorce proceedings the following year. 
It also seemingly coincided with Lamantia’s leaving the Catholic Church, though 
exactly when this occurred is unknown. His intention to renounce poetry remained, 
yet though he withdrew from publishing, he never seems to have entirely stopped 
writing. At the invitation of his ex-wife Goldian Nesbit, Lamantia decided to relo-
cate to Nerja, Spain, where she and André VandenBroeck were living. Since they had 
left Mexico, VandenBroeck and Nesbit had fallen under the influence of the “sacred 
science” of Egyptologist R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, whose chief work, 
Le Temple de 
l’homme (1958), was an exigesis of ancient Egyptian philosophy, mathematics, and sci-
ence as embodied in the symbology of the Temple of Luxor. Through VandenBroeck, 
Lamantia hoped to gain an understanding of “sacred geometry,” conceiving that he 
would thenceforth devote himself to philosophy instead of poetry.
Before undertaking such a journey, however, Lamantia needed to break his heroin 
addiction, having fallen into a period of heavy use in the wake of his failed marriage. 
He accomplished this in late 1962 in Newton, Massachusetts, through LSD therapy 
guided by Timothy Leary, whose early research into hallucinogens included their 
use in the treatment of alcoholism. “Phil Lamantia was up for a week,” Leary wrote 
Tangiers, Morocco, 1964. Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, 
Berkeley.

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to Allen Ginsberg. “He’s going through a death-rebirth sequence. Painful but he’s 
great.”
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Following this cure, Lamantia left for Europe, arriving in Nerja, Spain, in 
February 1963 and renting a small house down the street from the VandenBroecks. 
Lamantia would remain there for six months, studying Schwaller de Lubicz with 
VandenBroeck, but he found himself more interested in Egyptian myth and symbol 
than in sacred geometry. Lamantia grew frustrated, moreover, with VandenBroeck, 
whose initial enthusiasm had waned somewhat, though he would later write both a 
study,