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

The 
Blood of the Air, was published in San Francisco by Donald Allen’s Four Seasons 
Foundation.
75
To make no mistake about the author’s surrealist orientation, an exten-
sive quote from André Breton was placed at the beginning of the book; in addition, a 
frontispiece drawing was provided by Marie Wilson.
76
The collection— dedicated to 
Nancy Joyce Peters, “at the secrets / 
of the marvelous”— opens with “I Touch You,” 

---

l high poet
perhaps Lamantia’s most ardent love poem. Despite its brevity, the book as a whole 
projects— in contrast to the work of Lamantia’s earlier, self-destructive phase— a 
sense of self-confidence, a reclamation of poetic powers, with the poet-magus once 
more in command of “the coiled element, the supreme root of fire.”
In 1971, Peters moved permanently to San Francisco to look for a position as a 
librarian, after she and Lamantia decided that San Francisco suited them better than 
D.C. Peters worked briefly for editor and publisher Donald Allen, who was then edit-
ing Frank O’Hara’s 
Collected Poems for Knopf; not long after, she joined Ferlinghetti 
at the editorial offices of City Lights. (Peters would remain at City Lights for the 
next four decades, becoming its executive director in 1982, as well as a co-owner of 
the enterprise.) Around this time, Peters and Lamantia, together with Donald Allen, 
traveled by car through the American Southwest, visiting Hopi pueblos and other 
Native American sites. Such excursions to explore the West, its natural beauty and 
complex history, continued for the next twenty-five years, becoming an increasingly 
important source of inspiration for Lamantia’s poetic thought and practice.
At home in San Francisco, 1970. Photo by Nancy Joyce Peters. 
Courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, 
Berkeley.

---

high poet li
In the fall of 1971, Lamantia taught a course on poetics for one term at San 
Francisco State University at the invitation of Nanos Valaoritis (who, along with his 
wife, Marie Wilson, had recently relocated to California from Greece). Thanks to 
Valaoritis’s presence on the SF State faculty, literary surrealism had gained an aca-
demic foothold in the Bay Area. Valaoritis, who held his position at San Francisco 
State for many years, was a popular and influential teacher, yet certain members of the 
decidedly antiacademic Surrealist Movement in the United States became suspicious 
of what they regarded as Valaoritis’s “revisionist” tendencies. Both Valaoritis and 
Sotère Torregian, an Armenian-American surrealist poet and friend of Lamantia, 
were criticized by the group for failing to adhere to Breton’s allegedly “simple” defi-
nition of surrealism as “pure psychic automatism.”
77
Lamantia himself never came 
under such criticism, despite the fact that he had called for surrealism to reinvent 
itself in the very pages of the group’s publication 
Arsenal. In its second volume, 
published in 1973, Lamantia defined post-Bretonian surrealist poetry as “a rigorous 
reconstruction 
against the past, an adamant refusal to be entangled in previously 
conquered areas of association. . . . [W]e can all the more happily trace our inspi-
rations from . . . Breton and Péret . . . 
without literally re-tracing in one’s own poetic 
praxis their inimitable movements [emphasis added].” Nonetheless, besides contrib-
uting to 
Arsenal, Lamantia supported the activities of the group in many ways during 
this period, from collaborating with them in editing a surrealist section of the 1974