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

An Autobiographical Novel (New York: New Directions, 1991), 510.
14. Meltzer,
 San Francisco Beat, 135– 36.
15. See Garrett Caples, “André Breton and Philip Lamantia,” in 
Titanic Operas, Folio III: Poetries 
and New Materialities II, ed. Joseph Donahue, http://archive.emilydickinson.org/titanic/material/
three/caples.html, accessed January 9, 2013.
16. Catrina Neiman, “Introduction,” in 
View: Parade of the Avant-Garde, ed. Charles Henri Ford 
(New York: Thunder’s Mouth, 1991), xii.
17. Cited in Dickran Tashjian, 
A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism and the American Avant-Garde 
1920– 1950 (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 254.
18. Tashjian
, Boatload of Madmen, 137.
19. Though he quit the editorial staff, Lamantia would remain a “Contributing Editor” on the 
masthead of 
View until his definitive break with Charles Henri Ford in March 1946 over what he saw 
as the magazine’s increasing sensationalism.
20. Meltzer,
 San Francisco Beat, 136.
21. As early as its December 1943 issue (no. 4, series III), 
View had announced the projected 
publication of Lamantia’s surrealist poems under its new View Editions imprint, which in 1946 
would issue the first single-volume English translation of André Breton’s poetry, 
Young Cherry Trees 
Secured against Hares, with a cover by Marcel Duchamp. Lamantia’s book was to have been titled 

---

high poet lxi
First Poems, with a cover by Max Ernst, but this plan was complicated by tensions between Ernst and 
Breton and ultimately scuttled by Lamantia’s 1946 break with Charles Henri Ford and 
View.
22. Michael Davidson, 
The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 38.
23. Meltzer,
 San Francisco Beat, 139.
24. See Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, 
Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco 
Renaissance (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan, 1998), 21. Ellingham and Killian identify this address as 
McKinley Street, though it’s actually McKinley Avenue.
25. In an autobiographical note among his papers, under the heading “1948,” Lamantia writes: 
“Discovery of R&B ‘Little Harlem’ later described in Kerouac’s 
On the Road as one of two SF 
sites of jazz and R.B. musical culture. Important contacts with genius Harry Smith, painter & 
ethnomusicologist— very important exchanges between us re magic, gnosis, & music— Nights of 
‘Jackson’s Nook’ & Jimbo’s Bop City within Fillmore, & Post & Buchanan.”
26. Philip Lamantia and John Hoffman, 
Tau and Journey to the End (San Francisco: City Lights, 
2008), 58.
27. Ibid., 59.
28. Ibid., 59– 60.
29. Peters, “Philip Lamantia,” 331.
30. 
Tau and Journey to the End, 64.
31. Peters, “Philip Lamantia,” 332.
32. Bill Morgan, 
I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (New York: Viking, 
2006), 152.
33. John Suiter, “Philip Lamantia Interview, North Beach, December 11, 2000,” Carton 21, Folder 
23 of the Philip Lamantia Papers, 1944– 2005 (BANC MSS 2006/179) at The Bancroft Library at the 
University of California, Berkeley), p. 6.
34. John Suiter,
 Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Jack Kerouac in the North 
Cascades (Washington, D. C.: Counterpoint, 2002), 114.
35. Suiter,
 Poets on the Peaks, 114.
36. Suiter, “Philip Lamantia Interview,” 2. De Angulo had died in 1950.
37. Suiter, 
Poets on the Peaks, 115– 16.
38. Jack Kerouac,