Tau & Journey to the End (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)

Invited to read at the "6"Gallery reading of October 1955, surrealist Philip Lamantia declined to read any of his own poems, and instead read, from an onionskin manuscript, pages of an unpublished collection that his late friend, John Hoffman, had left behind. Editor Garrett Caples, who knew Lamantia in his final years, and who shepherded his papers into the archives of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, posits that the decision to read Hoffman might have been the lucky byproduct of another decision Lamantia made--to reject the poetry of "Tau," his then recent project, in the face of a volcanic conversion (or re-conversion) to Catholicism. This has the effect, for me at least, of showing Lamantia's human side, one prone to snap judgments and error just like anyone else.Of course it was an accident, or nearly so, that made the "6" Gallery reading a famous event in poetry history, thus pinning, like a fixative, John Hoffman's name into position, and yet it has been a curious immortality, hasn't it, since no one has actually seen any of the poems in question until now. This City Lights "Pocket Poets" Edition reunites the young men who bonded together in the late 1940s in North Beach with such passion and vigor, by printing all of Hoffman's extant poems, with the manuscript that Lamantia was working on in the mid 1950s, poems he recanted but, tellingly, never actually destroyed. "Tau" turns out to be one of Lamantia's most interesting achievements. From the moment it begins it plunges us into the mind of one who saw the way Tanguy painted, in a poetry of edges, splinters, riven landscapes still crackling with dead energies. I read these poems while the TV showed us the footage of Eyjafjallajökull, the volcano in Iceland, and I clutched the book harder. Half horror, half sublimity, the features of "Tau" take a long time to emerge from the smoke cloud. "His color is green green,/ to distend him from the earth," writes Lamantia in "The Owl." "He does not fly./ You meet him while walking." I wonder if Lamantia knew Hawthorne and Melville well, --it feels like it to me.As for John Hoffman, he isn't as dazzling and his metrics aren't as menacing, but he has a great sadness to him, the sadness of youth (he died at age 23, far away from home, in Mexico under disputed circumstances). "Do, re, mi, fa--how lugubrious!" is the refrain of one piece. The enormous pleasure of seeing this work arrive after so many years in shadowland, for now, makes it hard for me to feel very glum, but I can always go back once the initial high has subsided, right?