Philip Lamantia

October 23, 1927– March 7, 2005. He was born in San Francisco and raised in that city’s Excelsior neighborhood. He began writing poetry in elementary school and was briefly expelled from junior high for “intellectual delinquency” when he immersed himself in the work of Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. His poetry was first published in the magazine View in 1943 when he was fifteen and in the final issue of the Surrealist magazine VVV the following year. His first book, Erotic Poems, was published in Berkeley in 1946. His second book, Ekstasis, appeared after the Six Poets at the Six Gallery reading and City Lights published his Selected Poems 1943 –1966.