HAPPY BIRTHDAY PHILIP LAMANTIA!

Steven Fama is one of the great gifts to poetry. Poets are lucky if he comes to read their poems. And for his birthday celebration for Philip Lamantia this year (birthday actually was yesterday), he offers something unique: a reading of poems written to, after and inspired by Philip Lamantia. Click on summary of poets below for the link:

Here follows what I’ll for shorthand call Lamantia poems by Robert Duncan (1956), Michael McClure (1961), Clark Coolidge (1963), Ransom Lomatewama (1987), Penelope Rosemont (1992), Garrett Caples (1999), Will Alexander (2000), Lisa Jarnot (2001), Donald Sidney-Fryer (2003), John Olson (2006), and Eileen Tabios (2009). The parenthetical dates are the years the poems were published, except in the case of Coolidge, where it reflects the date the poem was written.

Reading now the excerpts Steven chose from the poems I wrote for Philip, I am struck again by just how special Philip was/is -- the most utterly marvelous and divine poet I've ever met.