Poet Philip Lamantia's birthday marked with a reading of his poem Vibration
On what would have been the 94th birthday of San Francisco poet Philip Lamantia, one of his poems, Vibration, is re-read and interpreted, focusing on the recurring word "there" and the tension between horror and creative force.
The American poet Philip Lamantia would have turned 94 on October 23, 2021. He was born in San Francisco in 1927, and on this occasion it is worth taking a close look at one of his poems. The article marking this anniversary presents the poem Vibration from the collection Becoming Visible, which was published in 1981 by City Lights Press in San Francisco as number 39 in its Pocket Poets Series.
The poem opens with an image of devastation: a wind torments bats, scorched feet of dead suns come into view, and a city is hurled into the sea. Among these images stand a whorl of fear, the humming of a skeleton of loneliness, furious corpses blooming in a bottle, and red weapons vanishing into mirrors. The Hanged Man, a motif from the Tarot, also appears in the text. Despite these gloomy images, the poem ends with a pyramid of water floating in the dark mouth-store of inner life.
The commentator sees the key word of the poem in the repeated line opening there, which occurs five times, and in the echo where, which is used twice. Each there works both as an adverb that binds something to a particular place or position, and as an exclamation that conveys a mixture of wonder and alarm. Through its repetitions the word almost becomes a fixed part of the rhythm. When read aloud, a pulsing emerges that the title Vibration picks up. The commentator explicitly stresses that he himself emphasizes every there when reading aloud and recommends this as a rewarding exercise.
Other words carry this vibration as well: spun in the third line, whorl in the fifth, the compound hum-whirr in the sixth, which the commentator calls a wonderful word formation, and hovers in the last line, which recalls the wingbeats of a hummingbird. For the commentator, Vibration expresses an emotional and spiritual state that is at once frightening and ultimately positive. It is meant as the feeling of a surge of creative energy, intense, lively and terrifying, yet necessary for the imagination. The horrors of the text are thus not an end in themselves but part of an inner movement.
The article also refers to testimonies from contemporaries. Robert Kelly, in the magazine Caterpillar 5 from October 1968, described Lamantia's "high excitement" at public readings, and the commentator finds this excitement in this poem too. Allen Ginsberg, in his foreword to Charles Plymell's volume Apocalypse Rose, published in 1966 by Dave Haselwood in San Francisco, called Lamantia an "American vibration artist". The commentator also quotes Clark Ashton Smith, whose sentence that explanations are neither necessary, desirable nor possible applies entirely to this poem.
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