Still Poem No. 9
--Philip Lamantia 

There is this distance between me and what I see
everywhere immanence of the presence of God
no more ekstasis
a cool head
watch watch watch
I’m here
He’s over there…It’s an Ocean…
sometimes I can’t think of it, I fail, fall
There IS this look of love
there IS the tower of David
there IS the throne of Wisdom
there IS the silent look of love
Constant flight in air of the Holy Ghost
I long for the luminous darkness of God
I long for the superessential light of this darkness
another darkness I long for the end of longing
I long for the
........................It is Nameless what I long for
.....a spoken word caught in its own meat saying nothing
This nothing ravishes beyond ravishing
There is this look of love Throne Silent look of love

PL: As I said, Surrealism begins with the sacred. And the premise that each individual poet, or painter, seek the “golden fleece” on his own. This point is critical to understanding Surrealism as it appeared in Paris around 1910 on the coat-tails of end-of-century poets such as Saint Paul Roux, who was known as “Le Magnifique!” and then with Apollinaire’s writings on modernism. Apollinaire wrote about the “new spirit in poetry,” with emphasis on the word “spirit”......

While, early on, there was a very real interest in “The Underworld” via Rimbaud and Dante, for instance, poets like Kathleen Raine later opted for a non-demonic route that, as she said, was not a risk to the pure surrealist process—a process of writing that focused on the stages of wakefulness and sleep that occur at the points of moving into and out of sleep. These bridges, these interstices, were considered key, if not critical, to the writing process and were catalyst to the advent of automatic writing which appeared around 1919. These so-called “bridges” had been defined earlier by Poe in his essay “Between Waking and Sleeping.” I now refer to this state of conscious-unconsciousness as “being in the zone.” This amounts to writing from and experiencing from a sort of waking trance state, a place from which many of the world’s great prophetic writings have come—writings of the old biblical prophets, The Song of Songs, and so forth.......

I think of the poem “Still Poem 9” (1959) that was published in the Donald Allen anthology, as something of a credo, hinting strongly at a metaphorical “grail search” of sorts that you may have followed over the course of your life and career and that would also be connected with your travels to the Hopi mesas, Central and South America, Africa, Egypt, Greece...

PL: Yes, in fact you’re not the first person to draw this kind of analogy to the poem “Still Poem 9”—and it’s a good one, I think as I like the association with the grail quest. That poem was written in 1959 and I’m still on the grail quest.

--from milkmag.org, Philip Lamantia: Shaman of the Surreal