ABSTRACT
A great poet in a society "too busy" for poetry, Philip Lamantia is not a household name. Far from MTV and the talk shows, however, his reputation is assured and growing. At least to the "happy few" he is well known as the first major surrealist poet in the United States. Much less acknowledged is Lamantia's crucial part in the resurgence of organized surrealism in the United States from the late 1960s into the 1990s, as coeditor of the journal Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion and as contributor to many other surrealist publications. The New York group, although dominated by refugees and thus only to a limited degree a vehicle for US poets and artists, nonetheless organized a large International Surrealist Exhibition in 1942 as well as several notable smaller shows, and issued an impressive number of significant publications.
