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Review by William Corbett
Philip Whalen, who died in 2002 at age 79, had a publishing history that should have earned him more stature than it did. After publishing with many of the top small presses in San Francisco, home for most of his adult life, his first collected poems On Bear’s Head appeared from Harcourt, Brace & World in 1969. The estimable editor Donald Allen then published Whalen’s next few books under his Four Seasons Foundation and Grey Fox imprints. After Whalen’s death, Penguin published Overtime, a large selected poems. The work has been out there but the shouts from the rooftops that Whalen is a great poet have not yet resounded. Wesleyan’s Collected Poems ought to change this. Philip Whalen is a great poet and this vast, unrolling scroll of life’s work will give much pleasure to those readers who hunger for an authentic voice.
It is voice, that quality in a poet we know when we hear it, that commands us in Whalen’s poetry. Like his friends and comrades Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Whalen’s imagination is large and untidy. Twenty pages into this book you begin to feel that Whalen will put anything that comes into his head into a poem no matter how the language might pull and push that poem into a new and unforeseen shape. He is rambunctious and eruptive. Words seem to grab him by the tongue, and he is not afraid to lose control, to have his poems take him places. He is one with those “ancient Chinamen” poets he admires who saw,
“Their world and several others since
Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it—
Cheered as it whizzed by—
& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars
Happy to have saved us all.”
Whalen cheers and he jeers; he is pissed off, sour, depressed, exultant, alone in his thoughts, gregarious, learned, a lover, a listener, sensuous and sharp-eyed with a big appetite for all the things in the world and for language—at times he packs all of these myriad selves into the same poems or a few pages of poetry. Turn to the mid-fifties poem “Sourdough Mountain Lookout” or “Scenes from Life at the Capitol” from the early 1970s. Since Whalen dated nearly all of his poems, his collected can be read as a diary and while his poems stand apart they are more closely related to one another than the poems of, say Ginsberg. Whalen described his poems as “A continuous fabric (nerve movie?) Exactly as wide as these lines…” and in a note in The New American Poetry he wrote, “This poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving, which is a body being here and now which is history…”
Whalen did not seek to write the well-made poem. He was a poet always in the process of writing the poem whose shape would be determined by the writing. Robert Creeley’s “Form is never more than an extension of content” gives an insight into Whalen’s technique but he followed nothing but the promptings of his own imagination. Early on he found a way of writing that was natural to him and stuck with it until the mid-1970s when he began to write less and less. In his deepening commitment to Zen Buddhism he must have found where he wanted to be and poetry became of less importance to him.
Born in Oregon, Whalen was, like his friend and fellow Reed College graduate Gary Snyder, a Westerner familiar with mountains and big spaces. Whalen’s poetry in particular has an ornery, restless, barely contained quality not unlike that of Pound, Williams and Olson—the latter fascinated Whalen and is given several great lines in this book—but fresher. Some of this air and flavor comes from his looking to the Far East, across the ocean that was in front of him, for a religious/ethical/mystical world he could discover for and in himself. He had the example of Kenneth Rexroth and comrades in Snyder, Ginsberg, and Joanne Kyger who did not stop at the Pacific shore. Not that Whalen was a pushover for Zen. Whalen preferred the sensuous both/and to the ascetic either/or and throughout this book he struggles, at times gleefully and other times he’s a sorehead, with Zen teachings and the world, so real to him, outside his window.
Whalen seems to have written or drawn most of his poetry with a calligrapher’s pen—there are examples of manuscript pages in this book—and if this can impart a handmade quality to his words, the feel of his poems says that it has. Some poems are doodles or what jazzmen call noodling. Whalen is a great improviser able to entertain his goofiest impulse without running out of gas and leaving his reader flat. What buoys him is his sense of humor:
I shall be myself—
Free, a genius, an embarrassment
Like the Indian, the buffalo
Like Yellowstone National Park.
There are a half dozen one-line poems in this book that must be among the best written by an American in the 20th century. Here is one:
The Inspection Of The Mind In June
All of me that there is makes a shadow.
San Francisco 14:vi:78
But Whalen is not best read for standout individual poems. My advice is to read him two ways. Start at the beginning and take your time, ten or so pages a day, until the end of this book. Or begin anywhere and read backwards or forwards until you’ve had your daily dosage. Do this until you finish the book. In either case, or in whatever order you invent, a marvel awaits you.
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