RE-READING PHILIP WHALEN ~

 

Further Notice

I can't live in this world

And I refuse to kill myself

Or let you kill me

The dill plant lives, the airplane

My alarm clock, this ink

I won't go away

I shall be myself —

Free, a genius, an embarrassment

Like the Indian, the buffalo

Like Yellowstone National Park.

                                                            22:ix:56

__________________________

Philip Whalen

The Collected Poems

edited by Michael Rothenberg

Wesleyan University Press, 2007

____________________________

For nearly any other collected poems

one can almost assume cracking the book open

to the middle will well provide the reader

with some of the best poetry by the poet.

Not so Philip Whalen.

For the last 50 years I guided my Whalen trajectory

through my favorite book of his, On Bear's Head,

a book devised and brought into existence through the

tough work of James Koller, Bill Brown and Don Carpenter

after a little fight with the co-publisher Harcourt & Brace.

Coyote Books was the rightful instigator, as usual.

Whalen was hot from the start — say after he gets through

his apprenticeship in the 40s— from the 50s onward

he is sailing, and Michael Rothenberg's perfect book

for Whalen: cover jacket design and hundreds of poems

(what more do you need?) plus Whalen's drawings and

doodles and general Philip-energy, it's all here in the Wesleyan

edition and I've come during a virus pandemic and read it all (ALL)

now a second time. Reading Philip Whalen is like bicycling up

a hill while eating an ice-cream cone, and maybe it's a hot day

but it doesn't have to be. Energies transfix. You know you've

got a poet when everyone says he or she is reading him and

no one knows who you're talking about.

SCENES WITH PHILIP WHALEN ~

This is the design, cover photograph, and overall

Philip Whalen while alive book I fell for

over 50 years and I still hold it close to my heart.

I'm more than grateful that the good folks at Wave Books

have reissued the masterpiece, with this cover photo

as frontispiece at least, and an afterword

by David Brazil.

(Wave Books, 2020)

PHILIP WHALEN & GARY SNYDER ~

PHILIP WHALEN (BOLINAS, KYOTO, ZURICH) ~

CROWDED BY BEAUTY ~

P H I L I P     W H A L E N

You will want the Philip Whalen biography. 

It is a gnarly book in that it goes round and round in interesting ways, 

often through friendships, quite unusual in this day and age of publishing. 

First Ginsberg, then Kerouac, and then taking off like a rocket
with Snyder

and leveling off mysteriously & sweetly with Kyger, 
while sharing birthdays with McClure (and Rimbaud!)

and all the friends, each and every one

claim they never saw Philip with 

a love interest. 

The gods could have told them that.

 Look at the full Collected Poems if you want to see his love interest. 

Long before a Buddhist,
Whalen, like Kerouac, were human beings. 

They didn’t actually waste their time on the Buddhist stuff, 

they just never needed it in the first place.
So the book reads less as a biography and more like an autobiography— 

Philip’s — the one he didn’t write. 

He wrote love poems. 

He wrote On Bear’s Head. 

The book that must be in every poetry library if one wishes to claim it is a poetry library. 

[ BA ]

Counterpoint, 2015

THE BLACK BARTS OF THE WORLD ~

Philip Whalen (seated) and Gary Snyder

photograph by Harry Redl

http://thenewblackbartpoetrysociety.wordpress.com/2014/05/10/a-diamond-wired-for-sound-2/