Philip Whalen: Plums, Metaphysics, an Investigation, a Visit, and a Short Funeral Ode

Philip Whalen 1923-2002

On Friday, October 7, 1955 Philip Whalen read at the underground art gallery the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Also reading that night were Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Phillip Lamanita, Michael McClure, and Gary Snyder. Conceived by Wally Hedrick, co-founder of the Six Gallery, the reading brought public attention to the West Coast Beats. Though Whalen hung out with beat poets, his own voice differs from theirs. On the Poetry Foundation's biography web page for Whalen, they point out that his work's reverential treatment of the mundane, its self-deprecating humor, and its generally apolitical tone. distinguishes him from other beat poets.

Born October 23, 1923 in Portland Oregon, Philip Whalen grew up in the small town of The Dalles, eighty miles south of Portland. He attended Reed College on the GI Bill after serving in the US Army Air Force in WWII. In High School he had read Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. In a 1999 interview he told David Meltzer that after reading Blavatsky ...I went to see where was she coming from? Where is she getting all this stuff? And then I found the actual translations of the actual Vedanta writings. You know the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita and so on. And that was very satisfying that this system was really there, and it made sense to me.... After release from the army, he visited the Vedanta Society in Portland, but did not attend due to the expense. He was introduced to D. T. Suzuki's books lent to him by his roommate Gary Snyder, and followed a Zen path eventually becoming head monk of Dharma Shagha in Santa Fe.

Whalen wrote his poetry in notebooks and accompanied them with doodles and other visual elements. He considered his calligraphic text an important layer in his work. In her introduction to his selected works Overtime, Leslie Scalapino says: Whalen not only posits the poetry to be a graph of the mind moving, but he contrives to break that mind apart: writing is to make no connection as it's being in the instant of and being the act of disjunction.

He appears as the character Warren Coughlin in Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums. In addition to poetry, Whalen wrote two novels: "You Didn't Even Try" and "Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head".

Whalen's vision deteriorated as he aged to the point where he could no longer read. He died June 26, 2002.

Webliography:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Whalen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Gallery_reading

http://www.litkicks.com/People/PhilipWhalen.html

http://www.litkicks.com/PhilipWhalen/

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=7347

interview with David Meltzer:
http://www.poetryflash.org/archive.282.wahlen.html

Bibliography:
(Edited by Michael Rothenberg) Overtime: Selected Poems, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1999.

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[BrianDornTFP]

A production worthy of the poem ... a difficult task, but one accomplished. Well done!

[andrewnorris1]

On your links I found this quote that Whalen's verse had "the freedom to include any reality from one's daily life into the poem one happens to be writing at the moment..." That is a very brave attitude since I imagine it hard to carry off, but this poem works, even mundane references seem loaded with meaning.

[andrewnorris1]

This channel is such an education and draws to my attention the names of poets that I had hardly known of before. Warmly read and engaging as ever I really appreciate the links to take me further into his world. Great work, James