Bancroftiana, Number 118 Spring 2001: The Philip Whalen Archive

The Philip Whalen Archive

The Bancroft Library has acquired the archive of the poet Philip Whalen, who was on the stage with Allen Ginsberg at the Six Gallery in San Francisco that September night in 1955 when the public first heard the poem "Howl" read aloud, the night the Beat Generation was launched. The Six Gallery, in the Marina district, had been converted from an auto repair garage to an art space less than a year before, and in that time had hung a number of group and one-artist exhibitions. It had also hosted performances, including a reading of Robert Duncan's verse play Faust Foutu. Given the way this gallery converted a mechanical and consumerist space into a venue for art, poetry and drama, it was an appropriate launching pad for the Beats, all of whom, like prophets in their own land, critiqued America's mechanistic, materialistic, consumerist culture as a kind of cannibal Moloch, devouring its own young. On the bill that evening with Ginsberg and Whalen, and helping to get the Beat generation into orbit, were three other young poets—Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Philip Lamantia. (The oldest, Whalen, was thirty-two.) Kenneth Rexroth, who had helped Ginsberg organize the event, also read and acted as Master of Ceremonies.

Lamantia's work faded from public view fairly quickly, but the other poets have gone on to become something that far transcends the notoriety of their early days. They've become accepted keepers of the national conscience and explorers of spirituality for believers who dare to speculate about their spirituality. Michael McClure has won acclaim and honors for his plays as well as his poetry and essays; Gary Snyder was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and is recognized internationally as an effective activist in the ecological movement, as is McClure; Allen Ginsberg won the National Book Award for poetry, and also was recognized as an activist and leader in many movements from the anti-Vietnam war to Gay Rights. Philip Whalen, who has been a practicing Buddhist priest since February 3, 1973, has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, commentary and interviews, including the major collections of poetry On Bear's Head (Harcourt, 1969) and most recently, Overtime (Penguin, 1999).

Whalen is arguably the most underappreciated of the Beat writers, in part because his Buddhism has kept him out of the public eye as a personality, and in part because his poems at first seem less user-friendly than those of the other Beats. Whalen's poems are far less discursive or narrative than Ginsberg's, and far less lyrical than Snyder's short poems. They also range more widely in their reference than most Beat poetry. Typically, a lengthy Whalen poem can refer in a casual, often playful way to pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, figures from Hindu mythology and Buddhist lore, sports, events from European or American history, TV programs, popular songs, science, Japanese and Chinese artists, even quotations from teen-agers walking down the street, and more.

In Whalen's poems these snippets from the already-created world, together with his own perceptions, connections and insights, are arranged in interwoven patterns of scenes or sequences that are related to each other in a rich network of multiple connections. People have attempted to compare Whalen's poems to mosaics or collages, and while that's a useful approximation, his poems are really more like mobiles. The scenes or sequences are suspended in relation to each other, so that as you read past them the relationships between the scenes or sequences are constantly changing, like a mobile, whose pieces are constantly moving in relation to each other.

Woodcut, "Woman with musical instrument."

Like most post-moderns, Whalen is very aware of his reader, and expects his reader to "make sense" of the poems by doing essentially what Whalen himself did in writing the poems—by taking note of those always-shifting relationships in what he perceives and in the connections he draws between them. He has described his own work in these terms: "This poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving, which is a world body being here and now which is history . . . and you. Or think about the Wilson Cloud-chamber, not ideograms, not poetic beauty; bald-faced didacticism moving as Dr. Johnson commands all poetry should, from the particular to the general. My life has been spent in the midst of heroic landscapes which never overwhelmed me and yet I live in a single room in the city— the room a lens focusing on a sheet of paper. Or the inside of your head. How do you like your world?"

The range of his reference is matched by the range of voices that speak in his poems. Most often this is Whalen's own voice, a deeply committed artist, whose art is not a "career" but a true vocation, a calling to a daily practice—not just the writing of poems, but the intense observation and enjoyment of the world that precedes the writing of the poem. This witty, laid back, self-aware and self-ironic voice is joined by a whole chorus of neighbors, friends, fellow shoppers, passers-by. They are the many voices that make up the poet, Philip Whalen. Like Whitman, Whalen is large, he contains multitudes, and like Whitman, many voices speak through him. These voices come from all levels of society, and sometimes Whalen will include voices from incongruous levels of discourse— deliberately, violating Dr. Johnson's insistence on "decorum," the notion that a poem's language must be consistent throughout— formal and eloquent or casual and slangy, but the same all the way through. In defiance of decorum, Whalen addresses an octopus at the aquarium as "O yummy and noble beast!" In "Monday in the Evening" a spirit evoked in a seance spews out an endless list of wants, including "I want a vision of the New Heaven and the New Earth/ I want a bottle of rootbeer."

This combination of free-floating voices that often merge together to become indistinguishable, of levels of discourse that merge together ("Yummy/ Noble," "Heaven/Rootbeer"), and of these references to such a wide range of disparate sources—all of these serve to underscore the central thread that runs through almost all of these poems and writings, Whalen's insistence that human beings live in a dense network of interrelationships in a number of different dimensions or registers simultaneously. This network of connections is in part a legacy of the Modernists, for whom people were always re-enacting mythological experience— Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's "Waste Land," Yeats' Ireland. But Whalen, like Snyder, extends the temporal and mythological range of these references far beyond the world of classical Greece. In addition to the history and mythologies of Asian cultures (Japanese, Chinese, Indian), Whalen refers to the lore of science and popular culture, insisting that human beings live material and social as well as spiritual and metaphysical lives, on scales that range from the intergalactic and the pre-historic to the microscopic and the daily. Snyder had claimed, "My values go back to the late paleolithic"; Whalen titled one of his books Memoirs of an Interglacial Age and another one Prolegomena to the Study of the Universe.

As smart as Whalen is and as thinky as he can be, as abstract and intellectual, he is also a very sensuous poet, always alert to the colors and sounds, the textures and smells, the sense perceptions that also make up his world. Wallace Stevens had said that "The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world," and by that measure, Whalen is a wealthy man indeed, in spite of the monastic simplicity in which he lives, and in spite of the persistent theme of hunger and poverty in the poems, especially in the earlier ones. His commitment to this multi-dimensional world, and to sharing its sacramental nature with the reader are two of Whalen's major aims. As he puts it,

Notebook, 1957-1965, pp. 107-108.

"What do I know or care about life and death My concern is to arrange immediate BREAKTHROUGH into this heaven where we live as music"

This is serious play.

Whalen, who earned his BA at Reed College in Portland, Oregon (where he was a classmate of Gary Snyder's), learned calligraphy from Lloyd Reynolds, one of his professors there. Almost all of the Whalen manuscripts in this archive are written in this calligraphic script, and many of his worksheets and finished drafts are illustrated with Whalen's own drawings, diagrams, cartoons and doodles. Because of the high quality of Whalen's own poetry and the fact that so much of it was written in the Bay Area and elsewhere in California, because of the uniqueness of these calligraphed and illustrated manuscripts, and because of Whalen's exchanges of correspondence with some of the major literary figures of our time, this collection will be a major resource for many years to come for scholars doing research in late twentieth century art and literature and into California or Bay Area writing or the San Francisco literary renaissance, as well as other fields.

—Ron Loewinsohn
Department of English