Product Description

One of the most path-breaking and creatively radical poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, Philip Whalen was part of the 1955 Six Gallery reading where the West Coast Beat movement famously began. Working alongside Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Jack Kerouac, Whalen developed a conversational and visually unorthodox style that is unique in contemporary poetry. His lifelong engagement with the impermanent and sensuous, concerns deepened by his commitment to Zen Buddhism, are on rich display here, along with his warm humor and original illustrations. This Collected Poems rightfully places Whalen among the foremost poets of his time, offering readers a truly major body of American poetic work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #724681 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 932 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780819568595
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
A friend and inspiration to Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, the Oregon-born California Beat poet Whalen (1923–2002) also played a serious role in the history of American Buddhism, traveling to Japan, then becoming a Zen monk in 1974. Whalen's copious pre-1967 writings make up the bulk of this volume: often they reflect a first-thought best-thought aesthetic, with scenes from West Coast nature and San Francisco bohemia, ecstatic and disillusioned jottings and quips about love, sex, drugs, literature and America, along with holographs and drawings. The work Whalen did in Japan tells a different story. The last and best of his long sequences, the 60-page Scenes from the Capital (1969), combines a Ginsberg-like flow with more considered reflections on travel, alienation and the poet's own mind: If you want something hold out an empty hand, Whalen advises; If you want a poem find a blank page. His move into more dedicated Zen practice slowed downhis verse: How to explain that everything is unimaginably splendid/ And horrible? an ode from 1979 inquires. Beat compleatists, seekers of Buddhist poetry and anyone else drawn to the history of countercultural writing should find much in this big book to like, though its sheer bulk (and price) may be a deterrent.(Nov.)
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Review
"Philip Whalen is one of the great but still largely unrecognized sources of our literature. This volume provides the opportunity to read all his published poems in the order of their writing. A masterpiece of the jump-start collected mind!" (Clark Coolidge, author of The Crystal Text )

About the Author
PHILIP WHALEN (1923-2002) was an influential Beat poet and the author of dozens of books of novels and poetry, including On Bear's Head, The Diamond Noodle, and Overtime. MICHAEL ROTHENBERG is one of the literary executors of Whalen's estate, and the editor of www.bigbridge.org. Also the editor of major volumes of selected poetry by Philip Whalen, Joanne Kyger, David Meltzer, and Edward Dorn, he lives north of San Francisco.

Customer Reviews

The Beat Louvre
This remarkable collection gathers the full range of work from one of the 20th century's most unpretentious experimenters with the form and matter of poetry. Granted, 800 pages is a lot of anyone, even a poet as great and under-read as Whalen, and the gain in information comes with a corresponding loss in shape. Whalen's refusal to separate writing from the business-as-usual work of living gives his poems their special tension--the "nerve movie" that's at once transcription of mind moving and competitive bid to be Art--but also invites sameness and slack, a problem more apparent here than in previous collections, especially On Bear's Head, where the batting average dazzles. Reference-wise though, having this book is like owning a wing of the Beat Louvre, and I wouldn't trade it for all of Mexico City and its blues.