Philip Whalen

Philip Whalen at the Issan-ji/Hartford Street Zen Center, San Francisco. Photo by Jennifer Burkett. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Philip Glenn Whalen
School	Sōtō
Lineage	Shunryu Suzuki
Personal
Nationality	American
Born	October 20, 1923(1923-Template:MONTHNUMBER-20) Portland, Oregon
Died	June 26, 2002(2002-Template:MONTHNUMBER-26) (aged 78) San Francisco

Philip Glenn Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002) was an American poet, a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.

Life

Born in Portland, Oregon, Whalen grew up in The Dalles, Oregon, from age 4 until he returned to Portland in 1941.

He served in the US Army Air Forces during World War II.

He attended Reed College on the GI Bill. There, he met Gary Snyder and Lew Welch, and graduated with a B.A. in 1951. He read at the famous Six Gallery reading in 1955 that marked the launch of the West Coast Beats into the public eye.

Whalen's finterest in Eastern religions originally centered on Vedanta. Upon release from the army in 1946, he visited the Vedanta Society in Portland, but did not pursue this very far, because of the expense of attending their countryside ashram. Tibetan Buddhism also attracted him, but he found it "unnecessarily complicated." In 1952, Gary Snyder lent him books on Zen Buddhism by D. T. Suzuki. Ultimately, Zen became his chosen path.

Whalen spent 1966 and 1967 in Kyoto, Japan, assisted by a grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a job teaching English. There, he practiced zazen daily, and wrote some 40 poems and a 2nd novel.

He moved into the San Francisco Zen Center and became a student of Zentatsu Richard Baker in 1972. The following year, he became a monk. He became head monk of Dharma Sangha, in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1984. In 1987, he received transmission from Baker, and in 1991, he returned to San Francisco to lead the Hartford Street Zen Center until forced by ill health to retire.

Recognition

Whalen's poetry was featured in Donald Allen's anthology The New American Poetry, 1945-1960.

In popular culture

Whalen appears, in barely fictionalized form, as the character "Warren Coughlin" in Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums, which includes an account of the Six Gallery reading. In Kerouac's novel Big Sur he is called "Ben Fagan".

Publications

Poetry

• The Calendar: A book of poems. Portland, OR: Reed College (B.A. thesis),  1951.
• Three Satires. privately printed, 1951.
• Self Portrait from Another Direction. San Franciso, CA: Auerhahn Press, 1959.
• Memoirs of an Interglacial Age. San Franciso, CA: Auerhahn Press, 1960.
• Like I Say. New York: Totem Press, 1960.
• Hymnus ad Patrem Sinensis (broadside). San Franciso, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 1963.
• Three Mornings (broadside). San Francisco, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 1964.
• Monday in the Evening. Milan, Italy: Pezzoli, 1964.
• Goddess (broadside). San Francisco, CA: Auerhahn Press, 1964.
• Every Day. Eugene, OR: Coyote's Journal, 1965.
• Highgrade: Doodles, poems. San Francisco, CA: Coyote Books, 1966.
• T/o. privately published, 1967.
• The Invention of the Letter: A beastly morality being an illuminated moral history for the edification of younger readers. Carp & Whitefish Press, 1967.
• Intransit: The Philip Whalen issue. Toad Press, 1967.
• On Bear's Head,. New York: Harcourt and Coyote Books, 1969.
• Severance Pay. San Francisco, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 1970.
• Scenes of Life at the Capital. San Francisco, CA: Grey Fox, 1971.
• The Kindness of Strangers: Poems, 1969-1974. San Francisco, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 1976.
• Prolegomena to a Study of the Universe. Poltroon Press, 1976.
• Decompressions: Selected poems (edited by Donald M. Allen). San Francisco, CA: Grey Fox, 1978.
• Enough Said: Fluctuat Nec Mergitur: Poems, 1974-1979. San Francisco, CA: Grey Fox, 1981.
• Heavy Breathing: Poems, 1967-1980. San Francisco, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 1983.
• Canoeing Up Cabarga Creek: Buddhist poems, 1955-1986. Berkeley, CA: Winson, 1996.
•  Overtime: Selected poems (edited by Michael Rothenberg). New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
• Collected Poems (edited by Michael Rothenberg). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press (Wesleyan Poetry Series), 2007.

Novels

• You Didn't Even Try. San Francisco, CA: Coyote Books, 1967.
• Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head. [[Black Sparrow Books}Black Sparrow]], 1971.
• The Diamond Noodle (novel, written in 1956). Berkeley, CA: Poltroon Press, 1980.
• Two Novels: "You Didn't Even Try" and "Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head". Somerville, MA: Zephyr Press, 1985.

Non-fiction

• Off the Wall: Interviews with Philip Whalen (edited by Donald Allen). San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1978.

Anthologized

• A New Folder: Americans (edited by Wallace Fowlie). Folder Press, 1959.
• The New American Poetry, 1945-1960 (edited by Donald M. Allen). New York: Grove, 1960.
• A Casebook on the Beat (edited by Thomas Parkinson). Crowell, 1961.

Philip whalen "lost fragments from the impatient monument"

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.

See also

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

• List of U.S. poets

References

• The Portable Beat Reader (edited by Ann Charters). Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk)
• John Suiter, Poets on the Peaks. Counterpoint, 2002. ISBN 1-58243-148-5; ISBN 1-58243-294-5 (pbk)

Fonds

• Philip Whalen Papers at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University
• Guide to the Philip Whalen Papers at the Bancroft Library

External links

Poems

• Philip Whalen 1923-2002 at the Poetry Foundation
• Philip Whalen @ EPC (Electronic Poetry Center)

Books

• Whalen chapbook at Big Bridge
• Whalen's hand-drawn fable "The Invention of the Letter"
• Philip Whalen at Amazon.com
• Works by or about Philip Whalen in libraries (WorldCat catalog)

About

• Philip Whalen: An introduction
• In memoriam Philip Whalen