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but the season UNACCOUNTABLY changes, the leavesYet the stuff was seeming not poetry at all, because it was put together in ways poetry had never been put together before. Whalen's poems seem to be, in some cases, especially in the earlier work, a species of collage crossed with doodling, the careful and at the same time completely intuitive stringing together of writing gestures (indeed the work was composed longhand in journals that often include cartoons and calligraphic flourishes that are essential to the appreciation of the work: Whalen is one poet with whom the printed page is often a disadvantage). Some of the works of the fifties and sixties are many pages long, completely disconnected in terms of theme or regular structure, yet not in any sense random or shapeless. Here was poetry that was quite clearly constructed with great delicacy and skill, yet constructed in some new as yet undiscovered way: based on the shape of writing itself, rather than on narrative, theme, or emotion. On Bear's Head was an instant underground classic and many poets of my generation used it, as I did, for permission to create works in a new paradigm. We had all read Williams, Stein, Zukofsky, Olsen, Creeley, Ginsberg. But it was Whalen's spirit, his humor and freedom, his compositional daring, his willingness to include everything and anything, that gave us the tools we needed to create the poetry we needed to create. In re-reading much of Whalen's work I feel as if I am revisiting my own dreams. Several things strike me this time around. First, there is the fact of his loneliness and distance from almost any form of social engagement. While Whalen is passionately political, and often angry at things the way they are and were, his sensibility is essentially poetic: he lives in, or wants to live in, a world in which peace and beauty prevail. He is often desperate about love and yet is unable to find it in a world in which others are so annoying and difficult to get along with. Some of the most poignant moments in Overtime are long laments about the impossibility of living in the world as it is, and, simultaneously, soaring riffs about the beauty hidden underneath things, the imaginary perfect worlds of alternative universes that just be might be this one. I keep trying to live as if this world were heavenAnother feature of Whalen's work is the use, following Williams, of ordinary American speech. There are numerous passages that break in here and there of ordinary working people and their everyday speech (they all sound like they are speaking in around 1935, probably in rural or small town Oregon, where Whalen hails from). It is almost as though in the middle of a ranting or an elegant or a learned passage these folks just had to show up to bring the thing back down to the world of regular folks, from which we cannot or should not stray for very long: Well that's a fine how de do. Now I've got to take and hunt upThen there are the celebrated arrangements, the scattered lists of stuff that seems irrelevant or simply odd. The obsessions with plants or minerals or arcane studies of various sorts that are just seemingly stuck in the poems willy nilly, though their placement also seems to be just right. I remember once in conversation Allen Ginsberg confiding to me that although he was fascinated by Whalen's work (indeed, Ginsberg was one of Whalen's biggest fans and supporters and they enjoyed a forty-odd year warm and mutually respectful relationship) he really couldn't understand it. Ginsberg,his own work so firmly built on personal confession and subject matter, could only marvel at Whalen's nonlinear deftness:
Nautilus.
purple stone mountain (from 'The Grand Design') If you consider the work at is progresses over time you can see a clear movement toward calmness, simplicity, and finally silence. Whalen's need to find a sane way to live, a way that would take him out of the craziness of American life and toward something deeper and more real, led him finally, through his years in Japan, to becoming a Zen Buddhist priest in the San Francisco the lineage of Suzuki-roshi. He was ordained in the early seventies and practiced monastically for a number of years (he and I were monks together at Tassajara Zenshinji monastery in the Los Padres National Forest near Carmel California) before moving back to San Francisco to become abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center. This period coincides with a quieting and modulating of the work. There are fewer and fewer rants in the poems, fewer and fewer long poems, and a kind of classicism (not inconsistent in style, attitude, or tone with the earlier work) begins to emerge. By the eighties the poems have become quite short, just a gesture or two, and since then, with Whalen's failing eyesight and less frequent reading, there have been almost no poems at all. Here is the final poem of the book, written in 1985: For Allen, on His 60th Birthday | |
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