http://www.bookslut.com/marsupial_inquirer/2008_12_013788.php
December 2008
Dale Smith
marsupial inquirer
(Note: This is the first in a series of articles I want to present in
this column space on the recent publications of collected poems by
significant San Francisco Renaissance poets. Besides the marvelous
edition of Whalen's collected work discussed below, university
presses have recently brought out collections by Joanne Kyger and
Robin Blaser, as well as a selection of work from 1957-2000 by the
poet George Stanley. (The latter did not appear from a university
press, but contributed an important body of work for contemporary
audiences nonetheless.) Last month Wesleyan released My Vocabulary
Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, whose work I'll
discuss next month.)
Presenting some of the most significant poetry of the postwar era,
The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen should boost Whalen's cultural
status to the level of recognition he deserves, for it reveals an
acute introspective power unequaled in the writing of the period. As
a modernist in the tradition of Pound, Williams, and Stein, Whalen
undertook new directions in poetry, and deserves to be read within a
larger context of postwar American letters. His reception of
modernism, along with influences from prolonged studies in eastern
religions, allowed him to develop a unique, collage-generated serial
form that inspected the phenomenological variety of the everyday as
it came into contact with the epistemic reach of the individual self.
Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1923 and raised in the Dalles, a small
town in the Columbia River Gorge, Whalen served in the Air Force
during World War II, and then attended Reed College on the GI Bill.
At Reed he developed lasting friendships with poets Gary Snyder and
Lew Welch, and also met William Carlos Williams, who visited the
liberal arts college in 1950. To Snyder, the slightly older Whalen
offered new paths of study. "He extended us into areas not much
handled by the college classes of those days, such as Indian and
Chinese philosophy," notes Snyder in his introduction to the
Collected. "Philip led the way in making conversation possible, and
then making poetry out of the territory of those readings." Such
erudition and capacity for learning beyond official cultural
perspectives led Whalen and his fellow poets to Pound, Stein, and
other modernists. Whalen, influenced by his studies of eastern
religions, received these modernist authors in new ways, expanding
the capacity of the poem to render perception in a language devoted
to popular and vernacular usages. What we find in this collection is
a west coast Charles Olson, a man motivated by the aspirations of
modernism to reach popular audiences through social commitment and
formal innovation. But Whalen, unlike Olson, complicated the high
seriousness of the modernist project, breaking down poetic
perspective to something limited within the capacity of the poet's
personal vision. While he is certainly a poet of cosmos, like Olson,
his measure of it comes with humor and a self-awareness of the
limitations of consciousness.
In October 1955, Whalen read poems with Snyder, Michael McClure,
Philip Lamantia, and Allen Ginsberg at San Francisco's Six Gallery;
on that legendary night, Ginsberg impressed the audience with his
poem "Howl," introducing the Beat Generation as a significant popular
force in American arts and culture. "Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac
came to town," writes Snyder, "and catalyzed the energy already fully
present into a more public poetics and politics." While the public
presence of poetry increased, however, much of Whalen's work plumbed
the subjective range of experience in language that was intimately
located in his unique features of perception. With extended visits to
Kyoto, Japan, a meager and simple stay for periods of time in
Bolinas, the small arts community north of San Francisco, and
prolonged study, practice, and initiation into the Zen Buddhist
tradition as a priest, Whalen complicated the relationship between
the personal and the public, the inner life and outer practice of it in words.
The work in the Collected reveals the attentions of a man intimately
engaged with the morphology of private experience. While the poem
gives that personal investigation a public shape, its address is to
an order of intelligence that evolves in the poet from his growing
sense of awareness, incompleteness of form, and compromises by nature
in phenomenal reality. Often poets assume a public of equals or near
equals, but Whalen's more inward compositional process relied on his
ability to motivate his own intelligence beyond itself. Uses of
notational and collage compositional practices gave his poems a
seemingly spontaneous life of their own, and yet they remained
dynamic too, providing a reader with a model of self-reflection.
This reflective compositional awareness gives his poems extraordinary
range, insightful self-understanding, and a vocabulary of action that
reveals motives within particular situations for which he was
present. In "T/O," for instance, he writes:
I: tough thin substance
expanding flexible glass
I traveled past the sun
found other nights and days,
Beyond
this universe of countless worlds and
stars I find many more. Beyond
this temporary imagination I call myself
and mine there are countless others.
Far away, all by their lonesome,
*
August royal blackness, brilliant night, &c.
*
O tickle star o rub that purple rim, &c. (hat) &c.
*
"…there's not very much of that
left, either…," Robert Duncan said.
*
certain flowers. I'll put all this into my book, decorate all
these blank white pages. (445-6)
I quote this at length to indicate the complicated formal structure
of the poem and to show how rhetorically it motivates a contemplative
ethical argument about the nature of the world, the self, and the
imagination. Conversational fragments, song lines, and notes-to-self
ease the meditative strain of the first portion of the poem. A kind
of self-mocking awareness prevents "T/O" from descending under the
weight of the universe, which, in a sense, is the poem's concern. But
it is a universe "inside the brain: / their 'outside' location
(please scratch my back) an illusion?" (446). This is the key
difference between Whalen and more conventional poets for whom the
self is restricted within phenomenological assumptions of spiritual
or physical boundaries. For Whalen, cognitive dissonance between the
inside and outside prevents a fuller identification with events "out
there." His "outside" remains within and becomes the subject of
considerable energy and scrutiny in his work. What he reveals,
finally, is not simply a problem of internal and external
resistances, but that there is indeed a membrane through which an
inside and outside curiously interpenetrate -- language.
Extraordinarily sensitive to the interaction that takes place at this
membrane, Whalen's work offers staggering perspectives. The
introspective personal narratives here argue for a largess and
openness to the world through the architectures of the poem. These
works are technically brilliant in that they propose strategies for
apprehending the self within situations for which the individual can
make no claims. The self arrives as part of the interwoven texture of
things. Mind, intelligence, perception, language -- or whatever
governing, sense-making metaphor you want to use -- establishes
itself within the residual artifact of the poem. The poem, then, as a
kind of "field poetics," organizes the communicative range between
author, world, text, and reader.
Remarkable too in this collection is the long poem, "Scenes of Life
in the Capital." The "capital" is Kyoto, Japan, where Whalen lived in
the late 1960s; the extended narrative shows Whalen's broad mind at
work to test his restless reach for things. He extends pattern
recognition from personal biography into historical knowledge that
intersects with particular geographic locations. One reason his poems
are difficult to write about is that the speed of thought and image
never dwell, as the writing schools would have it, upon a given
situation. Whalen instead enacts the movement of attention within a
precise field of phenomenal relation. So, for instance, in "Scenes of
Life in the Capital" we move from memories of World War II to Jack
Spicer and meditations on love, Victorian sexuality, and human
capacities of learning. He writes:
Failure to conform with these regulations
shall be punished by Court Martial
TAKE ALL YOU WANT BUT EAT ALL YOU TAKE
The following named Enlisted Men are transf
R E S T R I C T E D , SPECIAL ORDER #21 this
HQ dd 8 Feb 1946 contained 6 Pars. C E N S O R E D (588)
A few lines later, he follows the trajectory of a wasp "in the
bookshelf" as it "rejects Walt Whitman, / Herman Melville, Emily
Dickinson, The Goliard Poets, A Vedic Reader, Lama Govinda, Medieval
French Verses & Romances, Long Discourse of the Buddha, and The
Principal Upanishads." This is soon followed with an "accidental
descent into goofball drift":
recollections of Jack in Berkeley
Nembies & grass & wine
Geraniums, ripe apricots, & plums
Clio's green and slanting eyes
Gentle smile of pointed face
how much love I owe to her and to all women
My mother tried to warn me,
"Let your sister ride the bike a while;
Don't be so damned selfish!"
How can Victorian American lady
Explain to her son that his cock
Doesn't belong exclusively to himself
But also to certain future women?
It's a matter of some reassurance
That we are physically indistinguishable from other men.
When introspection shows us
that we have different degrees of intelligence
Varying capacities for knowing morality
We lose something of our complacency (589)
The "scenes of life" do not focus, as we see, on the capital; rather
Kyoto provides a location that calls out the memory collage of
Whalen's "life." The estrangement of travel in a foreign country can
leave the isolated traveler feeling raw and exposed. Whalen takes the
poem in a novel direction, building on his modernist predecessors,
but he puts the poem to different purposes, holding things still, for
a moment, from the kinetic motion of active life. A poet like Olson
would have used the occasion to study the particular history of
Kyoto, perhaps, showing its historical and geographic significance in
relation to human affairs of trade, mythic ruptures of a migrant
island people distinguishing a perspective from Mainland China.
Whalen's goal, by contrast, remains entirely different. The "scenes
of life" are composed of those things brought to mind:
And so home again, among roses "Arcades of Philadelphia
The Past" a piece of Idaho scenic agate
A crystal ball "Of Hartford in a Purple Light"
And supper on "An ordinary Evening in New Haven"
Where you never lived but always heaven
Along with Stéphan Mallarmé and all the marble swans. (594)
While some might see this kind of writing as incoherent and lacking
focus, the collage extends notions of self, memory, perception, and
reflection in ways unique to Whalen's modernist collage.
Significantly, Whalen provides what Kenneth Burke has called
"strategies for living." Such strategies provide readers with a
richly textured poem that comments on the force of memory and
imagination in the creation of everyday experience. Spiritual and
philosophical introspection is often tempered with humorous outbursts
of self-awareness, commentary on the concretely situated
flesh-and-blood body in space, and historically framed contexts that
give meaning to the accident of occasion. Such accidents appear in
Whalen's work in need of redemption from the peculiarities of chance.
His work suggests instead that separation is an illusion, that things
cohere as experience within a life remembered and continually
re-processed and situated in the subtly shifting coordinates we all
must ride. Poetry provides an imposed limitation on these phenomenal
movements, for it demands translation of perception into a
particularly ordered language. Again, in Burke's terms, Whalen shows
us how to expand our capacities of seeing, feeling, and thinking
about the world and the particular environments we inhabit.
These poems, impressively presented in a sturdy volume with
introductions by Snyder and Leslie Scalapino under the editorship of
Michael Rothenberg, arrive complete with biographic and bibliographic
information in the appendix. Moreover, prose statements by Whalen on
his work are collected here too, helping to situate his work for
first-time readers as well as for students of 20th-century poetry.
The range and dazzling reach of words in Whalen's body of work
deserves prolonged study; the texture of the cosmos shines through
this book, translated with precision through the peculiar delights of the poem.
.
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