Today, I read Philip Whalen’s poetry with background music of light rain. I learned he worked in an airplane factory and in shipyards before serving in the Second World War as a radio mechanic. After the war, he attended Reed College on the G.I. Bill. He met Lew Welch and Gary Snyder, etc, and lived on poetry— “living and writing and picking it up out of the air, out of books, out of other people.” He would become an ordained Buddhist monk. In “About Writing and Meditation,” he writes, “I became a poet by accident. I never intended to be a poet. I still don't know what it's all about…As far as meditation is concerned I'm a professional. I've been a professional since 1973. And that's my job.” Near the end of the essay, in a paragraph about his Buddhist name, he writes “Gertrude Stein says poetry is calling the name of something.” He liked to write longhand. He liked the feeling of pen on paper. Essayist Paul Christensen writes that he “thought of art as an act of personal delight and as a consolation to solitude…” Whalen invokes Blake’s idea of “Enough, or too much,” in his meditation essay, describing how his friends “used to go down to Muir Beach years ago to gather mussels off the rocks. We'd build a bonfire, put seaweed on the fire to steam the mussels. We'd eat them, then jump up and down in the waves and have fun. That was enough. Probably enough. Or too much.” In Scenes of Life at the Capital, Whalen supposes, “All I can say this morning is a dance / which can’t be recorded here / A wish to be free from orders, notions, whims/ mine or other people’s…” I like the feeling of pen on paper.
-Morgan English