Overtime: Selected Poems (Penguin Poets)
A selected-poems volume that revisits Philip Whalen's representative work. Everyday observation, Zen, humor, and self-reflection run through the book, renewing the voice of a Beat-era poet.
Work Information
A selected-poems collection that turns everyday detail into poetry.
Philip Whalen worked in the same era as Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac, but he made his own path by shaping everyday observation with light humor and a Zen-inflected sensibility. This collection gathers representative poems from across his career and lets readers experience the flowing thought and quiet wit that define his work.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Penguin Publishing Group
- Published
- 1999-05-01
- Pages
- 336 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.3 x 2.3 x 22.9 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780140589184
- ISBN-10
- 014058918X
- Price
- 4862 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
Like his college roommate Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen took both poetry and Zen seriously. He became friends with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac , and Michael McClure , and played a key role in the explosive poetic revolution of the '50s and '60s. Celebrated for his wisdom and good humor, Whalen transformed the poem for a generation. His writing, taken as a whole, forms a monumental stream of consciousness (or, as Whalen calls it, "continuous nerve movie") of a wild, deeply read, and fiercely independent Americanone who refuses to belong, who celebrates and glorifies the small beauties to be found everywhere he looks. This long-awaited Selected Poems is a welcome opportunity to hear his influential voice again.
Philip Whalen spent fifteen years of formal Zen training in Santa Fe and San Francisco. He is currently the Abbot of Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco.
Reviews
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Big Zen Ha Ha (from Ahadada Books)
If, as Leslie Scalapino suggests in the introduction to this book, Philip Whalen's poetry is about how his consciousness worked and utilized language, so that each poem is a gestalt of his thinking in process, then I think we must add that Big ZEN HA HA is present, ever-present in the articulate artifacts this poet of the hole-in-the-shoe and the shaven head (and I hear sadly mortal heart gunked up and out of incarnation by casual eating habits) left behind. Every turn of a trope ends in an undercutting of intention and meaning in the same way that the polyvalency of BIG ZEN HA HA (think "koans" here), undermines single meaning in every sacral utterance of Zen scripture. Of the See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil, Big Three of Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, we pretty much understand the hooks on which Snyder and Welch hung their tambourines, but it's Whalen who seems the reticent, self-effacing, hard to clearly define (just as Zen is), guy. He comes across sometimes as a New York School Poet (though lacking the sophistication of an Ashbery or O'Hara but including all their allusions to pop culture), and sometimes as a collagist of texts, in a kind of casual West Coast surrealism, but always as a 5-to-75 cent word nihilist, ready with a stick of BIG ZEN HA HA to shatter the prisms he stacks up so carefully before phenomena to liberate the pure light of the momentary mind. (And sometimes his verbal gestures remind me of the outsider texts, as well as the outsider stance of Harry Partch.) I'm still reading Whalen's Overtime news, hoping to stick around long enough to hear him whine for a toy early in his next incarnation on the streets of Tomorrow.
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Poetry as activity
I don't know enough about Whalen to comment on the editing of this volume, but do appreciate having so many enjoyable poems in one place. I'm not naturally sympathetic to the poetry-as-activity (as opposed to poetry-as-accomplished-form) approach, to put it very coarsely, but somehow Whalen wins me over. All the Zen stuff isn't my cup of tea, but modern anxieties come through consistently - the stupidity of politics, the dubious worth of achievement, the possibility of speaking authentically, etc. This redeems for me the broad gestures of acceptance and wisdom. Also, for a self-professed vegetable Whalen is enormously well-read, and there's much pleasure in seeing his easy way with that kind of learning. This is a book that I continue to treasure. Highly recommended!
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Awesomenessss
Wildly creative words and thoughts like a string of likes (ten more words required to be able to submit this).