Black Bart Quarterly Review Of Books II-1

—Notice To The Membership & Interested Parties—
The Society would direct your attention to the menu bar above.
Conditions of Parole have been revised to reflect new guidelines for submissions to Parole. Note as well new menu categories have been added to facilitate a more direct access to posts by specific as well as general subject matter.

Number 1

—FEATURE—
“Poesy’s ravening violet flames”:  Whalen in Ekstasis
Part Two
Bruce Holsapple
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—SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS—
Philip Whalen’s KYOTO Notebooks + (pdf)
Keith Kumasen Abbott
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All Best Phil, Annotated Letters from Philip Whalen + (pdf)
Alastair Johnston
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—FEATURED—
Journal of a Plague Year And A Half
Andrei Codrescu & Vincent Katz’s  A Possible Epic Of Care
Pat Nolan
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Tom Raworth and the Tale of No Ordinary O +(pdf)
Alastair Johnston
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Andrei Codrescu’s What Am I Reading
Charles Bernstein’s GPS
Read More

—New To The Society’s Shelves—
Mark Young, Ley Lines II, Sandy Press, 2023
Jonah Raskin, The Thief of Yellow Flowers, Regent Press, 2023
Tim Hunt, Thirteen Ways of Talking to a Blackbird, Finishing Line Press, 2013
Clifford Burke, Not Haiku, Desert Rose Press, 2024
Joe Napora, Snaketrain/Freightrain, Longhouse, 2024
Swoop Poem Cards
Read More

—Special Collections Gallery—
Ken Mikolowski’s The Alternative Press
Read More


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The Poet Interviews A Novelist, Part I

In which the indefatigable Carl Wendt, not quite Charles Baudelaire, not quite Charles Bukowski, poet for all seasons, master flaneur, and last of the poètes maudits, interviews a shooting star novelist at the behest of his agent, Nora White, and for a little ready cash.

Excerpt from Ode To Sunset
A Year In The Life Of American Genius
a fiction by Pat Nolan

“Yeah, sure I remember. But I always heard your name as Chris Alice.”

“No, it’s Salas.”

“Any relation to. . .?”

“I don’t think so. It’s a pretty common name in the valley. My family’s lived there like forever. BG.”

“Bee Gee?”

“Yeah, Before Gringo.”

Wendt gave an appreciative chuckle. He hadn’t heard that one before, nor did he really remember the man sitting across the table from him, Christopher Salas, Nora’s hot new literary sensation.

“I’m surprised you remember me.”

“Oh, yeah, you were one of the young hotshots on the literary scene. . . .” The guy Wendt remembered as Chris Alice was a chubby, baby faced, neurotic twerp, a green litterateur with an insinuating manner chewing up the edges of the poetry scene, not the distinguished dark haired man in his late forties with trim graying goatee, lively brown eyes, Hollywood smile, and the polished red cheeks of a man who liked his drink. Tan besides, he was jacket photo ready.

“But you, you were like a god back then. I saw you read at the Hipper Than Thou once, with a jazz combo. And at Glide a couple of times. With Irma Maurice, I think.”

“That sounds plausible.”

“And that Chinese poet, I forget his name. . .”

“Master Wei-lin.”

“Right, and you were part of that scene of what I thought of as ‘the older poets’.”

Wendt laughed, remembering. “That was more than twenty years ago.”

“Yuri Khasid, remember him, the Chechen poet?”

“He’s gone on to the misery of fame, fortune, and fatwa.”

“Ann Ahmoly. Now that was one sexy Hungarian intellectual. I tried having a conversation with her at a party once. I got this incomprehensible stare. I don’t think I was that drunk.”

Wendt nodded. “You probably were, and that stare was as deep as it got. It was all a pose. If you hang out with a bunch of talented creative types, people are just gonna assume that you are too. She was also known as Ann Nomoney or Miss Ann Action.”

“And Valerie Richards!”

Wendt winced at the mention and felt the tightening in his windpipe. “Yeah, Val.”

“You guys did a lecture together at New Arts Village, geez that was a while ago, on early Twentieth Century French writers. I won’t forget that. I made a list of everyone you mentioned. Cendrars, Reverdy, Roussel, Queneau. I was particularly impressed by Roussel, I remember. How a play on words could suddenly change the direction of the narrative, right in the middle of a sentence!”

“Yeah,” Wendt agreed, bored and way past nostalgia. He mentally reviewed some of the questions he was supposed to ask this now successful author, questions Nora thought appropriate. Well, if he got around to them.

“I was in Richard Granahan’s Advanced Poetry class at State, too. He spoke highly of you.”

Wendt shrugged. “We were friends.”  He wondered if it was the same class Grace Niklia had been in.

“I heard he just died.”

Just died, Wendt mused, more like death became him. But he was losing focus. He needed to regain control of the conversation. “Yeah, but what about you? Everyone was talking about how Chris Alice had a rocket in his pocket. Then you just dropped out of sight.”

Salas smiled with the ease of nice teeth and shrugged. “I had my fill of the city, the scene. After a while, what I was doing, my poetry, my writing, all seemed meaningless, you know?”

He nodded sympathetically. “AIC, Artistic Identity Crisis. How old were you then?”

“Mmm, late twenties. I’d seen it all, done it all, you know. Published in all the right magazines, The New Yorker, The Nation, read at all the hip venues, like The Project, The Poetry Center, Beyond Baroque, the Y. Had a selection of poems published by OMFG Editions. . . .”

“I remember that press, always thought that stood for Only My Friends are Great, and your book was titled. . . ?”

Pull My Finger.”

anotherss2tx“That’s why I remember.”  Wendt look down into the possibly one swig’s worth of red wine at the bottom of his glass and wished that it was whiskey. He glanced at the waiter knowing that they had reached Nora’s two bottle limit with the meal, her stipulation for footing the tab for him and her client at the fabulous Washbag on Powell. He had made short work of the rack of lamb though Salas had seemed perplexed by the half roast chicken in lemon sauce, and picked at it dissolutely. He wasn’t hesitant about the wine Wendt had selected, a pinot grigio and a hearty Zinfandel, both from the Sonoma Valley. If he had learned anything from his Monday dinners with Dorian, it was how to select wines.

Wendt leaned forward in confidence. “A lot of people have come up with that as a tentative title for their poetry selections before.”  He paused. “But no one ever had the guts to use it,” reflecting that impetuousness could easily be substituted for guts. “Offending bourgeois conventions is a young man’s game.”

“I was going to call it Preparation H but there were trademark issues.”

Wendt winced. More asshole humor.

“Anyway, according to the reviews, and it didn’t get many, it was sophomoric, ill-advised, crude, and déclassé.”

“Doesn’t sound like they read more than the title.” Not all that farfetched as Wendt had reviewed books of poetry with only a glance at the table of contents and the title.

Salas shrugged. “In hindsight, I don’t know if I really blame them. No one wants to pull the finger let alone open a book whose title suggests that you do. Bookstores, even used bookstores wouldn’t carry it. The ones that did carry it shelved it in the humor section.”

“Ah, but you were a succés de scandale! In the poetry world that’s often better than actually being any good.”  And as assurance, Wendt added, “Present company excluded. Besides, you made a splash and got people pissed off at you. What more can a poet ask?”

“Still, it left me feeling empty.” Salas held up the bottle of Zin. “This is almost gone, mind if I finish it?”

“No, go ahead. But you realize that what you say can and will be used against you.”  He said it with a show of teeth. He was referring to the piece he’d been asked to do on Salas for the Pacific Rim Institute Quarterly.

PRIQ, as it was commonly known, was a slick, high end arts and culture magazine published both on the West Coast and in a Chinese language edition in Shanghai. They were gold plated and Wendt could count on placing something with them at least once a year. Connie Chin, the editor, was an old friend. Not to mention that the magazine was funded in part by the Holbrook Foundation on whose board sat Dorian Pillsbury, and at one time, Nora White, his so-called agent. She was now, not so coincidentally, Chris Salas’ agent. She’d dropped a hint one day when he ran into her at the Caffe Trieste. “Did Connie from the Quarterly get in touch with you?”  He’d been remiss in checking his phone messages and email. “Maybe you should give her a call.”

His assignment, were he to accept it, and he never shied from a puff piece if the money was good, was to profile Christopher Salas, and his politically incorrect novel, Third Brain, The Story of a Man and His Penis which was causing much consternation, apoplexy, and denunciation among feminists, literary circles, and book reviewers. Nora’s one sentence synopsis had been “A man has visions of future events while holding his penis. Make of it what you will.”   Though Wendt had not yet read the advance copy Nora provided him, he couldn’t help but remark on the irony. Granahan would probably have enjoyed reading it. Or writing it. It was a subject he was quite fond of.

The waiter came to take Wendt’s plate and looked inquiringly at Chris’ half-finished chicken. “Was everything all right?”

Salas looked down at his plate. “Yeah, it was fine. Guess I wasn’t all that hungry.”

“Dessert? More wine?”  The waiter was just doing his job.

Both Salas and Wendt shook their heads, Wendt saying “I think we’re done. Bring the bill and I’ll sign it.”  Wendt enjoyed playing the bon vivant especially if someone else was paying. And then, as an aside to Salas, “Why don’t we continue the interview at the bar?”

Salas picked up the first round. And the second. He fleshed out his earlier introductory back story, explaining that he’d had plenty of time to write being Mr. Mom to his two boys while his wife, an administrative lawyer for Marin County, brought home the Lucky Charms and Froot Loops. He’d written a couple of novels in that time, but had been unsuccessful in placing them with a publisher or an agent. Then someone, it might have even been his wife, suggested he try his luck with a local agent rather than the New York City set. He’d dug up a city phone directory and gone down the list. He didn’t want to go with AAA Literary Services or Ace or Best, with their advisement to see display ad on same page. The very last listing was the unpretentious White Literary Agency. Nora loved the novel, Salas recounted, said it was the best dark humor she’d read in a long time.

“I thought you were a poet.”  The tone wasn’t accusatory.

Salas shrugged and signaled to the bartender, circling both their half empty glasses with a finger. “I started out on poetry but soon hit the harder stuff.”

“You think prose is harder than poetry?”

“Not prose, per se, but fiction, yeah.”

“So you’ve given up on poetry.”

“Aw, I could probably get back into it if I wanted to. I find that I use a lot of the same techniques in my fiction. Symbolism, extended metaphor, and so on. It was the vacuous social scene that really turned me off. So high school. Who’s in, who’s out.”

Wendt nodded to the bartender as she poured his Jameson and placed the glass of beer next to it.

Salas continued, “I’ve come to think of the poetry scene as a nasty little playground. There are the fortunate few playing king of the mountain atop the play structure, but otherwise it’s a string of endless lunatics staking claim to their corner of the sandbox, getting into turf battles, fueled by booze, pot, crack, meth, junk, and sociopathic egos carrying on 24/7, bitching, yelling and screaming empty braggadocio, taking offense at the slightest perceived slight, punching each other out or threatening to, crying over the spilt milk of their contrived ill-conceived verse, marrying their students, getting knocked unconscious by their much younger wives, and shitting themselves in public. This is simply the literary life, sub-genus American poet. Gregory Corso once said, or so I heard, ‘Poetry is great—it’s the poets who fuck it up.’”

Wendt rolled his eyes and laughed. “Yeah, I think I heard that one, too.”

“I liked your paraphrase of that from back in the day much better. ‘There are no bad poems, only bad poets!’”

“Did I say that?”  Wendt smiled wryly. “I must have been quoting someone.”

“Anyway, as a novelist, people expect you to be anti-social. Point Reyes is just far enough away that I was out of the loop of all that petty bullshit, and I had my kids to look after. That’s pretty time consuming.”

“Sounds like you had the advantages of woodshedding.”

“I don’t get what you mean.”

“It’s a jazz term. When a musician sequesters himself and practices his chops he’s said to be ‘woodshedding.’  It can be applied to artists who drop out to develop their style, painters, writers, before reemerging into the public eye. Probably an old down home expression used by black musicians whose only privacy was had out in the woodshed.”

Salas smiled. “I’ve never heard that. Guess you might say that that was what I was doing.”

“It does have its disadvantages though. Some guys get a little too comfortable with their seclusion and forget that the aim of what they’re doing is to polish up their act, not become a hermit.”

Salas favored vodka drinks and stirred the ice thoughtfully. “I always thought of it as being in a bubble. Or a cocoon. A fog cocoon, especially where I’m from.”


warning uspoet mrbtPat Nolan’s poems, prose, and translations have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in North America as well as in Europe and Asia.  He is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and three novels.  His most recent books of poetry are So Much, Selected Poems Volume II 1990-2010 (Nualláin House, Publishers, 2019) and the thousand marvels of every moment, a tanka collection (Nualláin House, Publishers, 2018). He also maintains Parole, the blog of the New Black Bart Poetry Society.  His serial fiction, Ode To Sunset, A Year In The Life Of American Genius, is available for perusal at odetosunset.com.  He lives among the redwood wilds along the Russian River in Northern California.

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—Special Collections Gallery—

Ken Mikolowski’s The Alternative Press

Poet Ken Mikolowski and his wife, painter Ann Mikolowski, started The Alternative Press in Detroit in 1969. They were part of The Artists Workshop co-founded by John Sinclair and George Tysh. For a fascinating history of the press click on Emily Warn’s article D.I.Y Detroit. As well, Rebecca Kosick’s Detroit’s Alternative Press: Dispatches from the Avant-Garage is scheduled for a 2025 pub date from Wayne State University. Dr. Kosick is the co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute—her interview with Ken Mikolowski can be viewed here: Ken Mikolowski’s The Alternative Press.

The Black Bart Poetry Society’s archives has six of The Alternative Press bundles, beginning with #7, dating from 1977 to #16 in 1989, including the memorial Ted Berrigan issue from August of 1983. The manila envelopes with the familiar Bison logo were jammed full of the latest literary ephemera, from bookmarks, postcards, broadsides and bumper stickers. The contents were always inventive, unusual, unorthodox, and controversial. The Mikolowski’s would often send  blank postcards to selected poets and artists (Berrigan, Notley, Berkson, Tom Clark, Brainard, to name just a few), and have them provide the word/art which would then be returned and included in the poetry bundles mailed to  subscribers. What Ken and Ann were doing could be classed as “mail art” and went hand in hand with the international movement of artists and writers making their art known with a cobbled together guerrilla media reproduction tech, including mimeo, letterpress, rubber stamps, and distributed with the help of the postal service.

The pieces selected for this Special Collection Gallery include works by Allen Ginsberg, Ted Berrigan, Tom Clark, Ed Dorn, Alice Notley, Maureen Owen, Eileen Myles, John Sinclair, Amiri Baraka, Joanne Kyger, Elaine Equi, Ann Waldman, Kenward Elmslie, and artists Glen Baxter, Ken Tisa, and Arthur Okamura.


Allen Ginsberg
Elaine Equi & Joanne Kyger
Pat Nolan & Eileen Myles
Ron Padgett & Glen Baxter
Gerard Malanga & Ann Waldman
Ted Berrigan & Amiri Baraka
John Sinclair
Tom Clark
Ted Berrigan,
Bob Rosenthal, Al;ice Notley, & Ted Berrigan
Maureen Owen
Ed Dorn & Bob Holman
Christopher Dewdney
Ken Mikolowski post card pak
Kenward Elmslie & Ken Tisa postcard pak

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—New To The Society’s Shelves—

MY LLMark Young, Ley Lines II, Sandy Press, 2023
Ley Lines II, Mark Young’s latest poetry selection, offers a who’s who of celebrity names as titles. For those unfamiliar with the term, ley lines are straight alignments drawn between various historic structures, prehistoric sites and prominent landmarks. In Young’s case, the alignments are drawn between celebrated names on the map of history and pop culture. For the 93 poems in this selection, the titular designations are essentially non sequiturs. However it is the novelty of the titles that provide the hooks to Mark’s meaty quatrains. “Jodie Foster” and “Bernie Sanders” vie for attention with “Doris Day” and “Frida Kahlo” or “Janis Ian” and “Nancy Pelosi” snag the reader into an inventive and largely entertaining experience. The epigraph at the beginning of the selection sets the tone:

every linear system
with free variables has
infinitely many solutions


JR YRJonah Raskin, The Thief of Yellow Flowers, Regent Press, 2023
The lyric poems in Jonah Raskin’s The Thief Of Yellow Roses are piquant, poignant, impish, and perhaps a little of Jean Genet. The author of six poetry chapbooks, Raskin is best known for his definitive study, American Scream, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl And The Making Of The Beat Generation. A former New Yorker, he is professor emeritus from CSU Sonoma where he taught literature ad media studies. After forty years in a county ancillary to the Bay Area, he now makes his home in San Francisco. A member of Write If You Dare, he is also co-editor of the magazine Caveat Lector.


TH BBTim Hunt, Thirteen Ways of Talking to a Blackbird, Finishing Line Press, 2013
Like one of those jazz albums that features inventive arrangements of old standards and show tunes (viz. Coltrane’s My Favorite Things, The Quintet’s All The Things That You Are, Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s Say A Little Prayer), Jeffers scholar Tim Hunt’s Thirteen Ways of Talking to a Blackbird riffs on a variety of American poetry standards including Wallace Stevens’ Blackbird, but as well Williams’ Wheelbarrow and Plums, Frost’s Wall, Pound’s Metro, Ginsberg’s Supermarket, and Eliot’s Prufrock, to name but a few. His sly and satirical takes on the poetry of the 20th century American canon are virtuosities of wit, tongue firmly planted in cheek, but with an educated ear and unerring eye. In his delightfully entertaining retrofits, Hunt gives the reader refreshing adaptations of some tired old saws.


Clifford Burke, Not Haiku, Desert Rose Press, 2024
Once again, master printer and poet Clifford Burke’s creation grace the Society’s shelves with a beautifully realized chapbook from the quarterly Desert Rose Keepsake series.


JNJoe Napora, Snaketrain/Freightrain, Longhouse, 2024
Prolific author and poet Joe Napora’s latest is a “bus ticket” from Bob Arnold’s Longhouse with a set of historically relevant poems as a response to Velimir Khlebnikov’s Snake Train and dedicated to “the Aztec god of eternal youth, capricious, unpredictable, not bound by Nature, the Smoking Mirror, the club foot, the wounded god of inspiration.”


Swoop Poem Cards #27-31 speak for themselves.


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Charles Bernstein’s GPS

Charles Bernstein’s GPS

Recalculating by Charles Bernstein (The University of Chicago Press, 2013)

AC CB recalcWhen they are not being performed, Charles Bernstein’s poems are on the edge of performance. But they don’t start that way. They start as notes from a mind that is never still, fueled by extensive reading, a constant regimen like a diet or a job. He reads the newspapers, the mail, and the philosophers. He talks on the telephone. This activity is divided between the pleasure of finding something new, the recasting of a text in a grotesque or alien context, stripping it for a good idea, and talking it out. Talking or thinking it out loud is a beta performance that may later be transcribed. His interlocutors could be dead (books) or alive (friends). Bernstein’s engine is also revved up by an epistolary practice or lit up by a Jewish joke. Addressed to a respondent, the “you” could also be anyone, so the “you” is automatically intimate. A joke often tips his thoughts into performance. When he is moved to perform, the transcription aligns itself in a poem, and a sound machine orders the words to his particular music. 

The mind of Charles Bernstein is local, but the locality moves with an ever-changing present, a circumstantial circus that needs to amuse or outrage him. Or else. A bored Bernstein you don’t want to see. But performance is a slippery slope, it is rarely (if ever) totally successful. Sometimes, a text on autopilot pleases the audience, but embarrasses the poet. Ideas are not as risky in notes, but if the notes stretch into essays the form can smother their spark. Fitting a good idea into any form runs the risk of the idea drowning in the form, and becoming irrecoverable in retrospect. How many ideas, not just Bernstein’s, have disappeared in their genres? Great ideas are so tender they disappear on their bookshelf classifications. In bookstores I lose interest in sections labeled Essays or Fiction or Poetry. I still trust the alphabet, if only because there is mystery in its apparent disorder. Why are Berkson, Bergson and Bernstein together? Where are Baudelaire, Berlin and Bachelard? Somebody bought their books, leaving the other B’s to huddle together. Call it a hazard of the market, or a game by ghosts. Next week it will be a different crowd. 

POMPEII

The rich men, they know about suffering
That comes from natural things, the fate that
Rich men say they can’t control, the swell of
The tides, the erosion of the polar caps
And the eruption of a terrible
Greed among those who cease to be content
With what they lack when faced with wealth they are
Too ignorant to understand. Such wealth
Is the price of progress. The fishmonger
Sees the dread on the faces of the trout
And mackerel laid out at the market
Stall on quickly melted ice. In Pompeii
The lava flowed and buried the people
So poems such as this could be born.

This performance embarrasses Bernstein, but it lands with the audience. I extracted this at random, by opening the book, titled somewhat apologetically, somewhat defiantly, “Recalculating.” If the GPS led from a thought about economy to environmental disaster and to the fish market where the iced catch makes surrealist faces, it is because the poet can’t stop himself. The avalanche is inevitable and pedestrian, the metaphor is awkwardly collaged, and the last line is apologetic (sort of.) It’s not the poet’s fault that the GPS is defective. It would not be difficult to trace this poem to its notes: wealth, decadence, disaster, fish and poetics. The price of fish these days! Check the iPhone Notes: the sources are there intact, not filed down to fit in a poem to be performed. This is not just about Bernstein, but literature sui generis. Ideas are constantly menaced by the bandits of convention. They threaten it as it travels, like a carriage in Stendhal. The woods on either side of the road are filled with murderous Essays, Novels, and Villanelles. To take an idea safely to wherever it might lead it must continually be on guard against capture by well-trained forms. An idea must be ready to do battle with every idea that resembles it, even with its twin. In the case of “Pompeii” we can watch a desperate struggle to escape from predictable capture, and its surrender in the last line. 

Here are other texts from “Recalculating” that reference the conflict between thought and performance at deeper levels:

“The truth of the poem is neither in the representation nor the expression. Its truth dwells in what has never been and what will never be. Where possibility and impossibility collide, here the poem is forged.”

“Digital poetry 2003: in 1975, everyone was worried about the idea that language is code; in 2003, everyone is worried that code is language.”

The first note here is the thought in its almost pristine transcription. “Almost” because the last sentence is obligatory, a reminder that Bernstein has a job theorizing. That a poem is “forged” is an inconvenient truth, but not a revelation. That the forgery happens where the possible meets the impossible is not news either, though it bears some reflection. Where is that place? A street corner in Paris at sunset? We know what the possibility is wearing (a frock sonnet, a fractured lines dress) but what is the impossibility (Jack the Ripper, a shadow, a bodiless contradiction?) And why does our Parisian sonnet meet the mysterious impossibility in an understandable sentence? Why does this encounter between a known form and a shapeless phantom “forge” a poem? The answer is circular: we are trying to understand what a poem is because that is our job: poetics.

The second note attempts to inject some heft into the final cannoli-shell sentence in the first note. It establishes a timeline for a process (progress?) of language. It is approximate despite its dating. “Everyone” is Bernstein’s friends, or, more generously, the philosophers he was reading. But were they really “worried” that language is a code? Seems to me that since the beginning of language, everyone everywhere knew that language is a code. What else can symbols be? More interestingly, we would like to know what about this code we call “language” was “everyone” worried about in 1973. I suspect that in 1973 everyone we knew and read, was paranoid. The codes of language were read in a paranoid key, justified by all the social horrors around us. This is also the year when The “Language School,” a poetry society led in part by Charles Bernstein, upset all the poets not belonging to it. In retrospect, the poets of the Language School, were not so much “worried,” as intoxicated by the discovery of language codes, aided by the poetic philosophies of the French deconstructionists, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Jabès, etc. Edmond Jabès was possibly Charles Bernstein’s chief inspiration in his thinking about language, writing and Jewish identity. Also, published in 1973 was “The Theory of Communicative Action” by Jurgen Habermas, a book that may have been read by the more Left-leaning members of the Language group. Habermas discussed the role of rational discourse in social institutions. And thus was the old rift between French poetics and German rationalism duplicated in miniature by American poets. 

In 2003, “everyone” (a considerably larger group) was “worried” that code was language. That is definitely a graver thing to be worried about. That year it became visible to many people that numbers were shedding the layers of culture and meaning that words had acquired during their ages of use. Without the weight of centuries of reference, the codes became versatile enough to reprogram the human archives and to, eventually, create another history of humanity, based on numbers not on accrued meanings. In 2024, there is no need to worry any longer. Code has rewritten the future, and is in the process of rewriting the archives. Charles Bernstein second note is perfect. It nails one stage of the process, it identifies the second, and it points to the next. 

Charles is occasionally Baudelaire, but he is always Wittgenstein.


Andrei Codrescu is a Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and commentator for National Public Radio. He is the author of over fifty books of poetry, fiction, critical essays, and commentary on art, life, and literature.  He is a recipient of the Ovid Prize for poetry, the Heritage Award from the American Immigration Council, a National Book Award Finalist, and two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. His poetry, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Harper’s, and The Paris Review. What I Am Reading is a regular feature at Andrei’s website, codrescu.com 

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Tom Raworth and the Tale of No Ordinary O

Tom Raworth and the Tale of No Ordinary O

Alastair Johnston

raworthTom Raworth (1938–2017) was a major figure in the British poetry revival of the 1960s. Charles Olson praised his first book The Relation Ship as “preternaturally wise.” Ted Berrigan wrote: “His poems are not afraid to be beautiful, & they are not afraid to seem clever … He’s as good as we are, & rude a thing as it is to say, we don’t expect that, from English poets today. (I wonder is he better?)” Raworth said: “I was a Teddy Boy in the days of bicycle chains and razors. A police record for stealing a lorry. Didn’t like the idea of publishing myself, & didn’t while I had the magazine Matrix.” After Outburst magazine and Matrix (1961–4), which were the first to publish Olson, Zukofsky, Dorn and other Americans in Britain, Raworth collaborated with Barry Hall in Goliard Press (My bibliography of his press activity is online, at booktryst.com as of this writing).  After Raworth left it became Cape Goliard, as a prestigious poetry loss leader for Jonathan Cape, who brought in Nathaniel Tarn as editor.

In the early 1970s Raworth came to the USA to teach and ended up staying (illegally) for six years. He was poet in residence at King’s College Cambridge in 1977, but always struggled to make a living. He travelled all over Europe giving poetry readings & made annual trips to the USA to read at a few spots – Buffalo and San Francisco among them – where he had a big audience. With my partner in Poltroon Press, Frances Butler, we published four of his works.

Tom didn’t like to talk on the phone and was terrible at interviews but a great correspondent. In the days before the internet he created zines and collages which he sent through the mail. Once cyberspace took hold he posted intricate photoshopped collages as annual greeting cards for all to see. These showed acerbic political and social commentary but he had a wickedly insightful take on his fellow poets also, which was generally limited to the few friends in his address book.

I met Raworth in San Francisco in 1974 and was quite star struck. I treasured his Trigram press books and had memorized parts of them, but he had never been a part of the poetry circuit in England in the late 60s when I started going to readings: the reason being he was in Mexico and the United States.
Tom had come to the United States to teach at the University of Austin in Texas but chucked it in, unsuited to academia. The Raworths lived in Chicago and visited their old London friend Anselm Hollo at the Iowa Writers Workshop in Iowa City. Visiting the Dorns in San Francisco they decided to stay. It was a productive time, Ed Dorn had worked in the printshop at Black Mountain College and had hooked up with Holbrook Teter and Michael Myers of Zephyrus Image Press on Geary Boulevard in San Francisco and lived around the corner. Dorn was working on his epic Gunslinger. The Raworths moved nearby and Tom joined into the printing mayhem, with his own background of printing at Matrix and Goliard presses in London. Zephyrus Image spoofed current events, such as the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst, or Gary Snyder receiving the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1974. Dorn’s vehicle was a newspaper called Bean News which they filled with all sorts of crazy stuff, rebuses, attacks on the Nixon White House, pieces on environmentalism and contributions from their network of correspondents. Their visas expired and Valarie Raworth took jobs as a housecleaner to support their young family. When their building was due to be demolished they lived in the Dorns’ apartment while Ed was away teaching, then moved to the Teter’s cabin in Camp Meeker up in the dank redwood groves of Northern California. It was a typical hand-to-mouth poet’s existence. Tom went on reading tours. In Buffalo he was being seen off at the Greyhound station by Bob Creeley when some undercover customs agents heard his London accent and asked to see his papers. The Raworths were ordered to be deported. At the Immigration hearing in San Francisco the official told Val, “You shouldn’t be here — you’re white!”

For once they got a break. In 1977 Tom was offered the Chair of Poetry at Kings College, Cambridge. Val found, after 6 years away, that “everyone in England had gone really loopy.” Inevitably after a year the position was turned over to another poet and Tom went on the dole while their precarious housing situation resumed. At the same time Tom’s poetry was being taught at Cambridge — I wrote to the professor who reportedly was handing out Xeroxes of our book The Mask, saying this was illegal and the book was in print. He wrote back that $7.50 was too much for his students to pay. And obviously paying the poet to come in and talk about his work was out of the question too.
Tom’s letters which arrived once or twice a month were usually full of gloom, though he remembered to send me jokes. (“I called the IRA hunger strikers’ hot line: eight nothing eight nothing eight nothing.”) He had bronchitis as well as a bad heart and was perennially broke. My letters and tapes of music cheered him up, and he was always asking for drugs, “to be mailed with fake return address”. His own letters came from addresses such as “R. Mugabe / “See Few” / Kraal Ave / Zim-ba-bwe.” Or he would address the letter in rhyming couplets, making me Johnston Al, to go with Berkeley Cal.

Read Alastair’s hilarious Tom Raworth and the Tale of No Ordinary O  in its entirety as a pdf file here


amjAlastair Johnston has taught Visual Studies, Typography, and Book Design at University of California, Berkeley & Davis from 1975 to 1986 and at U.C. Berkeley Extension from 1987–2011, where he was Honored Instructor for the Academic Year 2004. He founded Poltroon Press with artist Frances Butler in 1975, and he continues to publish original writing by contemporary. He has designed books for British Library, Oak Knoll Press, Crown Point Press, Harper/Collins, Serendipity Books.

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Journal of a Plague Year And A Half

Pat Nolan

Andrei Codrescu & Vincent Katz, A Possible Epic Of Care, Black Widow Press, 2023

A Possible Epic Of Care is a pandemic prompted project that began at its onset in early 2020 and concluded in July of the following year. It begins with the poet Vincent Katz informing the poet Andrei Codrescu that “It is Mozart’s birthday. He’s only 264.”  From that initial prompt, the discussion throughout reverberates around their own decided mortality and that of their friends and family as well as the mocking chimera of immortality. As Codrescu states, “Our common bonds at that curious time of the planet-engulfing Plague were various: we were friends, we were poets, we took poetry seriously enough to believe in its superpowers, but above all, we both had mothers who at ages past ninety needed the care and attention that we could provide them.”

Codrescu is no stranger to the art idea of collaboration. At one time, in the late sixties/early seventies, collaboration (aka “collabs”) were the thing, and particularly among a NYC based poetry contingent, it was almost de rigueur. Sourced from the surrealist automatic writing group experiments, it became a popular pastime when poets got together. John Ashbery and James Schuyler writing A Nest Of Ninnies on weekend drives to the Hamptons (sic). Tom Veitch and Ron Padgett knocking out Antlers In The Treetops. And of course the Waldman/Berrigan Memorial Day. To name only a very few. Even out in the tangled wilderness of Black Bart country, it  is easy to recall Dick Gallup, Jeffrey Miller, Andrei, Victoria Rathbun, Michael-Sean Lazarchuk, Steve Lavoie, and I taking turns on the typewriter set on the mantle of the gas fireplace. Codrescu and Katz are veterans of those long ago word orgies and seem perfectly attuned to the requirements in their return to the form. The additional factor of an incipient pandemic and its impending doom color the rapport with an underlying anxiety that things will never be the same (if they ever were).

The collaboration serves the purpose of overcoming their isolation. It is a journal as well as a working notebook as an exchange of energy. The experience of being put on a “war footing,” hunkering down, as Ted Berrigan put it, to deal with an invisible and, at the time, novel foe is reflected in the turns of mind of both authors. How the mundane is affected and the maze of every day reorganizes itself to address the changed conditions. The collaboration is a coping mechanism, an emergency action to gain control of a disrupted routine, to gather up the loose ends and recycle the usable untarnished by the decay of cliché. A Possible Epic Of Care brings together a mx of anecdotes, memories, ruminations, and examples of putting the creative process through its paces.

For some, the pandemic, at its outset, encouraged a certain self-indulgence brought about by a profound shift in perspective, provoked, in part, by an innate desperation but also as a resistance to the dour mood of a potential cataclysm. In other words, survivor mode, something shared by nature: when the greatest danger threatens annihilation, there is a tendency to overproduce, blossom like never before, attract all the bees vital for perpetuation. While there were many who reacted negatively, hopelessly petrified or perversely heedless, others embraced the altered situation and started novels or resurrected long dormant projects among many last chance creative endeavors. The enforced isolation of the first year of the pandemic also had the effect of redefining the social norm and how, over time, there would be a need to retool those relationships. Such strategies can be found in these pages.

As the work progresses, certain themes are reiterated, alluded to as key words or sensibilities. Judging by the number of quotes and citations, periodic lockdowns and self-imposed isolation presented ample opportunity for reading. And for listening to music as means of transport beyond the four walls. The collaboration was also an opportunity for improvisation and verbal virtuosity. Occupied by the occupation of thinking and writing, sketches and notes for further exploration are interspersed with the mundane of just getting by, the chicanery of those in public office, and the drone of supercilious super serious news pundits in the background. Interspersed also are the “in memoriam” notices of friends and personal heroes who have passed. And as well, instances verifying (anecdotally at least) the claim that the pandemic made for more vivid dreaming.

The reader is made privy to Andrei’s autobiographical reminiscences, in particular his memorable first meeting with Lewis Warsh as a particularly elegiac riff at the poet’s passing. As is Vincent’s close attention to the procession of time through his cataloguing of the meaningful, making lemonade under the dark cloud of the pandemic pessimism. Both of the poets also have the task of caring for their nonagenarian mothers, Vincent taking his mother to the hairdresser or to a doctor’s appointment, navigating the new cautionary hurdles, and Andrei visiting his mother in a home in Florida. He relates that on the first day she thanked him for bringing a message from “Andrei.” “I said, ‘I am Andrei.’ No Dice. Next day she saw me, ‘Andrei, you are here. Someone came yesterday with a message from you.’ I had the distinct impression that she like liked ‘Andrei’ better than Andrei.”

As should be expected from two poets, some of the texts are poems, and some of it is prose masquerading as poetry, and vice versa; some of it is fraught with cautious worry and some is carefree; yet, as a backdrop, there is a figurative bonfire the size of a skyline—it is the bonfire of the hubris of Western civilization, fueled by disease and hopelessness. And what can these puny poets do in the face of it all except the Promethean thing—steal a little fire for their own.

There are twelve cantos in this one hundred and forty four page epic of care, a praise song to an extraordinary event that through the incantations of the particular inevitably become quite ordinary. Andrei claims, “Ted Berrigan looms over these poems” and quotes Pound, “nothing matters but the quality of affection in the end.” As for Vincent, bringing Canto Doce and the collaboration full circle,

“I’ve been thinking and reading
And listening to music and going
For bike rides and looking at the light
On the side of a building”

And also that “I don’t want anything to end.”


Pat Nolan’s poems, prose, and translations have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies in North America as well as in Europe and Asia.  He is the author of over a dozen books of poetry and three novels.

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All Best Phil: Annotated Letters from Philip Whalen

Alastair Johnston’s long association with Philip Whalen has resulted in numerous collaborations between the poet and the printer/publisher including Prolegomena to a Study of the Universe & Other Prose Takes (Poltroon Press, 2014)and The Diamond Noodle (1980). He has put together a wonderful display of Whalen’s orthography along with annotations that illustrates what one would encounter in such a correspondence. It is best viewed in its original conception as a pdf file mainly because of the limitations of this platform. Below is the attempted replication of the first page. Click on the title to access the complete document.

All Best Phil: Annotated Letters from Philip Whalen

I met Philip Whalen in 1975 when I was writing my bibliography of the Auerhahn Press.
Here are some of his letters to me. – Alastair Johnston

PWletterAJ

Because of my bibliographical
interests PW
would send me notes like
this when he remembered
little magazines that had
published some of his
early poems.

I sent him Xeroxes of his early “Prose Takes” that I had found in the Auerhahn
archives at The Bancroft Library, enquiring whether they had appeared anywhere.
He replied on yellow paper, from the Page Street Zen Center,

PWletterAJ2


amjAlastair Johnston has taught Visual Studies, Typography, and Book Design at University of California, Berkeley & Davis from 1975 to 1986 and at U.C. Berkeley Extension from 1987–2011, where he was Honored Instructor for the Academic Year 2004. He founded Poltroon Press with artist Frances Butler in 1975, and he continues to publish original writing by contemporary. He has designed books for British Library, Oak Knoll Press, Crown Point Press, Harper/Collins, Serendipity Books.

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Philip Whalen’s KYOTO Notebooks

Philip Whalen’s KYOTO NOTEBOOKS

Transcriptions & Notations by Keith Kumasen Abbott

As a professor at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder Colorado, Keith Kumasen Abbott (1944-2019) spent his summer breaks over the course of four years, beginning in 2005, going through the Philip Whalen archives at the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library as well as the UC Davis Library where Gary Snyder’s papers are stored, gathering material for his lectures and essays on Northwest writers (including Kesey and Brautigan), many of which were transcribed and published in Parole. One of the results of his research was the discovery of an unpublished poem by Whalen titled “Kozanji”. His essay “Nothing Is Forever” (see The Whalen Papers above for link) is his deep reading of the poem. Further analysis of Whalen’s poetics was developed in a longer unpublished forty page treatises titled Nothing Is Forever: Kozanji Part Two, Some Remarks on Whalen’s Transnational Poetics.*

It was Keith’s intent in copying out the notebooks from the Kyoto period to delve into the poet’s mature poetics and make an attempt at defining, as much as possible, the undefinable. Below are some of his ruminations on the significance of the writing in the notebooks he transcribed.


pwcal1In a four-year span, from 1966 to1971, Whalen lived for two periods in Japan, broken by eighteen months in California, until his return to take lay monk ordination at San Francisco’s Zen Center in 1972. Of Whalen’s twenty-four Kyoto notebooks from 1966-1971, a majority were the bound art sketchbooks with sturdy covers and excellent smooth blank laid paper—ideal for Western calligraphy nibs; some were art sketchbooks, a few were lined, and one wide notebook with thin laid paper for Asian calligraphy. Whalen usually only typed his works for publication. Most Kyoto work was first written in his calligraphic hand with an Osmiroid pen, alternating Italic and Humanist Bookhand scripts occasionally decorated with Slab-Serif or Swash Roman capitals for his entries. Bright colored ink felt pens were also used for calligraphy and illustrations.

            Whalen’s notebooks are filled with entries of his avid temple and shrine studies. “Kozanji” seemed to be a visitor’s jottings upon a tour of Kozan’s temple and grounds. But his handwriting was much neater than his usual notes. Because these lines were in verse, I transcribed a copy onto my laptop and went on reading. Later, viewed in Times font, this poem seemed like some passage I had seen from an earlier published magazine or chapbook version of Scenes of Life at The Capital.

            Two years later, upon my return to the Bancroft Library, further examination of “Kozanji” convinced me that these lines definitely comprised a finished poem. For Scenes of Life at The Capital, Whalen rewrote the “Kozanji” material. He dropped some lines, phrases, and images, while splicing in entries from other notebooks. The Scenes’ stanzas were elongated, combining two or more lines into extended looser rhythms to fit his long poem’s discursive narrative style. Some images remained identifiable, but the intent of the “Kozanji” passages was changed, sometimes drastically. Overall, these five stanzas with thirty-one lines were redesigned to serve as a flowing narration of the multiple temple, shrine, restaurant and nature sites he visited that make up part of Scenes From Life At The Capitol. Unlike “Kozanji,” this version did not peak in one ecstatic sparkling burst.

            Whalen’s personal history of his poem’s creation turned out to be considerably livelier than my discovery of it. Only after my reading through all his Kyoto notebooks in chronological order did Whalen’s own activities surrounding the creation of this poem became clear.

Most importantly, in 1968 Whalen had returned to Kyoto from California for a second time on a self-imposed mission. On July 3, 1970, in a retrospective mood he wrote what that mission was. [Note: throughout brackets [  ] are mine; the braces{ } are Whalen’s.]

3:VII: 70
I came back to Kyoto because I need things to keep up my enthusiasm, to keep up my curiosity, to remind me that there’s a vast deal I must learn, viz the Japanese & Chinese languages, the real scoop about Shugendo, Tendai & Shingon, about Shinto, about Kyoto & music & No—in America most of this information can be obtained from books, but here it can be seen & touched & smelled &c. (BANCROFT MSS Box 2, Folder 10)

In his roles as a writer, as a fledgling Kyoto historian, and as an avid and seemingly indefatigable walker, Whalen often seemed to average three to five temples, museums or shrines on the days that he dedicated to exploration of Kyoto proper. Contrast this defined mission of 1970 with his first visit in 1966 when he reviewed why Kyoto fascinated and instructed him. His excitement and distraction seems obvious from his jumpy prose style.

9:II: 66
In this town it’s all out in the open, the poverty, brutality & wickedness—the beauty –I repeat—is what I bring to it, & here “IT” is only wood & paper, stones & water, shrubs & trees—most of the statuary is undistinguished except as it helps remind me of who I am, what I’m really doing here &c. And they continually sprinkle water on everything to keep the dust down & spend lots of hours wiping all the wood, sweeping & mopping.
            These palaces & temples & shrines even survive the daily pressure of several thousand eyes and feet marching through the gardens, the porches, the floors every man woman & child . . . no less than {it seems} 18 billion a year . . .. [who] come to Kyoto walks through these buildings & gardens.
            How come the garden paths aren’t worn down into trenches? How come the migration of 11 trillion footsteps {as it was the day I visited those thousand Buddhas at Sanju Sangendo}—footsteps & eyes & giggles which made the wooden weather godlings tremble, their fragile 13th Century haloes shiver & quake—& on one porch of that same building they had archery contests, shooting at many arrows as they could from East to West, 24 hours—a garment of wooden roof-bracketing lives in a glass case, the bow & arrows beside it, which frayed & chewed the wood until it had to be replaced.  An archery contest 700 years! Nobody is quite sure why—except it was hard to do and lots of fun . . . . (BANCROFT MSS Box 1, folder 8)

Snyder testified, “Once in Kyoto, Philip seemed instantly intimate with the sites of literature and history . . ..” (Collected Poems, Philip Whalen xxix)  Reading Whalen’s entire run of Kyoto notebooks it is clear that his excitement was rapidly transformed into a remarkable breadth of knowledge. From my personal experience as the blind Whalen’s library go-fer in San Francisco (circa 1999), I can testify that many years later his ability to access by memory broad bands of Japanese historical, religious and philosophical information often astounded me. Especially when Whalen could recite, from memory, various Zen temple histories and direct me—not only to his library books he needed read to him for confirmation of some troublesome detail—but to where to find the relevant footnotes containing variants of this or that history, citing if they were found on the left or right page.

Besides such exciting discoveries of arcane yet ageless rituals as this archery contest, Whalen was also sampling a Sixties generation ritual: psychedelics. Poet, editor, and Whalen aficionado Pat Nolan characterizes Whalen’s relationship between Kyoto’s cultural experiences and psychedelics:

[In Kyoto, Whalen] actualized Zen when in the land of Zen. Something he couldn’t have done in San Francisco (as easily) because his relationship to the philosophy was at an intellectual distance. But also a point is PW’s incredible ability to absorb psyche shifts . . . and the intelligence he brings to the telling of these moments. The quote from the mescaline trip notebook reminds me of the [letter to Snyder] after his first peyote trip, how he had the knowledge (reference) and intelligence to understand what was happening to him. He wasn’t a tripper, he was a traveler, in a way that shamans are, and bodhisattvas, which to me is just another manifestation of the shaman role. I think that’s what he did with Japanese culture, sucked it up like a big old backcountry sponge. A life changing experience, more so than psychedelics, though that was just another step in his direction. (Nolan email, 7/12/09)

Whalen remarked that “there was lots of good[ies] to be had” during his stay in Kyoto. (OTW 49) On November 6th, 1969, Whalen wrote the following entry.

6:XI: 69
9:55 A.M. swallowed a big yellow capsule of mescaline—gift of Roy Kiyooka somewhere in Canada.

ADMONITIONS  {to my usual self}

Try to remember that weeping & sorrow & woe are only transitional, no more real or significant than laughter, letch, anger. That it isn’t necessary to cry any more, neither for myself or for anyone else, because {in some weirdly improbable way} everything is allright. [sic]  Don’t get foolish with the kerosene stove, it is hot & flammable. Remember not to stare at the sun. It is very cold here in the house. Put clothes on {happy being what I am, I now have some beautiful new ceremonial robes to wear}  ((BANCROFT MSS Box 2, Folder 5)

This list makes clear that Whalen was no amateur in preparation for such events. He records various aspects of his sensations until sometime after 10:12 a.m. when, by his own reckoning, he writes the observation that confirms for him that the capsule is working.

Possibly I’m growing better—for only a few seconds I had a very small paranoia take from hearing the landlord’s family talking & thrashing about in the distance.  I got up to get something or other,  & {locked front door} on the way to front door, saw the 13 Buddha scroll & knew THEY are really the neighbors: the neighbors are really THEM {all 13}. Add, that just before eating this capsule, I put on the blue magic beads which Cass & Jim made for my use on occasions of this kind. {Getting writer’s cramp, writing this down—a little like “blocking & cramping experienced with LSD.}  Texture of this paper is quite interesting universe. 

[Keith’s note: Typically zoom-in of psychedelic trip here with Whalen is sidetracked by texture of paper, which is very nice even now. These Japanese notebooks are his best quality notebooks.]


There’s no doubt that Keith’s transcription of the notebook material and his interjected commentary and notes were place holders for his return to the notebooks to continue mining angles and developing approaches to Whalen’s poetics. The passages he references are tantalizing in their potential for insight into Whalen’s thinking about what he is doing or thinks he is doing, as well as anecdotes, gossip, complaints, rants, sketching (something he picked up from Kerouac) and, in general, word doodling that makes up the source, the raw material for his poetry. These notebooks are not journals in the conventional sense, they are working books. And they are instructive to anyone interested in Philip Whalen as a poet, someone, as Kumasen used to say, “built his own railway.” What is always remarkable is the dialogue Whalen has with the page. There does not appear to be a filter. So the opportunities for reflection are legion. And in many respects, his poetry is a poetry of reflection and revelation aided and abetted by an unerring ear. Some of the objections to his work may be that he is too revealing, “in the nude” so to speak. There is a stark unadorned honesty to the notebook jottings that is often the springboard for some fancy footwork, linguistically and psychically, and a sense of balance needed to walk the artistic tightrope.

The notebooks for this period of time end in February of 1972, with the following notations:

Groundhog Day 1972
I got the Rilke flash very strongly tonight: “you must change your life.”

25:II:72
the way Lewy disappeared was something I had thought about doing myself—stepping off some trail in the mountains & sitting down among trees & brush to quietly starve to death—I wrote about this notion somewhere –did Lewy read it? Anyway, his acting out of my fantasy makes me feel responsible or accountable for his action . . . . or some metaphysical plane, anyway….

pwmonkPW cops to the same guilt other friends did, but this death also motivated GS to vow to help PW with his career etc.   That he didn’t want to feel he let anyone down as he obviously felt about Lew.  PW elsewhere, when he mentions it, is very ambivalent about moving up & living on Gary’s land, when he is offered that by Gary.
Then he moves into the Zen Center “prepared to be disillusioned” and he lists Baker’s peculiar actions.  I may have typed these elsewhere. 

In this organization [Zen Center] the Buddha keeps sidling up and patting my ass, groping my crotch etc. The air is thick with Zen & good will & patience & piety. I told Claude at lunch [in Chinatown] many of the inhabitants look simply cowed, too scared to move in any direction. 

END OF NOTEBOOK 3:9


A link to a pdf of unedited excerpts from the notebooks, almost 80 pages, and Keith Kumasen Abbott’s commentary and ruminations on them is available here.

*Although Abbott uses the term “transnational” in the title and several places in the text, it might be more appropriate, considering the emphasis he places on Whalen’s sense of music, to use the term “trans-notational.”


keithinsertKeith Kumasen Abbott (1944-2019), poet, novelist, scholar, ordained Zen monk, and calligrapher, authored numerous poetry books, novels and short story collections as well as the memoir Downstream from Trout Fishing In America (Astrophil Press, 2009).

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“Poesy’s ravening violet flames”:  Whalen in Ekstasis, Part II

“Poesy’s ravening violet flame”
Whalen In Ekstasis
Part II
(Part I can be viewed here) 

by Bruce Holsapple

4. A Musical Feeling in the Line

            I’d focus now on “The Best of It,” a nine page poem concluding Every Day, one giving an impression of being culled from notebook entries as a kind of patchwork of “best” entries from October 3rd through November 7th 1964, although Whalen doesn’t explicitly say that.[1] It ends with yet another invocation. Here is the opening stanza:

Worry walk, no thought appears
One foot follows rug to wood,
Alternate sun and foggy sky
Bulldozer concrete grinder breeze
The windows open again
Begin
                        a line may
                                    start:
      spring open, like seams of a boat high on the hot sand  (CP 384-5)

Windows closed, perhaps, because of noise caused by the bulldozer, although it could have been because of the smell, for when the poet ventures out in subsequent “entries,” he mentions roadwork on 16th Street, one block over, where they were digging up a sewer line. When he says “no thought appears,” he’s referring to his writing, so we start by searching our worried way in, going outside to look, walking, making observations, hoping that a poem might erupt. The poem consequently proceeds, obliquely, as commentary on writing.

            Stress on the everyday is also frequent, yet the text is not a narrative of events, and not really in sequence, but is staged. While the dating implies Whalen began the poem on October 3rd, in the second section he mentions “tomorrow is a holiday” (CP 385; Every Day 46). Yet October 4, 1964 was a Sunday, not, to my knowledge, a holiday. I suspect rather the second section was written on October 11, eight days later, for that year President Johnson declared Columbus Day, October 12, a holiday. This further argues the text assembled from bits and pieces, rearranged. Although the staging lends itself to a sort of progression, day by day, that development is constructed.

img474As regards structure, in an interview with Scalapino, who paraphrases Whalen’s method as one of composing from “accumulated material in a notebook,” first typing fragments on separate pages, then arranging them on the floor, Whalen states, explicitly: “And then I’d look at these things and be typing it up out of a notebook and saw patterns in it all rough and decided this part here was going to follow something else or not. And I can’t explain. It was a poetical frenzy.” That “poetical frenzy” is what concerns us. In a second entry, Scalapino quotes Whalen as saying: “And then you could see there were fragments of something. And those fragments go down on the floor. And you find out that something you wrote last year and something you wrote five minutes ago are part of the same news.” Apropos his frenzy, Whalen also spoke of adhering to a “rhythmical thing in the back of my mind somewhere,” of his patterning as an “interweaving of different stands of ideas or notes, sounds that come around and about and all make a strange harmony” (Scalapino, Phenomena 117-9). I’d note the reference to music.

            Here’s another. In May 1964, Whalen, Snyder and Lew Welch participated in a panel on “Bread and Poetry” for KPFA (FM) radio, prior to their reading at the Longshoremen’s Hall that June (Schneider 198-9). In the midst of their talking about the poet’s role in society, the moderator asked if they thought a poem had “any special characteristics . . . or is there . . . something transcendent about a poem . . . ?” Whalen replied: “Sure. The connection or whatever you want to call it—is to music, as far as I can see. Not necessarily to metric, or to anything else, except as it relates to a musical experience, a musical feeling, in the line, happening between the words, or happening as the poetic line . . .”  (Snyder, Welch and Whalen 21).[2] That musical feeling interweaves to create a “strange harmony” (above). This is the art of juxtaposition seen in “Mexico.”

            And “The Best of It” as a whole is something of a ramble, built of many small steps, as the opening walk foretells. We worry walk, for instance, into the second section, where Whalen is unable to work because of this or that and unable to read and unable to sleep because he’s waiting for Tommy to arrive with a key (so that he can later feed her cats). There’s a mysterious visualization of Orpheus’s head—What’s the big idea, he asks (twice)—then we maybe wobble into a dream. These sections are followed by a series of speculations on just what to attend, or more narrowly, about sensation (mostly noise and color) and belief. But sequencing events doesn’t really account for the wild contrasts in sensibility Whalen achieves, the splashy emotional shifts, the jumbled texture of the piece, for instance, the odd, deliberately flat textural effect of a single line, such as: “I wrote ‘46’ a few days ago,” and more simply “blang” (390-91). His bizarre, sometimes frantic notations, the self-directives and often gleeful challenges (“how many ideas about the world have you known?”) are seemingly thrown about, giving the text an open, gritty feel. Certainly, texture is key, as is fragmentation and ellipsis, the deliberate shifts off topic, the contrasts, the small instances of dailiness, the ambling about, producing an immediacy by way of its specificity, its sense of incongruity, expansive in that way.

            When focused on sensations of one sort or another, he recalls his father’s comment, “Don’t believe everything you hear and only half of what you see,” actually entered into his journal earlier in April (CP 387; Unger 353). But problems with belief occur throughout. Consequently, when Whalen discusses reason and logic in a dismissive way, it’s evident there’s an underlying subtext, for the topic of magic likewise recurs.[3] Midway, Whalen posits, “I say, / Believe some of the senses part of the time, / although I have seen my share of mirages, / visions, optical illusions, fake skin pangs, / nightmares, déjà vus, false memories, / lies, frauds, theaters, governments, universities, magicians—“ (388-9). But then he reports, if somewhat facetiously:

I practice looking out through
the top of my head,
brain surface receives direct radiant energy
it responds like the compound eye of insect
which is also the eye of bodhisattva watching everything
at once with perfect detachment, perfect compassion, perfect wis-
dom. . . .                                                                      (CP 389)

This apparently reflects his meditative practice.[4]      

            The argument about magic and belief may be why mention of crystals and gemstones weaves throughout, along with alchemy, color imagery, prisms and Sir Isaac Newton (optics), that is, because of the magical properties of crystals and gemstones in healing and rejuvenation. Crystals and gems also double as indices of value (and as a component of belief). For amidst the variegated commentary, one notices several instances of such value, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes overtly, as in the following section:

                                                            EXCELLENT
                                                                    HOW
GOLD                                                             IT SHINES
                                                           HEAVILY
                                                            WELLS FARGO BANK
                                                            & UNION TRUST COMPANY
Earthquake washing machine                                     (CP 390)

The valuation here, perhaps the sun shining gold (heavily) on the exterior of the bank—a kind of doubling effect, gold inside, gold outside—occurs towards his conclusion, and in fact instances of value increase as the poem proceeds. But the real wind up and pitch (as regards poetry and belief) occurs at the conclusion.

“O Goddess I call on you constantly,” Whalen begins the final section, addressing Tara, Buddhist goddess of compassion. “People laugh when I speak of you / They don’t see you beside me, / I’m young again when you appear.”  He’s lonely, he complains, “Drug with literature and politics / Almost convinced that writing’s impossible, / Totally controlled by professors and publishers.”  He appeals for her support by way of the inspiration she provides.

One small zap-ray blink of your eye
Demolishes all these tinny dreams of Art
Breakthrough to actual skin throb stroke

And beyond all this—
Countless worlds, life as joy knowledge
Flower freedom fire
My doubt impatience fear and worry
Consumed in wisdom flame garland
I can bless the editor, the PhD, the New York Review of Books

The poems and the writing are all yours    (CP 392-3)

This closing section caps the book, contrasting the mediating effects of professors, publishers and reviewers and tinny, intellectual dreams, with the dimension she provides, which he experiences as “skin throb stroke,” evidence of her presence. I said above “inspiration,” yet there’s no distinction between her presence and his inspiration. One zap actualizes, expands into realms of “joy knowledge / Flower freedom fire.” And here his elliptical phrasing exemplifies the flush effect of that presence, conveying that his “doubt impatience fear and worry” dissolves into “wisdom flame garland.”

5. Making It

            In “‘Goldberry Is Waiting’; or, P.W., His Magical Education as a Poet” Whalen explains, flatly, it’s “impossible to describe how poems begin,” but then begins describing how : “Some are simply imagined immediately, are ‘heard’ quite as if I were hearing a real voice speaking the words . . . . Sometimes the same imagination provides me with single lines or with a cluster of lines which is obviously incomplete . . . . a few hours later I’ll ‘receive’ more lines. Perhaps they won’t arrive until weeks or months go by” (CP 831). Poems also come in dreams, in overheard conversations, and in imaginings. The instances then snowball:  “A landscape, a cat, a relative, a friend, a letter,” he goes on, “. . . shopping for vegetables, making love, looking at pictures, taking dope, sitting still” and on, until he concludes—and note past participle “found”—“all this is how to write, all this is where poems are to be found. Writing them is a delight.” In order to find them, however, you must know how to look.

            The practice of finding poems, shopping or sitting still, involves ordinary, every day mind, nondiscrimination, but juxtapose that approach, for a moment, with how Whalen speaks of music in “The Ode to Music” from Every Day

the fingers that hear it as it happens
as it is being made, Thelonious Monk
“has the music going on all the time,” AG told me
“You hear it while he’s at the piano,
you see him listening to it when he’s out walking around
it’s going all the time”                                    (CP 366)

Music is posited here as happening wherever Monk is, similar to the presence of Whalen’s Goddess. That fingers might “hear” music as it is being made (by those fingers) requires being attentive, a spontaneity which fills the fingers with music. And Whalen’s phrasing is a citation from Gertrude Stein’s “Composition As Explanation,” where Stein speaks of artists who “make it as it is being made,” who compose “using everything,” and who distinguish the time of composition from the time in composition. Composition, she insists, “is not there, it is going to be there and we are here” (520, 523, 528-9), that is, we are (here) moving toward where the composition will be, there, once it has been made, much like Whalen moving toward his Goddess. In similar ways, Monk’s music, Ginsberg claims, is “going all the time” and you can watch Monk make that music precisely as it is being made, filled with a kind of presence, with the music that we are.

            In “‘Goldberry Is Waiting’” Whalen speaks about learning of poetry not as a power possessed by persons, so much as something to defer to, “older and larger and more powerful than I.” He also states that poetry gave access to a world not evident to the senses, as a means to commune

with those works of imagination and vision and magical and religious knowledge which all painters and musicians and inventors and saints and shamans and lunatics and yogis and dope fiends and novelists heard and saw and “tuned in” on. Poetry was not a communication from ME to ALL THOSE OTHERS, but from the invisible magical worlds to me . . .  (CP 830)

This poetry is entered into as a realm, as was his ether vision, hence his notion of breakthrough.

            Whalen makes related comments in a 1971 interview with Anne Waldman, speaking of a breakthrough during a peyote trip in 1955, when the poem started “making itself” and he “started having to go along behind it and write it the way it was . . .” (Allen 1972, 22-3). His reorientation—to that of following the poem—relates obviously to graphing, following the mind in its motions, but as well to Ginsberg’s impression of Monk hearing music when out walking about because “it’s going all the time” (CP 366),[5] as well as to Stein’s notion of making the composition “as it is being made.” In such terms, the poet doesn’t focus on statements per se, but on making a poem, yet the poem, Whalen insists, in his “Preface” to Decompressions, is going to think itself (CP 837).

6. This World as Heaven

Reading Whalen forward from the mid-fifties to Every Day (in 1965) makes evident a shift in his evolving sense of the poem’s unity. He moves from a statement-based poetry, such as in “Sourdough Mountain Lookout,” toward a more flexible, open approach, less constrained by thematic development. Consequently, there’s increasing use of fragmentation and juxtaposition—parts held deliberately in abeyance, often by an asterisk. The change begins, oddly enough, after his “Preface” about graphing the mind, that is, in 1959-61. I’ve discussed that change in terms of a doubling or split, noticeable in the “voice” of the poet, between Whalen as literal author and Whalen as the speaker (lyric subject), or the agentive “I” and the experiencing “me,”[6] This doubling results, I think, from a kind of suspension, perhaps a detachment from specific kinds of thinking. Studying or graphing the mind would require a nonordinary self-scrutiny. I’ll talk about that suspension here, however, in terms of Whalen’s playfulness, the nonsense and goofing about. For play likewise is comprised of a sort of doubling, namely, a pretended role or self and an imagining or pretending self. And play bears a conspicuous relationship to self-talk. There is much self-talk in Whalen’s verse.

            “Play” writes Johan Huizinga in Homo Ludens, “lies outside the reasonableness of practical life; has nothing to do with necessity or utility, duty or truth”  (158). During play, the ordinary is set aside and “the distinction between belief and make believe breaks down” (25). Susan Stewart, discussing Gregory Bateson’s work on frames, posits that play “involves the construction of another space/time, another domain having its own procedures for interpretation” because “all play involves a detachability of messages from their context of origin” (36-7). We’re concerned with that detachment. Friedrich Schiller precedes both, of course, in stating that art arises from a “play impulse” and that play alone “makes man complete” (79): “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing” (sic; 80). It follows, for Huizinga, that “The concept of play merges quite naturally with that of holiness,” and he cites Bach’s Preludes as evidence. Archaic ritual is sacred play, and in this sphere “the child and the poet are at home with the savage”  (25-6). In his chapter on poetry and play, Huizinga details the ancient roles poets once had and associates poetry, naturally enough, with magic, liturgy and imagination (25, 132). Huizinga also states disinterest as formal characteristics of play, perhaps in reference to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Disinterested play however can be accomplished in great earnestness. One disengages from the routine in order to give oneself over to play. The arts, Brian Sutton-Smith points out (133), represent play as a form of transformation, a point Gadamer likewise makes (102).

            Whalen’s playfulness consists of much clowning about, doodling, banter, whimsy, feints, mimicry, hyperbole, sound association, shifts in perspective. That’s to say, one rarely knows where a poem is headed, for Whalen exploits all dimensions of his verse. While there may or may not be evidence of “graphing,” the intent I suspect is largely that interrogating self, the lyric subject, in effect, innovating on that self, but that’s a larger topic. As a good example of how play contributes to a doubleness and transformation, here is the opening stanza of “Love Love Love Again,” written in 1965:

I keep trying to live as if this world were heaven
puke fish        dark fish        pale fish        park fish
              mud fish          lost fish         selfish
                              Rockers and Mods
                               “acres of clams”              (CP 439)

The first line invokes a problem in a straightforward way, his heavenly aspirations, but what follows is off-topic, and totally transforms the poem. Why the various fish intrude isn’t provided, but it functions as a sort of stalling tactic, a diversion, and it’s at that point we lift from, suspend concern with his topic. The adjectives that modify “fish” are phonemically linked. Whalen is doodling. But “puke” signals a rejection of sorts and dark and pale are negative, such that the associated “sel-fish” tumbles distinctly forward. With “Rockers and Mods,” a conflict is introduced, though Whalen doesn’t build on that. (There were riots in southern England in 1964 between Rockers and Mods, English subcultures, in coastal towns.) With “acres of clams,” Whalen cites an “Old Settler’s Song” popular in the Northwest, where he was raised. There are several versions of the song, but most involve a settler prospecting for gold, failing at that, and moving to Puget Sound (called his new Eden), where he’s “surrounded” by acres of clams, He consequently digs for something more rewarding—no longer “slave to ambition.” The clams obviously are nestled in mud, with “shellfish” perhaps providing an inaudible rime with “selfish.” 

            At home on Puget Sound, comfortably surrounded by clams, may be a kind of paradise. There’s an ellipsis, but that resonates with the next stanza, so we’re not totally afloat:

And all my friends, all the people I’ve known, all I’m going to know
Were mistresses and lovers, all of us with each other
All intimate with me                                       (CP 439)

This stanza extends from the opening topic, namely, living “as if” in heaven where people he’s known (or eventually will know) are “mistresses and lovers.” Yet when this stanza closes, Whalen jumps back to aquatic imagery and integrates the earlier fish and clams into a second, more ecological vision:

fish eyes never close but fish sleep
octopus eye of human camera goat
gnat in my ear, mice in my beard
beautiful garden in my colon (part of me
REALLY a flower)                                         (CP 440)                                   

A tonal shift suggests an unstated progression, and I’d explore that. Why the open fish eyes I can’t say. Watchfulness? But we’re meant to leap. Dark and park fish live where clams do, and one associates a human-looking octopus eye (from fish eye) and all those grasping arms (namely with the several lovers above), and we can move, perhaps below the surface, from lechery to goat, goat to a gnat (in his ear), on to beard (ear/beard/goat) and the image of “mice in my beard,” which broaches on folklore, though I don’t know a referent. By now the speaker is surrounded by animals as well as lovers, inhabited as it were. That’s an unaccounted for but playful change.

            Notice, however, that the combined imagery suggests a centralizing self with grasping arms. This recalls the opening topic of wanting to live in heaven by linking to relations between friends, such that his reference to heaven jibes with the inclusion of animals and the garden of Eden, etymologically related to “paradise” (as a walled garden, in Skeat 428). “Really” a flower, he reports— its nature finally, fully revealed— implying we’ve arrived somewhere. That’s the transformation.

            Here is how the poem ends:

I dreamed something with a whale in it
(Not the biggest whale, but big enough)
Animal who loves in the sea
And worms and snails and crustaceans and plant/animals
Animal plants                         

           Although your name doesn’t show here
          I haven’t forgotten you.                                  (CP 439-40)

There’s a mystery lurking in the final lines, sort of beneath the waves. In his penultimate stanza, however, Whalen singles out the whale as an “animal who loves the sea,” positing love as salient (underscored by his title), and here marks the whale as “not the biggest whale but big enough” as if size were a register, perhaps of love. And it may well be, for the resemblance of “whale” to “Whalen” is too big to ignore and loving the sea relates to the intimacy posited with the people he knows and to one’s “surroundings.” There’s also a conspicuous thoroughness in his phrasing, “plant/animals” and “Animal plants.” What emerges, consequently, is the grandiose figure of an undersea (underground?) poet around whom all life revolves, and this is of course a self-portrait, self-parody, of Whalen himself. But is it actually? For there’s a coy doubleness to this conclusion. “Although your name doesn’t show here,” he assures us, that doesn’t mean you’re forgotten. The inclusivity, here, seems akin to his embrace of animals and plants and friends.

            Movement from Whalen’s opening problem to his closing embrace is twisty, and it’s hard to hold pieces together. Yet the poem has an emotional cohesion and one feels a shift occur. I mentioned that playing involves a suspension or doubling and suggested it was transformative. Whalen initiates that doubling with his first “as if,” where the poem itself lifts off. His alleged problem, living like he’s in heaven, is not an especially arresting problem, is it? But if it’s held slightly askew—as nonserious or better, a bit hokey, as a topic—that does render the consequent departures from topic more navigable. Whalen’s next move, after all, is to introduce non sequiturs, to play with sounds. And he does know better, doesn’t he, than to treat all people as lovers? By sound association, the word “selfish” emerges, yet from a different semantic domain, as does a song about prospecting for gold and, failing at that, learning to dig for clams. The instances of “selfish” and “puke fish,” then, perhaps signal a rejection, for the transformation that the lyric subject undergoes would seem to be from self-centered, a selfishness (shellfishness?) to the inclusivity or largess of the last stanzas, A to B. This change results in allowing himself to be inhabited by creatures and plants, in short, by becoming that world he would convert into paradise. At that point, after all, he discovers he contains a garden. But in order to be filled (with paradise) in this way, it seems he must be emptied. That’s the doubling, the suspension. I’m a bit over my head, but this emptiness, I suspect, is what allows the change to occur, working towards what we stand beside. This world as heaven.

7. Poetry as Transport

            My argument at this point is straightforward. Much as is effected with song, poems are constructed to be engaged in, but importantly they are composed as imaginative events. As events, they have dimension, or better, can produce a felt, dimensional experiences, both for readers and for writers, for writers undergo the experience also. Much as with song—or with ritual—poems can elevate and transport, but access to that experience requires that readers construct imagery, ideas, emotions and musicality as a felt experience, In short, the reader enacts the role of speaker and performs the poem, largely through its musical structure. That is why Whalen speaks of vision and music and of tripping synapses and “causing great sections of [the reader’s] nervous system—distant galaxies hitherto unsuspected . . . to LIGHT UP” (CP 835).

            In his preface to Decompressions, Whalen states that his poems were made “for the pleasure of making them, not for the purpose of being merely ‘understood’ by literary scholars and bluestockings” (837). Yet the feelings they generate, “feelings of exuberance joy ecstasy satori, whatever,” he advises, are “basically antisocial feelings” (837). They should be channeled into art, so that effects “of our delight will become broadcast the more we concentrate them in acts of creation.” Whalen then shifts gears:

philip_whalenI don’t mean, “I feel really good today, I think that I shall write a poem,” the poem is going to precede the thinking; it is going to think itself, in addition to ripping the poet out of his head—think of light wave/particle/bundles being slowly emitted in a pattern from the surface of somebody’s face and traveling very slowly through space to mingle with the chemicals of a photographic film and slowly change them so that they in their turn remember the pattern and can reproduce it whenever called upon. Those wave/particle/bundles and their combinations are words for a poet and his mind is at once their source and the pattern of their intensities. (CP 837).

Let me reiterate one part of this. One writes a poem for pleasure, but the source is not simply “person,” and it doesn’t result, simply, in self-expression. While the patterning arises from the writer’s mind, the poem precedes thought; it thinks itself, “ripping the poet out of his head.” The poem, one could say, takes you beyond whom you thought you were.

            This sense of being taken out of one’s self connects in a special way to Whalen’s playfulness. Writing about relationships between play and art, Gadamer remarks that “all playing is a being played” (106), for players lose themselves in play—get “caught up” in the game—for “the structure of play absorbs the player into itself” (105). In a similar way, the poet can be taken up and surpassed by the poem, and as Gadamer notes, this “primacy of the game over the players engaged in it is experienced by the players themselves” (106). One feels that primacy. The subject of play, he insists, is play itself, thus play is a self-presentation, similar in ways to how the subject of the poem becomes the poem itself. By analogy, the poet experiences the primacy of the poem—it’s going to think itself—and is drawn into the task of achieving the poem’s “self-presentation,” or as Creeley has it, a “process . . .felt and acted upon as crucial in itself” (374). Readers involve themselves in that event and are transported by it.[7]

            Writing poetry, Whalen remarked in another interview, involves getting outside of one’s self:

I think you really have to be into some—capable of some funny—what Timothy Leary or somebody calls “trans-personative” conditions or states—you have to get out of yourself, some way or another, to get in, to operate, as a poet, or a painter, or a musician.  (Allen 1972, 45)

When the interviewer questioned Whalen about the trans-personative, Whalen spoke it of as “a state of freedom actually, of being untied from all of your usual paranoias . . . that you can suddenly move, or decide, or see something . . .” (46).[8] As I noted in a prior essay, that freedom requires the crucial capacity to get outside oneself, hence my reference to Longinus and the sublime, to transport.

            Whalen cites that capacity, in an off-handed but interesting way, in the “The War Poem for Diane Di Prima,” written on his first visit to Japan in 1966, during the Vietnam War. The poem opens inside a Japanese coffee shop, “conquered territory,” where the speaker mentions having looked in a bookstore for “something translated by R. H. Blyth” and citing a sign in the street, “Carefully written in English / YANKEE GO HOME” (CP 500). This prompts meditation on where home is, invoking, among several things, Shelly’s Prometheus Unbound. (Prometheus, recall, was married to Asia.) The poet returns “home,” to a rental but then to further explore issues of war, power, revolution and money, distinguishing the violence in Asia, a “temporary war,” from “Real War,” that is, distinguishing historical revolutions (French and Russian, for example, where tyrant replaces tyrant) from real revolution, which is “Immediate change in vision / Only imagination can make it work . . .” (503). This distinction is prefigured in Shelly by world-wide revolution and by the tyrant Jupiter confronting Eternity. A friend is said to argues no, that’s wrong, money is power, consider New York, but Whalen demurs, “the power’s gone somewhere else.” He narrows to his issue:

Powerful I watch the shadow of leaves
Moving over nine varieties of moss and lichen
Multitudes of dragonflies (all colors) the celebrated
Uguisu bird, and black butterfly: wing with trailing edge of red
brocade
(Under-kimono shown on purpose, as in Book of Songs)

I sail out of my head, incandescent meditations
Unknown reaches of clinical madness, I flow into crystal world
            of gems, jewels
Enlightened by granite pine lake sky nowhere movies of Judy
Canova                                                                        (CP 504)

It’s hard to assess this as a set of claims, for to speak of “reaches of clinical madness” and of becoming enlightened by cornball Judy Canova movies (e.g. Puddin’ Head or Scatterbrain) is evidence of Whalen’s clowning, yet also of his flexibility, of a distance beyond what is to all extent himself. And he does lift off, inside of the poem, to flow “into crystal world of gems,” again with gems as indices of value, “Out beyond the throne of time” as he writes in another poem (CP 731). It’s the poem itself, then, that testifies to his elevation, the heightened or inspired state. A reader doesn’t perhaps sail out with Whalen, yet “with any luck,” as he said, we get some feeling of that flow, the incandescence and excitement “about that existence or that understanding.”

            That elevation, we know, can be self-induced, although it likely takes practice, the every day. Below, in “Duerden’s Garage, Stinson Beach” (poet Richard Duerden’s garage, where Whalen stayed on his return from Japan), Whalen would induce such a state, as if by incantation:

Sweat, voluminous agey brain! Draw nearer and
Melt down in Poesy’s ravening violet flames            (CP 570)


Endnotes “Poesy’s ravening violet flames”: Whalen In Ekstasis, Part II

[1] In the 1965 Every Day, this poem is divided into eight parts by strings of nine asterisks, some parts further subdivided by a string of five asterisks or a straight line. The sectional use of asterisks was reduced to single asterisks in On Bear’s Head in 1969. In the Collected Poems, the editor follows On Bear’s Head, and that would seem Whalen’s intention, for Whalen proofread On Bear’s Head, and the editor of the Collected Poems worked with Whalen. But Whalen was in Japan when On Bear’s Head was prepared for publication, and several people were involved, Don Carpenter and Jim Koller, for example. Whalen also may have been pressured to change his typography to suit Harcourt, Brace & World. (For other details, see Schneider 211-16). I’ll observe the eight marked sections of the poem as they appeared in the 1965 edition, as I think that provides a richer text.

[2] Whalen spoke of composing from notebooks in a similar manner in a 1971 interview with Anne Waldman (Allen 13-4).

[3] Whalen seems to have had a life-long preoccupation with the relation between magic and poetry, as have many others, e.g. Rimbaud and Yeats. See, for instance, his “Birthday Poem,” especially pp 574-7.

[4] An earlier (1962) poem indicates this as a recurrent thought: “Certain teachings are whispered into the right ear, / others are murmured into the left; but the / most sacred and arcane of all must be blown into / the crown of the head, down through the sutures / of the skull bone” (CP 274).

[5] Ginsberg listened to Monk perform at the Five Spot in the late 1950s (Kerouac and Ginsberg 403, 412).

[6] As in George Herbert Mead (173-8). For a discussion of other writers on the topic of the “dialogic self,” see Wiley 26-33.

[7] For a detailed discussion of the underlying  factors involved here, see Stromberg, esp. pp. 76-96.

[8] “Transpersonative” was a key concept in experiments with communal LSD sessions that Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert conducted at the Zihuatanejo Center for Transpersonative Living in Mexico in 1962-3. One source of their inspiration was Aldous Huxley’s newly published Island (Stevens 184-200). Joseph Downing attributes the term itself to Alan Watts. Whalen knew and read Watts, but in The Diamond Noodle he attributes the term again to Leary (79).

Works Cited is available as a pdf file here.


Scala Hols pic1Bruce Holsapple is a retired speech-language pathologist living in central New Mexico. He earned a PhD from SUNY Buffalo in 1991 and has published essays on William Carlos Williams, Charles Reznikoff, John Clarke, and Philip Whalen. He has published seven books of poetry, most recently Wayward ShadowHis book-length study of Williams’s poetry, The Birth of the Imagination, was published by the University of New Mexico in 2016

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