“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.
As 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:
I 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.
Bruce 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 Shadow. His 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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