Everything about Philip Whalen totally explained
Philip Whalen (
October 20,
1923 –
June 26,
2002) was an
American poet,
Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the
San Francisco Renaissance and the
Beat generation.
Biography
Born in
Portland, Oregon, Whalen lived in
The Dalles, Oregon from age four until he returned to Portland in 1941. He served in the
US Army Air Forces during
World War II. He attended
Reed College on the
GI Bill. There, he met
Gary Snyder and
Lew Welch, and graduated with a
BA in
1951. He read at the famous
Six Gallery reading in
1955 that marked the launch of the West Coast Beats into the public eye. He appears, in barely fictionalized form, as the character "Warren Coughlin" in
Jack Kerouac's
The Dharma Bums (which includes an account of that reading), as well as in later Kerouac novels as "Ben Fagan".
Whalen's first interest in
Eastern religions centered on
Vedanta. Upon release from the army in
1946, he visited the Vedanta Society in Portland, but didn't pursue this very far, because of the expense of attending their countryside ashram.
Tibetan Buddhism also attracted him, but he found it "unnecessarily complicated." In
1952, Gary Snyder lent him books on
Zen by
D. T. Suzuki. Ultimately, Zen became his chosen path.
Whalen spent 1966 and 1967 in Kyoto, Japan, helped by a grant from
the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a job teaching English. There, he practiced zazen daily, and wrote some forty poems and a second novel.
He moved into the
San Francisco Zen Center and became a student of
Zentatsu Richard Baker in 1972. The following year, he became a monk. He became head monk, Dharma Sangha, in
Santa Fe, New Mexico in
1984. In 1987, he received transmission from Baker, and in
1991, he returned to San Francisco to lead the
Hartford Street Zen Center until forced by ill health to retire.
His books include
Off the Wall: Interviews with Philip Whalen (
1978),
Enough Said: 1974-1979 (
1980),
Heavy Breathing: Poems, 1967-1980 (
1983)
Two Novels (
1986), and
Canoeing up Cabarga Creek: Buddhist Poems 1955-1986 (
1995). In
1999,
Penguin Books published his
Overtime: Selected Poems. His Collected Poems will be released by
Wesleyan University Press in
2007. Both the collected and selected editions were edited by
Michael Rothenberg.
Further Information
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