The Beat Century — post 22 of 100. Philip Whalen, On Bear’s Head (1969).

Cover of On Bear's Head by Philip Whalen — On Bear’s Head, 1969. Cover image via Open Library.

Twenty years of work in one volume from a poet who defined the poem as a graph of a mind moving, published in 1969 and reviewed by Lew Welch, who called it the moment Whalen became accessible to all.

Philip Whalen wrote the most useful single sentence anyone in his circle produced about what they were doing. In a press release dated October 1959, asked to explain himself, he offered: this poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving, which is a world body being here and now which is history and you. Everything difficult about On Bear’s Head follows from taking that definition literally, which is how he meant it.

The book appeared in 1969 from Harcourt, Brace & World in association with Coyote, and it gathered more than twenty years of work into one volume — effectively the collected Whalen at the midpoint of his life, and the first time a reader could get the whole shape of him without hunting small presses.

What a Graph of a Mind Looks Like

If the poem is a graph rather than a statement, then its job is to record the movement of attention including the parts that go nowhere. Whalen’s poems accordingly digress, break off, note the weather, quote a book he happens to be holding, complain, and resume. Nothing is tidied afterwards, because tidying would falsify the instrument.

The comparison his method invites is to calligraphy, and it is not a coincidence: Whalen studied the discipline under Lloyd Reynolds at Reed College, and a brush stroke is likewise a record of a gesture that cannot be revised without becoming a different stroke. Many of his poems were composed in his own hand and reproduced that way. The page is a trace of an event rather than a container for a conclusion.

The definition also quietly disposes of the distinction between a poem’s subject and its circumstances. If the graph records a mind that is a world body being here and now, then the ambient noise — the room, the date, the interruption, the thing the poet was eating — is not background to the poem but part of the data being plotted. This is why Whalen can seem to have no subjects. He has one, continuously, and it is the only one his premises allow him.

Lew Welch’s Review

The most valuable contemporary notice came from inside the house. Lew Welch, who had roomed with Whalen and Gary Snyder at Reed twenty years earlier, reviewed On Bear’s Head in the San Francisco Chronicle on 22 June 1969. He called it an important book and wrote that one of the century’s most brilliant poets was at last accessible to all.

Welch’s characterisation of how Whalen works remains the best short account of it: that he reaches us mostly through wit and a cranky insistence upon joy. The crankiness is essential to the formula and usually gets dropped by admirers who prefer their Zen poets serene. Whalen is funny, irritable, self-deprecating and frequently bored, and the joy in him is a position held against evidence rather than a temperament.

The Quiet One at the Six Gallery

Whalen was one of the five poets who read at the Six Gallery in October 1955, the evening that launched the West Coast Beats into public view and that is remembered almost entirely for Ginsberg’s Howl. He was born in Portland, Oregon, on 20 October 1923, served in the Army from 1943 to 1946, and took his degree at Reed on the G.I. Bill in 1951, where his interest in Asian philosophy began.

Kerouac put him into The Dharma Bums in barely fictionalised form as Warren Coughlin, in a novel that includes its own account of the Six Gallery night. Being a supporting character in someone else’s bestseller is a mixed inheritance, and in Whalen’s case it fixed a public image of amiable background presence that his own work does not support.

The Poet Who Became an Abbot

Whalen’s Buddhism was not an aesthetic. He moved to the San Francisco Zen Center in 1972, was ordained a monk in 1973, served as head monk at Dharma Sangha in Santa Fe in 1984, received dharma transmission in 1987, and led the Hartford Street Zen Center from 1991 until ill health forced his retirement. He died in San Francisco on 26 June 2002, aged seventy-eight.

This trajectory clarifies the poems rather than replacing them. A practice built on watching the mind without editing what it produces is the same discipline as a poetry that graphs a mind moving, and Whalen arrived at the poetics roughly fifteen years before he formally took up the religion. The vocation was already implicit in the method.

Why He Is the Beat Poet People Skip

Whalen offers a reader almost nothing to be excited by. There is no scandal, no prosecution, no disappearance, no myth of speed — only a very intelligent man writing down what it was like to be conscious on a particular afternoon, at length, for fifty years. The Beat titles that sell are the ones with a story attached, and Whalen’s story is that he sat still.

That is precisely his value in a Beat sequence. He is the demonstration that the movement’s central technical idea — spontaneous composition, the unrevised record of mind — could be pursued rigorously by someone with no interest in performing wildness. Kerouac theorised spontaneous prose and then produced myth. Whalen just kept the instrument running and let the graph accumulate.

On Bear’s Head is consequently a book to be opened rather than read through, which is a genuine difficulty and not a fault to be argued away. Twenty years of a mind’s weather is more weather than most readers want at once, and the volume rewards the person who treats it as a place to visit at intervals over years. The later gathering of the collected poems from Wesleyan made the same case at greater length. Whalen’s readership has always been small, and it has never stopped renewing itself, which is roughly the outcome his poetics would predict.

This poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving, which is a world body being here and now which is history … and you.

Philip Whalen, “Since You Ask Me (A Press Release, October 1959)”

Where to go next

Follow it with Lew Welch’s Ring of Bone and Gary Snyder’s early work — the other two poets from the Reed College house — and with The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen from Wesleyan for the full graph.

Previous: Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Next: Carolyn Cassady, Off the Road. One hundred books from the Beat Generation and the writers around them — the ones who got famous, the ones who got written out, and the ecological writing that grew out of the same soil. A new one every other day.

Sources

CD Damitio

CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA

CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.

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