Philip Whalen
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Philip Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002) was a poet and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat generation.
Born in Portland, Oregon, Whalen served in the US Army Air Forces during World War II. He attended Reed College with 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 Fagin".
Whalen became a Zen Buddhist monk in 1973 and was associated with the San Francisco Zen Center during the controversial tenure of Zentatsu Richard Baker. He became head monk, Dharma Sangha, in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1984, and in 1991, he returned to San Francisco to lead the Hartford Street Zen Center.
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.
[edit] References
- Charters, Ann (ed.). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books. New York. 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hc); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (pbk)
