Reading Philip Whalen

[para. 1]: "I first read Philip Whalen's poetry in the late Spring of 1995. Although much of his work was out of print, I was lucky to find several used books in various San Francisco bookstores. The first one I picked up, entitled The Kindness of Strangers, was a collection of poems written from the mid 1960's through the early 70's. As a young poet new to the West Coast, I was unfamiliar with much of the work produced during the San Francisco Renaissance. Upon first reading Whalen's poetry I was drawn into the movement and range of his lines while simultaneously being thrown off balance. Associative leaps moved from the particular details of experience and perception to the distant echoes and ephemera of his memory. I came to understand that this is how he thinks against the mind, by organizing coherent poems from moments made of dissimilar compositional units in space and time. The sound in the work, conjoined with the poetic imagination, clarifies a voice that simultaneously diverges, pulling the outside in while pushing the internal habits, fetishes, desires, and personal interests to the poem's surface."