School Soto Role Poet Lineage Shunryu Suzuki Education Reed College (1951) | Nationality American Awards American Book Awards Name Philip Whalen | |
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Born October 20, 1923
Portland, Oregon ( 1923-10-20 ) Title Poet
Zen Buddhist
Author Died June 26, 2002, San Francisco, California, United States Nominations National Book Award for Poetry Books The Collected Poems of, Overtime: Selected Poems, Like I Say: Poems, Lady Susan the Watsons, Scenes of life at the capital Similar People Lew Welch, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, Gregory Corso | ||
Philip whalen plums metaphysics an investigation a visit and a short funeral ode
Philip Glenn Whalen (20 October 1923 – 26 June 2002) was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance and close to the Beat generation.
Contents
- Philip whalen plums metaphysics an investigation a visit and a short funeral ode
- Usa poetry episode philip whalen and gary snyder
- Biography
- Poetry
- Prose
- References
Usa poetry episode philip whalen and gary snyder
Biography
Born in Portland, Oregon, Whalen grew up in The Dalles 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. In Big Sur he is called "Ben Fagan". Whalen's poetry was featured in Donald Allen's anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960.
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 did not 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. With Snyder, Whalen attended a study group at the Jōdo Shinshū Buddhist Church in Berkeley. Ultimately, Zen became his chosen path.
Whalen spent 1966 and 1967 in Kyoto, Japan, assisted 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 of 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 ill health forced him to retire.
Poetry
Both the Collected and Selected Poems were edited by Michael Rothenberg.