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 Corps during World War 2. 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.
Whalen became a Zen Buddhist monk in 1973 and was asssociated 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 Francsco 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).
External links
- Whalen homepage at the EPC (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/whalen/)
- Tributes and poem (http://tomraworth.com/whalen.html)
- Essay on Whalen (http://jacketmagazine.com/11/whalen-intro.html)nl:Philip Whalen