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reed magazine logoWinter 2008
Language as Transient Act: the Poetry of Philip Whalen

Language as Transient Act: the Poetry of Philip Whalen

The poem, “In the Night,” for example, is a series of lines that are comparisons between dissimilarities, sounds Whalen hears at night which include demons and ghosts, Whalen running, an elephant, a hen, the Japanese wars of Onan:

“I FUCKING RAN”

*

“elephant and sunset”

*

“huge hen”

*

Lots of speed makes the surfboard slicker

Falling upward…

ONIN-NO-RAN (1467–1475)

Lots of speed. I fucking ran.

Civil wars more interesting than any other kind

America

The relation in this night space to (its) events and sights, real and imagined, is ‘actually’ only sound (such as a Japanese war, “ONIN-NO-RAN,” and “I fucking ran”). Everything that is left out, infinite numbers of sounds, also creates that space, of ‘actual’ referenced history and of night perceived by Philip Whalen. His only editorial remark in the poem is that, “The world is larger/More complicated than we can remember/And so we fall upward/Into a fake superiority.” That is, we order falsely when we summarize and explain, a hierarchical construct which conceals relation. So Whalen playfully orders on the basis of sound (similarity/dissimilarity at once), condensing to be only a view in history at once an observation on history…

The Beats also altered use of image to incorporate relativity. Ginsberg’s description in his Indian Journals of viewing the fire-enflamed corpses burning on the ghats on the Ganges is concentration on the disintegrating self as no entity of being, reflecting Hindu and Tibetan meditation methods. That is, his intention is not vivid image (is not fixation on the image as such) but rather language as transgression of the barrier between flesh (regarded as not an entity of self, there being none) and the filter of ‘our seeing,’ customary social behavior compartmentalizing experience. Ginsberg is breaking down the separation between optical seeing and (language which is to be) ‘seeing’ as changing conceiving. He used chanting (physical, hearing) to break down compartmentalizing of experience (such as customary description as subject). Sound in Ginsberg’s poetry gives an incantatory, visionary frame. . . .

I asked Whalen if his writing was the same as meditation: that is, if his writing was doing the same thing as the process of meditation as the ‘disjunctive present’ which is no-separation of self and outside, and does not form these (self or outside) either. He answered no, that writing is writing and meditation is itself. I take that to mean: Language is always an ordering device. Language can’t be the same as a state that does not rely upon any device and creates no entity, can’t be a state that hasn’t even language to rely upon (which is the characteristic of meditation). If the subject of writing is ‘being only a disjunctive present,’ the writing is not doing that, it would merely reproduce subject matter and division from it. Yet I think Whalen was using language to make being outside even what language is, let alone its conventional usage, while his poetry is based in language’s daily usage as speaking, thinking and fantasizing. The Beats as a movement were undertaking to undo convention of U.S. ‘seeing’ which continually reproduces ‘being’ divided from subject matter as subject matter. Whalen undertook that ‘undoing’ as the process of the language itself…

Excerpted from The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (Wesleyan University Press, 2007). A reading of Whalen’s poems will be held at Reed on March 29—events.reed.edu.

 

reed magazine logoWinter 2008