Subversive histories

American Poetry Review, The, Sep/Oct 1999 by Clark, Tom

The composing process and the narrative of the poetry, for Whalen, are often precariously elided, as he admitted in a deceptively lighthearted I964 squib titled "Composition": "I tetter I dangle I jingle/ Fidget with my fingers ears and nose/ Make little repairs-tape or glue/ And the floor is filthy again." The poet's candid admission of a rather regressive noodling or doodling as creative procedure is characteristic of his disarmingly self-deflating comedy.

Whalen's poetic strategy of inspired puttering seems to have derived in part from the spontaneous notation method of his friend Jack Kerouac, though in the polymathic scholar-poet's hands the instinct machine runs in an entirely different gear. While Kerouac heads out, Whalen tends to circle around slowly and return to certain obsessive themes and rhythms. His formal universe, as he advises John Cage in the poem quoted above, is not really unbounded space, but, like a tuned piano's, a "closed system."

Whalen's finicky, self-conscious, urbane, pointillist sketching features high detail-resolution. A patient reader will pick up on brilliant perceptual moments of stillness, clarity and depth that accumulate small shocks in contemplative micro-spaces. That unexpected, instantaneous "shift from opacity to brilliance" Whalen speaks of in his firewatching poem "Sourdough Mountain Lookout" encapsulates his stylistic signature: "The Zenbos say, `Lightning-flash & flint-spark."'

A self-acknowledged tendency to "bald-faced didacticism" in "moving from the particular to the general" sometimes pushes the vividly articulated moments of Whalen's poetry over the edge of their synapses toward wisdom, or beyond themselves into philosophical enlargement. The teacher in this poet lurks never too far beneath the surface of the amused or bemused observer.

Yet even the most generalizing of Whalen's poems has a way of turning itself inside-out with a deft, koan-like touch, as in "The Dharma Youth League," a small account of sudden enlightenmentwithin-confusion written in Kyoto in 1966:

However ironically self-distanced, Whalen's poems are haunted by an odd tone of disappointment, which lingers as a kind of shade around the focused light of many long, monastic "single room in the city" nights. The Whalen writing persona is lonely by fate, not by choice, and the sense of failure seems to have to do not with fame or success but with an inability to finally catch up with his poetry's elusive, magnetic Muse.

Half metaphor and half real if anonymous woman, this tantalizing Muse-figure, beckoning from behind a veil in the 1958 "Complaint: To the Muse" and from beyond an ocean of thought in the 1969 "Scenes of Life at the Capital," is finally encountered up close in Whalen's I97I Bolinas poems, prevailing over the local poets' landscape like a cross between a beguiling Circe and a garrulous Fairy Queen, "babbling on without making any sense at all."

The poet's Missing Muse, source of extended provocative absences and occasional, empty-headed yet spellbinding, "MAGNIFICENT" presence, is the secret heroine as well as the sublime enabler of Overtime. A reader who'd like to hear more about her might look up early Whalen collections, or the I959 Grove Press New American Poetry to discover her origins in love poems mysteriously excluded from this selection.