Unhurried Vision

by Michael Rothenberg

Unhurried Vision continues Michael Rothenberg's experiment with the journal, a record of a year--The Millennium, but slower, without the fanfare, evenings before falling asleep, sometimes half asleep, taking down fragments as they surfaced, dating them, and going on. This is the year that Philip Whalen became terminally ill and Rothenberg began taking care of him on a daily basis, editing his book of selected poems, Overtime, organizing events to celebrate its publication, and pulling together Whalen's archives and library. Political, personal, and romantic, Unhurried Vision works to savor the impermanent, looking at the moments in a poet's life, contemplating the body of experience. It is the mind on a quiet stroll through longing, loss and beauty. "Unhurried Vision, a year in the life of Michael, is really a deeply loving celebration & farewell to mentor Philip Whalen, poet, roshi, & all around confounder of boundaries. A day-book; a non-epic odyssey through routes & roots of living & dying; a gastronome's pleasure dome, but above all a deeply stirred & stirring affirmation of poetry's centrality in realizing mundane & profound instances in the everyday extraordinary. Rothenberg's raw footage is disarming, sly, self-effacing, proclaiming, doubting, affirming."--David Meltzer

117 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2003