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Crowded by Beauty: The Life and Zen of Poet Philip Whalen
Philip Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and key figure in the literary and artistic scene that unfolded in San Francisco in the 1950s and ’60s. When the Beat writers came West, Whalen became a revered, much-loved member of the group. Erudite, shy, and profoundly spiritual, his presence not only moved his immediate circle of Beat cohorts, but his powerful, startling, innovative work would come to impact American poetry to the present day.
Drawing on Whalen’s journals and personal correspondence―particularly with Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Kyger, Welch, and McClure ―David Schneider shows how deeply bonded these intimates were, supporting one another in their art and their spiritual paths. Schneider, himself an ordained priest, provides an insider’s view of Whalen’s struggles and breakthroughs in his thirty years as a Zen monk. When Whalen died in 2002 as the retired Abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center, his own teacher referred to him as a patriarch of the Western lineage of Buddhism. Crowded by Beauty chronicles the course of Whalen’s life, focusing on his unique, eccentric, humorous, and literary-religious practice.
Drawing on Whalen’s journals and personal correspondence―particularly with Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Kyger, Welch, and McClure ―David Schneider shows how deeply bonded these intimates were, supporting one another in their art and their spiritual paths. Schneider, himself an ordained priest, provides an insider’s view of Whalen’s struggles and breakthroughs in his thirty years as a Zen monk. When Whalen died in 2002 as the retired Abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center, his own teacher referred to him as a patriarch of the Western lineage of Buddhism. Crowded by Beauty chronicles the course of Whalen’s life, focusing on his unique, eccentric, humorous, and literary-religious practice.
350 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 2015
4 people are currently reading
262 people want to read
About the author
David Schneider
17 books21 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Born in 1951 in Louisville, Kentucky, Tensho David Schneider was the first child of Marc, a Jew and engineer and Georgia, his southern Baptist sociologist mother. David rapidly acquired three sisters, the rudiments of a standard boomer education, and a bi-religious, Southern upbringing, involving. Saturday School and Sunday School. He grew up in Pittsburgh, PA .
He began to practice Zen meditation with a local group at Reed College, in Portland, OR and attended sesshins with Joshu Sasaki Roshi in 1970 and 71. In January, 1971, he met Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, and he says, that did it. In April of the same year, he saw Suzuki Roshi and Trungpa Rinpoche together at the San Francisco Zen Center, and that really did it
David dropped out of Reed College to move into Zen Center. He took up studies under Richard Baker Roshi, and in 1977, he received ordination as unsui or “cloud-water person.” He did many academic and practical jobs as part of community life there, which ran from 1972-85. The 1983 scandal at SF Zen Center led to the departure of Baker Roshi. In 1984, in the formal shuso ceremony, David was ordained as a head monk at the Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco.
In 1985 David was formally accepted by Trungpa Rinpoche as a student. He attended Vajradhatu Seminary in 1986 and staffed Seminary again in 1988.
David wrote Street Zen, a biography of Issan Dorsey, published in 1993 by Shambhala Publications, and again in 2000 by Marlowe. Street Zen won several prizes, included “Best Buddhist Book of the Year” in 1993. In 1994 he co-edited with Kazuaki Tanahashi a collection of zen stories, titled Essential Zen.
In 1995, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche appointed David Director of Shambhala Europe by, a position he held until 2003. David now works for Vajradhatu Publications Europe; he continues as well to pursue writing projects – currently, a biography of Beat poet and zen master Zenshin Philip Whalen – as well as calligraphy exhibitions. Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche appointed David to the post of acharya in 1996.
Born in 1951 in Louisville, Kentucky, Tensho David Schneider was the first child of Marc, a Jew and engineer and Georgia, his southern Baptist sociologist mother. David rapidly acquired three sisters, the rudiments of a standard boomer education, and a bi-religious, Southern upbringing, involving. Saturday School and Sunday School. He grew up in Pittsburgh, PA .
He began to practice Zen meditation with a local group at Reed College, in Portland, OR and attended sesshins with Joshu Sasaki Roshi in 1970 and 71. In January, 1971, he met Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, and he says, that did it. In April of the same year, he saw Suzuki Roshi and Trungpa Rinpoche together at the San Francisco Zen Center, and that really did it
David dropped out of Reed College to move into Zen Center. He took up studies under Richard Baker Roshi, and in 1977, he received ordination as unsui or “cloud-water person.” He did many academic and practical jobs as part of community life there, which ran from 1972-85. The 1983 scandal at SF Zen Center led to the departure of Baker Roshi. In 1984, in the formal shuso ceremony, David was ordained as a head monk at the Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco.
In 1985 David was formally accepted by Trungpa Rinpoche as a student. He attended Vajradhatu Seminary in 1986 and staffed Seminary again in 1988.
David wrote Street Zen, a biography of Issan Dorsey, published in 1993 by Shambhala Publications, and again in 2000 by Marlowe. Street Zen won several prizes, included “Best Buddhist Book of the Year” in 1993. In 1994 he co-edited with Kazuaki Tanahashi a collection of zen stories, titled Essential Zen.
In 1995, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche appointed David Director of Shambhala Europe by, a position he held until 2003. David now works for Vajradhatu Publications Europe; he continues as well to pursue writing projects – currently, a biography of Beat poet and zen master Zenshin Philip Whalen – as well as calligraphy exhibitions. Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche appointed David to the post of acharya in 1996.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
September 18, 2015
This big biography of Philip Whalen (1923–2003) brings the man, his vision, and his writings up close. Whalen, author of 14 books of poetry and six of prose novels and memoir, was an intimate of the West Coast writing scene for five decades. Though he lacked the charisma and ambition to become a popular figure, this book shows he is a major writer.
Fellow author and Zen priest David Schneider achieves this through healthy chapters on the friendships of Whalen with writers: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, and Michael McClure, and with Buddhist priest Richard Baker. Many other friendships come into play including those with poet Lew Welch and professor Lloyd Reynolds of Reed College, and such figures as Anne Waldman, Diane DiPrima, Robert Duncan, Neal Cassidy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Donald Allen, and others, many of whom he lived with temporarily in his rather open and transient lifestyle.
Chronology is not abandoned here; in fact, one which Whalen himself had partially prepared follows the author’s insightful introduction. And each of these detailed chapters on Whalen’s relationships follows their own chronology. The Zen of the title is necessary to understand the man and his work. Whalen had followed his own rambling woodsy and urban, intellectual and wild life patterns until 1972 when he moved into the San Francisco Zen Center and eventually became ordained by Richard Baker as a Zen priest.
Whalen comes across as a unique individual who had great sensitivity and humor (often self-deprecating), and boundless appreciation for people and music, places and literature. His love for Joanne Kyger, while she was in love with their friend Gary Snyder, reveals something of his sensitivity and innocence. His loose yet truthful writings are presented with understanding. Whalen’s unconventional lifestyle finally found an anchor in Zen Buddhism, which he practiced with serious intention for three decades.
The book is well documented with primary source material of Whalen’s own journals and prolific correspondence, as well as interviews with him and a host of others. A fine collection of photographs of Whalen and friends enlarges the portrait. One garners from this well written and sensitive biography of a key American author a sense of the energy and openness of the whole Beat and San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the 1950s to 1970s.
[This review also appeared in New York Journal of Books.]
Fellow author and Zen priest David Schneider achieves this through healthy chapters on the friendships of Whalen with writers: Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Joanne Kyger, and Michael McClure, and with Buddhist priest Richard Baker. Many other friendships come into play including those with poet Lew Welch and professor Lloyd Reynolds of Reed College, and such figures as Anne Waldman, Diane DiPrima, Robert Duncan, Neal Cassidy, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Donald Allen, and others, many of whom he lived with temporarily in his rather open and transient lifestyle.
Chronology is not abandoned here; in fact, one which Whalen himself had partially prepared follows the author’s insightful introduction. And each of these detailed chapters on Whalen’s relationships follows their own chronology. The Zen of the title is necessary to understand the man and his work. Whalen had followed his own rambling woodsy and urban, intellectual and wild life patterns until 1972 when he moved into the San Francisco Zen Center and eventually became ordained by Richard Baker as a Zen priest.
Whalen comes across as a unique individual who had great sensitivity and humor (often self-deprecating), and boundless appreciation for people and music, places and literature. His love for Joanne Kyger, while she was in love with their friend Gary Snyder, reveals something of his sensitivity and innocence. His loose yet truthful writings are presented with understanding. Whalen’s unconventional lifestyle finally found an anchor in Zen Buddhism, which he practiced with serious intention for three decades.
The book is well documented with primary source material of Whalen’s own journals and prolific correspondence, as well as interviews with him and a host of others. A fine collection of photographs of Whalen and friends enlarges the portrait. One garners from this well written and sensitive biography of a key American author a sense of the energy and openness of the whole Beat and San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the 1950s to 1970s.
[This review also appeared in New York Journal of Books.]
June 4, 2024
Philip Whalen was what used to be called a Man of Letters, back in the days when there were such people. In fact, as John Tarrant pointed out in Bring Me the Rhinoceros, Whalen was more or less an 18th century man, with his studious nature, his habit of letters, his bold and often bawdy opinions.[1] He had passed a bookish childhood in Oregon, where his sister recalls that he used to take “pounds” of books out of the library, and where he had read Shakespeare at the age of eight and was delving into Eastern thought just out of high school. There was no money for college, so he joined the service—in 1943, with World War II in full swing—but fortunately eluded combat and enrolled at Reed College on the GI Bill. He was older than the other undergrads, but met Gary Snyder there, who shared his interest in poetry and Eastern philosophy. They would remain lifelong friends.
Weirdly, though, even as an older student, Whalen didn’t thrive at Reed. He was one of those people (I’ve known a few) who wanted to spend his life reading and writing and felt the world should provide him with a living. There are ways to do that, of course—become a professor, or live as a freelancer and hook up with publications that pay decently—but Whalen was utterly impractical, seemed to think the world should discover him. His idea of getting along was to be entertaining and find a series of friends who would put him up. That worked better than I might have thought, but wasn’t a long-term plan.
He was part of the famous Howl reading that took place in San Francisco in the Fifties and remained friends with all of those folks throughout his life. Snyder first of all, because they met at Reed, but also Ginsberg (and his pal Jack Kerouac), Michael McClure, and Joanne Kyger (who wasn’t part of the reading but later married Snyder). Author David Schneider writes about these friendships first, in five chapters that take up the early part of the book, then moves back to a chronological account. That turns out to be a brilliant strategy. It was through his famous friends that Whalen himself became at least marginally famous; Ginsberg was great at promoting his buddies, Kerouac made Whalen a character in Dharma Bums; Snyder was immediately serious about both writing and Zen practice, McClure once went on tour with Whalen, and Joanne Kyger became a practicing Zennist and a lifelong poet. All of those folks were better at promoting themselves and connecting than Whalen. He often seemed hapless.
But he had a lifelong habit of writing in his journal and writing poems, also long letters to friends, and the work poured out of him; he was prolific throughout his early years. He found publishers, but often they were marginal places that might take months or years getting a book out and didn’t pay much when they did.
He had started meditating as far back as high school, and was reading up on Zen in those years too. Eventually he had two sojourns in Japan, the first with Gary Snyder, the second with Richard Baker, whom he had met when Baker worked at Grove Press. Whalen taught English to make a living in Japan, and was apparently good at that. But eventually his visa ran out, and his sponsor wasn’t interested in hiring him again, so he headed back to the states.
By that time Richard Baker was Abbott of the San Francisco Zen Center, and jumped Whalen over a number of people to give him a single room and, essentially, board, though he had some nominal job. Baker tended to be a tad dictatorial, but in this case had the excuse that Whalen was a famous poet and had been practicing Zen in his own haphazard way for years. For the first time in his adult life, Whalen had a place to live and good food to eat, dependably. It was a perfect situation; all he had to do was attend meditation a couple of times per day.
For some reason, his literary production dried up. It didn’t stop altogether, but he was no longer the prolific writer he had been as a homeless bohemian. Instead he ordained as a priest and eventually was head man at a couple of temples. He also followed Baker to Santa Fe when Baker was removed from his post for misconduct. Though Whalen was the older man, he always considered Baker his teacher. They stayed together until, at the end of his life, Whalen returned to the Bay area, which he loved.
That’s one puzzle in Whalen’s life, the fact that, when he finally had a settled living situation, his literary production nearly stopped. The other is his tepid sexuality. I had always assumed, because of various life circumstances, that Whalen was gay, but that isn’t true. When questioned about that—straight or gay? as people used to ask—he said he was polymorphously perverse, echoing what Freud said about infants, and sex didn’t seem terribly important to him, though he fell in love with women on several occasions, especially Joanne Kyger (there were no apparent crushes on men). Whalen did have a thing for booze and drugs, including psychedelics, though he moderated himself once he was a priest; his real problem area was food. He complained all his life that he was fat and couldn’t seem to do much about it.
David Schneider is a perfect person to have written this book. He ordained as a Zen priest himself, also in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki, and knew Whalen personally. He had actually written “another, earlier book about Philip Whalen—a journal of life with him at Zen Center, modeled roughly on Boswell’s chronicles of Samuel Johnson” (who was a lot like Whalen). Schneider makes the disarming statement that he “had no real goals beyond the pleasure and practice of writing.” When was the last time you heard that? An author wrote a book for the pleasure of it.
There is also a wonderful anecdote at the end of the volume when Schneider is with his new Buddhist teacher (Schneider bailed out when the shit hit the fan with Richard Baker, and didn’t follow him to Santa Fe), Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, who said to him “in a lively, crowded booth with several other people in a lively, crowded brewery in a midsize town in France on a warm evening” (how’s that for a compelling setting), “You know what’s wrong with you?” Of all the questions the teacher ever asks, that’s the one we would most like answered. What the hell is wrong with me?
“’I was thinking about it,’ [his teacher] said, looking into my eyes, tightening the focus around us in a way that eliminated any other time and place. ‘What’s wrong with you is that you’re not writing. You need to be writing. If you feel you can’t do it with everything else that’s going on, then I’—here he used a lengthy version of his name and one of his titles—‘am now formally giving you this as a practice to do.’”
How’s that for a perceptive teacher. What a moment.
Schneider is indeed an excellent writer, and this is a superb biography, despite its idiosyncratic structure. He’s found a way to present the living man, so that I knew him before I read through the chronological account; that filled in the details. Schneider has also written a collection of stories centered around spiritual practitioners of various kinds, and though that seems a limited market, the stories are quite lively too. They’re about a young man, sincere in his practice but living a young man’s life, and they’re surprisingly sexy (in contrast to the life of Philip Whalen). If these stories reflect the scene at the San Francisco Zen Center, I can only wish I’d been there. Schneider has continued as a teacher in the Shambhala lineage, but Trungpa had him pegged from the start. He’s first and foremost a writer.
[1] Tarrant had gone to visit Whalen in a hospice, where he was in poor health and nearly blind. He still had people coming to read to him, from Shakespeare and Boswell, Tristam Shandy and Gibbons’ Autobiography. Tarrant managed to assemble lunch of a salami sandwich and a bottle of good beer, and Whalen consumed these with gusto.
www.davidguy.org
Weirdly, though, even as an older student, Whalen didn’t thrive at Reed. He was one of those people (I’ve known a few) who wanted to spend his life reading and writing and felt the world should provide him with a living. There are ways to do that, of course—become a professor, or live as a freelancer and hook up with publications that pay decently—but Whalen was utterly impractical, seemed to think the world should discover him. His idea of getting along was to be entertaining and find a series of friends who would put him up. That worked better than I might have thought, but wasn’t a long-term plan.
He was part of the famous Howl reading that took place in San Francisco in the Fifties and remained friends with all of those folks throughout his life. Snyder first of all, because they met at Reed, but also Ginsberg (and his pal Jack Kerouac), Michael McClure, and Joanne Kyger (who wasn’t part of the reading but later married Snyder). Author David Schneider writes about these friendships first, in five chapters that take up the early part of the book, then moves back to a chronological account. That turns out to be a brilliant strategy. It was through his famous friends that Whalen himself became at least marginally famous; Ginsberg was great at promoting his buddies, Kerouac made Whalen a character in Dharma Bums; Snyder was immediately serious about both writing and Zen practice, McClure once went on tour with Whalen, and Joanne Kyger became a practicing Zennist and a lifelong poet. All of those folks were better at promoting themselves and connecting than Whalen. He often seemed hapless.
But he had a lifelong habit of writing in his journal and writing poems, also long letters to friends, and the work poured out of him; he was prolific throughout his early years. He found publishers, but often they were marginal places that might take months or years getting a book out and didn’t pay much when they did.
He had started meditating as far back as high school, and was reading up on Zen in those years too. Eventually he had two sojourns in Japan, the first with Gary Snyder, the second with Richard Baker, whom he had met when Baker worked at Grove Press. Whalen taught English to make a living in Japan, and was apparently good at that. But eventually his visa ran out, and his sponsor wasn’t interested in hiring him again, so he headed back to the states.
By that time Richard Baker was Abbott of the San Francisco Zen Center, and jumped Whalen over a number of people to give him a single room and, essentially, board, though he had some nominal job. Baker tended to be a tad dictatorial, but in this case had the excuse that Whalen was a famous poet and had been practicing Zen in his own haphazard way for years. For the first time in his adult life, Whalen had a place to live and good food to eat, dependably. It was a perfect situation; all he had to do was attend meditation a couple of times per day.
For some reason, his literary production dried up. It didn’t stop altogether, but he was no longer the prolific writer he had been as a homeless bohemian. Instead he ordained as a priest and eventually was head man at a couple of temples. He also followed Baker to Santa Fe when Baker was removed from his post for misconduct. Though Whalen was the older man, he always considered Baker his teacher. They stayed together until, at the end of his life, Whalen returned to the Bay area, which he loved.
That’s one puzzle in Whalen’s life, the fact that, when he finally had a settled living situation, his literary production nearly stopped. The other is his tepid sexuality. I had always assumed, because of various life circumstances, that Whalen was gay, but that isn’t true. When questioned about that—straight or gay? as people used to ask—he said he was polymorphously perverse, echoing what Freud said about infants, and sex didn’t seem terribly important to him, though he fell in love with women on several occasions, especially Joanne Kyger (there were no apparent crushes on men). Whalen did have a thing for booze and drugs, including psychedelics, though he moderated himself once he was a priest; his real problem area was food. He complained all his life that he was fat and couldn’t seem to do much about it.
David Schneider is a perfect person to have written this book. He ordained as a Zen priest himself, also in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki, and knew Whalen personally. He had actually written “another, earlier book about Philip Whalen—a journal of life with him at Zen Center, modeled roughly on Boswell’s chronicles of Samuel Johnson” (who was a lot like Whalen). Schneider makes the disarming statement that he “had no real goals beyond the pleasure and practice of writing.” When was the last time you heard that? An author wrote a book for the pleasure of it.
There is also a wonderful anecdote at the end of the volume when Schneider is with his new Buddhist teacher (Schneider bailed out when the shit hit the fan with Richard Baker, and didn’t follow him to Santa Fe), Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, who said to him “in a lively, crowded booth with several other people in a lively, crowded brewery in a midsize town in France on a warm evening” (how’s that for a compelling setting), “You know what’s wrong with you?” Of all the questions the teacher ever asks, that’s the one we would most like answered. What the hell is wrong with me?
“’I was thinking about it,’ [his teacher] said, looking into my eyes, tightening the focus around us in a way that eliminated any other time and place. ‘What’s wrong with you is that you’re not writing. You need to be writing. If you feel you can’t do it with everything else that’s going on, then I’—here he used a lengthy version of his name and one of his titles—‘am now formally giving you this as a practice to do.’”
How’s that for a perceptive teacher. What a moment.
Schneider is indeed an excellent writer, and this is a superb biography, despite its idiosyncratic structure. He’s found a way to present the living man, so that I knew him before I read through the chronological account; that filled in the details. Schneider has also written a collection of stories centered around spiritual practitioners of various kinds, and though that seems a limited market, the stories are quite lively too. They’re about a young man, sincere in his practice but living a young man’s life, and they’re surprisingly sexy (in contrast to the life of Philip Whalen). If these stories reflect the scene at the San Francisco Zen Center, I can only wish I’d been there. Schneider has continued as a teacher in the Shambhala lineage, but Trungpa had him pegged from the start. He’s first and foremost a writer.
[1] Tarrant had gone to visit Whalen in a hospice, where he was in poor health and nearly blind. He still had people coming to read to him, from Shakespeare and Boswell, Tristam Shandy and Gibbons’ Autobiography. Tarrant managed to assemble lunch of a salami sandwich and a bottle of good beer, and Whalen consumed these with gusto.
www.davidguy.org
January 13, 2016
Zen Master, Master Poet
A beautiful book about a beautiful person.
Imagine your life as one big museum. And there are certain artifacts and documents left behind which speak of a certain time in your life. Add to that 7 or 8 expert curators who each know and are eager to indulge the museum visitors with a certain aspect or phase of your life.
Crowded by Beauty is a bit like this. David Schneider successfully and elegantly weaves together the various strands of Philip Whalen's life, leaving us with not only a stunning portrait of the great beat poet and zen master but also a compelling and fascinating kaleidoscope of one of America's greatest poets and thinkers.
This is also a great book if you are interested in finding out information on Kerouac's time in San Francisco, Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger's relationship to Philip and Gary, the buddhistic brotherhood between Gary and Philip or anyone interested in the American lineage of Japanese Zen Buddhism will also be able to glean much exciting information from these pages.
Highly recommended.
A beautiful book about a beautiful person.
Imagine your life as one big museum. And there are certain artifacts and documents left behind which speak of a certain time in your life. Add to that 7 or 8 expert curators who each know and are eager to indulge the museum visitors with a certain aspect or phase of your life.
Crowded by Beauty is a bit like this. David Schneider successfully and elegantly weaves together the various strands of Philip Whalen's life, leaving us with not only a stunning portrait of the great beat poet and zen master but also a compelling and fascinating kaleidoscope of one of America's greatest poets and thinkers.
This is also a great book if you are interested in finding out information on Kerouac's time in San Francisco, Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger's relationship to Philip and Gary, the buddhistic brotherhood between Gary and Philip or anyone interested in the American lineage of Japanese Zen Buddhism will also be able to glean much exciting information from these pages.
Highly recommended.
August 16, 2017
"Causes are boiling away inside of ourselves...I believe that all of us feel a pressure in ourselves to respond to the mess the world is in, an experience of mutual suffering with all beings. 'Other people' is us. And Buddhism is you—what you are doing now, and how you are affecting the feelings of other people."
.
Wonderful biography of poet and Zen monk, Philip Whalen. These words from the last pages were very moving. A reminder that although the form is no longer composed, words, like ripples or the sound of a bell, continue unobstructed, transcending time and space.
.
Wonderful biography of poet and Zen monk, Philip Whalen. These words from the last pages were very moving. A reminder that although the form is no longer composed, words, like ripples or the sound of a bell, continue unobstructed, transcending time and space.
October 18, 2015
I received Crowded by Beauty: The Life and Zen of Poet Philip Whalen by David Schneider through a Goodreads giveaway. First off, don't let the lack of stars put you off. If you're interested in Philip Whalen or the beat poets (or even an insight into Buddhist practices), I think this might be a very enjoyable read for you. In fact, I enjoyed the content and would have given it four stars if it weren't for the author's stylistic choices. There were times things seemed just a bit disjointed and I wasn't exactly sure of the journey Schneider was trying to take me on, especially during Part I.
Despite that small concern, I found Philip Whalen to be a very interesting person indeed, and look forward to delving into some of his poetry as a follow up to reading his biography. If you've an interest in poetry, especially that of the beats, I'm sure you'd find this a fascinating read.
Despite that small concern, I found Philip Whalen to be a very interesting person indeed, and look forward to delving into some of his poetry as a follow up to reading his biography. If you've an interest in poetry, especially that of the beats, I'm sure you'd find this a fascinating read.
March 3, 2016
I really wanted to like this book, but unfortunately it was not really the case. Before reading this book, I hadn't heard of Philip Whalen, so for me this book was an introduction to the man and his work. I think the way the book is organized was my main problem. I would have preferred having a chronological presentation of his life at the beginning of the book. Of course for readers already familiar with Philip Whalen, the organization of the book may not be a problem at all.
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May 10, 2016Wonderful book. It helped me sort come of the Beat poets out, things I knew much about but not the specifics. It sheds light on the San Francisco Zen Center happenings and Whalen's last teaching post at the Hartford Street Zen Center. A crotchety, studious person, no one was less adapted to corporate America, and thus a role model and teacher!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews