Tricycle | Awake in the World

Philip Whalen is probably best known as one of the readers introduced by Kenneth Rexroth at the Six Gallery in San Francisco forty years ago, an event that launched the Beat Scene in San Francisco. Presently the abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco, Whalen’s magnificent poetry has remained largely invisible in literary America, turning up in Beat anthologies but virtually ignored by the literary mainstream.

I would nevertheless assert Whalen’s rightful place among the most vital and original poets of the past half-century. This slim volume presents a selection of overtly Buddhist poems written between 1955 and 1986, and while it is, poem by poem, a treasure trove, I couldn’t help but wish for a more generous selection.

Why, for instance, is Whalen’s marvelous poem “For Brother Antoninus” not included?