Whalen, Philip

Prolegomena to a Study of the Universe

Berkeley, CA: Poltroon Press, 1976. First Edition. Sewn Wrappers. “Buddha in an early sutra sets out one of Whalen’s essential poetic principles: ‘In what is seen there must be just the seen; in what is heard there must be just the heard; in what is sensed (as smell, taste or touch) there must be just what is sensed; in what is thought there must be just the thought.’...Truth, for Whalen, lies woven in the surface.” So writes one Kevin Power (a name, admittedly, that Your Devoted Managing Curator has not yet come across over his extensive Beat-scholarly travels) in the introduction to Philip Whalen's (1923-2002) predictably oblique-&-unique "Prolegomena to a Study of the Universe," issued by the Berkeley-based Poltroon Press at the height of the Second San Francisco Renaissance: 1976. It features nine prose poems, all of which--while clearly the product of monkish intellect--proceed with masterly assurance. Every once in a while, a Whalen lesson about awareness--perhaps in the form of a re-remembered koan (or related arcanity) that he littered about the landscape like a West Coast Basho strike the reader equipped to perceive them. Similar valuations of Whalen -- involving, as they do, actually working to understand the enthusiasm afforded him by [Allen] Ginsberg or [Gary] Snyder, for example -- are, to many, a Beat-readerly rite-of-passage. From the collection of the late Erin Black Matson, an artist & poet who was a close friend & associate-protege of Bonnie Bremser, Herbert Huncke & others. During the 1960s, Matson & her first husband, the acclaimed poet & educator (& our good friend & colleague at the European Beat Studies Network, ebsn.eu) were bona fide bohemian members of the Beat Generation as it was transitioning into the hippie counterculture. The condition (see below) of this issue befits (& in our estimation is enriched by) its history as the slightly beaten-down possession of a True Beat. In Good condition with moderate-to-pronounced toning, rubbing & spotting to front, back covers & fine-edges; moderate bumping, creasing to corners at same; presence of what appears to be the result of Erin's cats or other small creatures' nibblings present and reflected at lower right-hand corner of back cover and extending onto the final blank flyleaves of the chapbook (flyleaves on which--as the latter photographs in this listing show--Erin's fledgling efforts at Tibetan translation appear). Good. [Item #5032]

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