William Corbett: The Whalen Poem

Boston-based poet, editor, publisher and teacher at MIT, William Corbett composed this book-length poem, he writes in his introduction, over the summer and autumn of 2007 while in Vermont reading an advanced copy of the collected poems of Philip Whalen (1923-2002) [See sidebar]. The result is truly a poem for summer, as flighty as a hummingbird, now pausing, now darting too fast to follow to the next luminous blooming. The poem's fluidity offers a delightful ride if one is willing to go along with it.

Corbett's economy of language gives him the facility to flit between images, allusions and occurrences, be they personal or seasonal, and his wide ken allows him to track events on several planes at once: "Suddenly field goes goldenrod/ Skunks dig grubs/ Henry's Birthday/ You hear crickets/ Grass grows slower/ Earwigs scurry/ Arden's Birthday..." he writes, in a catalog of natural and personal time.

Whalen seems to be a spiritual adviser for this poem, a teacher who proved that the paths of the mind, traced mindfully, can be poetry. A few specific references to Whalen are evident, as when Corbett cites an inscription from what one assumes is Whalen's collected poems: "Whalen 204/ Up the right margin-...Handwritten August 15, 1961.../ Beautiful penmanship/ Handground ink/ He can do what he wants/ He does."

The Whalen Poem displays an open-ended lyricism that resists closure with the awareness - the insistence - that nothing is ever over, life or a work of literature.

The Whalen Poem
By William Corbett
Hanging Loose Press
61 pages

Philip Whalen (1923-2002)

The inspiration for Corbett's poem, American poet Philip Whalen was a key member of the San Francisco Renaissance, which included Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and other writers often classified as the Beat Generation. After moving to San Francisco from Portland, Oregon, Whalen participated in the legendary Six Gallery Reading, where Ginsberg first read "Howl." Whalen spent two years in Kyoto in the mid-1960s and moved into the San Francisco Zen Center in 1972, where he later became a Buddhist monk. The author of some 17 books of poetry, Whalen is considered a key American poet.

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com