Overtime: Selected Poems (Poets, Penguin) [Paperback]

Philip Whalen (Author)

Book Description

Series: Poets, Penguin | Publication Date: May 1, 1999

Like his college roommate Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen took both poetry and Zen seriously. He became friends with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Michael McClure, and played a key role in the explosive poetic revolution of the '50s and '60s. Celebrated for his wisdom and good humor, Whalen transformed the poem for a generation. His writing, taken as a whole, forms a monumental stream of consciousness (or, as Whalen calls it, "continuous nerve movie") of a wild, deeply read, and fiercely independent American-one who refuses to belong, who celebrates and glorifies the small beauties to be found everywhere he looks. This long-awaited Selected Poems is a welcome opportunity to hear his influential voice again.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Palpably realistic, Boswellian in detail, by turns cranky, amused, hungry or sated with experience, Whalen's verse remains uniquely personal, an artifact of one man's creative energy. A Buddhist abbot known for early, California friendships with Gary Snyder, Lew Welch and Allen Ginsberg (see Dharma Bums for Kerouac's impressions of those relationships), Whalen has remained in San Francisco for most of his career, a fact wonderfully reflected in his daybook-like verse: "I always say I won't go back to the mountains/ I am too old and fat there are bugs mean mules/ And pancakes every morning of the world." Gertrude Stein, Samuel Johnson, William Carlos Williams, Lady Murasaki and Japanese Zen practices are all perceptible influences, and even an evangelical urgency enters Whalen's verse at times, with a backwoods conviction in the virtues of conversion. But true to his credo, "I shall be myself," Whalen, critical and ironic, soars "free, a genius, an embarrassment/ like the Indian, the buffalo/ like Yellowstone National Park." As many of Whalen's books have dropped out of print, this generous volume, introduced by poet and critic Scalapino, and chronologically organized and selected by poet Rothenberg, is long overdue. It helps reacquaint us with a key figure who continues to work toward social and personal transformation.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics) (May 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 014058918X
• ISBN-13: 978-0140589184
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #221,947 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Brainy Beat, December 11, 2002

By 

Arch Llewellyn "arch-l" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Overtime: Selected Poems (Poets, Penguin) (Paperback)

I didn't know much about Whalen's poetry until he died this year, but the terrific memorial reading for him here in San Francisco drove me to "Overtime" and man, what a find. The Beats were more learned than the 'first thought, best thought' aesthetic suggests, and Whalen's poems balance religion, philosophy and cranky Zen insight with a casual, conversational Americanese in a way few of his more famous contemporaries could touch. His poems draw from a deep past that embraces everything from ancient Chinese verse to classical music, but insist that it walk down the street in T-shirt and jeans. Whalen spent the last three decades of his life at the San Francisco Zen Center--his particular brand of Buddhism, so generous to human failings (starting always, comically, with his own) and never, ever doctrinaire, has to be one of the most attractive spins on Eastern religion I've read. Whalen was in it and of it, never above it. He gives the moment plenty of wiggle room in his writing, so that cats, friends and silly thoughts can all stray into the poems without being shoo'd out for art. Whatever Beat meant, Whalen shows it in about its best light. Poetry's a little thinner and more straight-laced with him gone.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Run to your nearest bookseller and demand this book!, November 25, 1999

By 

Suzi Winson (NY, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Overtime: Selected Poems (Poets, Penguin) (Paperback)

Philip Whalen is a national treasure, one of our most important living poets. This collection, masterfully assembled by Michael Rothenberg, is a great place to start if you're not familiar with Whalen's work, and a glorious visiting ground for those of us who have already discovered him. Don't let the word POETRY dissuade you. You will not be bored for a minute.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Big Zen Ha Ha (from Ahadada Books), June 14, 2008

By 

M. Hori "Jesse Glass" (Urayasu, Chiba Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Overtime: Selected Poems (Poets, Penguin) (Paperback)

If, as Leslie Scalapino suggests in the introduction to this book, Philip Whalen's poetry is about how his consciousness worked and utilized language, so that each poem is a gestalt of his thinking in process, then I think we must add that Big ZEN HA HA is present, ever-present in the articulate artifacts this poet of the hole-in-the-shoe and the shaven head (and I hear sadly mortal heart gunked up and out of incarnation by casual eating habits) left behind. Every turn of a trope ends in an undercutting of intention and meaning in the same way that the polyvalency of BIG ZEN HA HA (think "koans" here), undermines single meaning in every sacral utterance of Zen scripture. Of the See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil, Big Three of Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, we pretty much understand the hooks on which Snyder and Welch hung their tambourines, but it's Whalen who seems the reticent, self-effacing, hard to clearly define (just as Zen is), guy. He comes across sometimes as a New York School Poet (though lacking the sophistication of an Ashbery or O'Hara but including all their allusions to pop culture), and sometimes as a collagist of texts, in a kind of casual West Coast surrealism, but always as a 5-to-75 cent word nihilist, ready with a stick of BIG ZEN HA HA to shatter the prisms he stacks up so carefully before phenomena to liberate the pure light of the momentary mind. (And sometimes his verbal gestures remind me of the outsider texts, as well as the outsider stance of Harry Partch.) I'm still reading Whalen's Overtime news, hoping to stick around long enough to hear him whine for a toy early in his next incarnation on the streets of Tomorrow.