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"Goldberry Is Waiting"; or, P.W., His Magic Education as a Poet

by PHILIP WHALEN

When I was in high school I wrote for the fun and excitement of writing. Later on — after I learned that I couldn't go to college and learn medicine — I seriously tried to make myself into a writer, a professional novelist. I believed that I could write fairly correctly; I had learned a great deal about English grammar and composition by studying French and Latin and doing lots of translations, dramatic adaptations, parodies, poems, essays and stories. I supposed that the next thing I must do was to acquire a sparkling and witty style which the editors of magazines should find irresistible. I spent more time reading and working as an office boy than I did at writing, however.

Then I went into the Army Air Corps. While I sloppily soldiered along, I continued to write poems and stories. My comrades in arms (recruited from various colleges and universities) set me to reading Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Huxley and Thomas Wolfe. Reading Wolfe encouraged me immensely. I, too, came from a poor family; we lived in the remote section of the country, far from the intellectual life of New York and Paris. And my family and their friends had a fine, salty way of speaking... I began writing page after page of romantic description and farm gossip and native folk speech.

whalen and ginsberg in 1971

I discovered I was a sensitive genius from the Oregon woods whose beautiful writings would bring immortal fame and lots of money.

I wrote lots of unfinished (and almost illegible) manuscripts, hundreds of letters to my family and friends, long intellectually searching journals and worries and recollections, but no novels. I wrote poems from time to time, using every technique I had seen other poets use. I played with words and experimented with them, trying to find out what they would do and what they would let me say. At this time (1943) a friend of mine sent me a copy of Gertrude Stein's Narration. Reading the book gave me great encouragement and pleasure. I read as many of her books as I could find.

I wanted style. I wanted a theory of writing. I wanted to be able to explain, to whoever asked me, how come I should be a writer and why writing was so important to me. I also wanted a completely believable philosophy of life. I was having trouble interpreting my religious feelings — if that's what they were; perhaps they were only some kind of Druid backlash from all my antique Irish genes, I didn't know.

I thought of myself as a "modern" agnostic rationalist: were not all religions merely a confection of superstitution and lies which were imposed upon the ignorant in order to make them obedient to authority? On the other hand, music and poetry and pictures and novels could move me profoundly. I would experience exaltations, "highs," and strange knowledges which seemed to correspond with what I had read about in the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita.

After the war I met a number of people at Reed College who were interested in writing and who were producing the school literary magazine. They persuaded me that it was no longer possible for anyone to seriously write poetry. Yeats and Eliot, Rilke and Pound had said all there was to say, quite perfectly. There was no more poetry to be had. There was no more in the well.

I was, as I say, persuaded — but from time to time I'd forget my despair and sophistication and write a poem. I found that I could at least finish poems, whether they were any good or not, whereas I seemed unable to invent a solid prose style. (I was continuing to work at making myself into a novelist.) Professor Lloyd Reynolds was most encouraging. I took his classes in creative writing. He taught us by using great examples: Joyce, Blake & Williams — and by his great enthusiasm for good writing in every genre. He succeeded in changing my mind about the hopelessness of writing poems or anything else in this late and decadent period of the world; his encouragement and advice and friendship cut through all the fogs and megrims which I had contracted from reading the "New Criticism" and The Partisan Review.

PW & Anne Waldman

It was towards the end of this period that Williams Carlos Williams arrived — in person — to dispel what remained of those brumes and mists. He was interested in what we had to say. He made us feel like poets, not students any more; he talked to us as if we were his equals. It was at that point, I think, that I really could begin to take myself seriously as a writer.

Being an American, I imagined that life was a matter of owning things, having things. I wanted a family and a house and many books and musical instruments and cars and boats and a little place in the mountains and a small shack near the ocean. I suppose I was remembering all the Esquire magazines I had read back in 1937 and 1938. I thought that if I could just write a fine big novel and send it off to Harpers or Scribners in New York, they could not fail to accept it and print it and so my fortune (in the shape of this extravagant Esquire life) should be made.

Having all these illusions made it difficult for me to work at an ordinary job for any length of time. After working for a few months, I'd quit and spend perhaps a week buying books and squandering what money I had made, then I'd write for a few days but no novel came of it all. Soon I would be penniless and begging all my friends for help. I needed time to write. The time seemed only to be had for money. I had no money; therefore I couldn't write anything so I had better move out of my friend's attic (or basement or guest room or garage or backyard or living room) and get another job and make some money. There was usually someplace I wanted to go, someplace where I thought that I could live quietly alone and write... and there were usually some books I had to have very soon.

with ginsberg

If my friends had not helped me, I should have starved or gone, at last, to the nuthouse. They fed and clothed and housed me, arranged poetry readings for me, got my work published and reviewed, made other people buy my books, and now they faithfully write letters to me, which I answer promptly. These experiences made me realize that I didn't need money in order to write: what I needed was love and poetry and pictures and music in order to live.

This knowledge not only freed me from a lot of old hangups, it also changed my feeling towards poetry and all the other arts. I saw that poetry didn’t belong to me, it wasn’t my province; it was older and larger and more powerful than I, and it would exist beyond my life-span. And it was, in turn, only one of the means of communicating with those worlds of imagination and vision and magical and religious knowledge which all painters and musicians and inventors and saints and shamans and lunatics and yogis and dope fiends and novelists heard and saw and "tuned in" on. Poetry was not a communication from ME to ALL THOSE OTHERS, but from the invisible magical worlds to me... everybody else, ALL THOSE OTHERS, "my" audience, don’t need what I say; they already know.

I had been very worried about theories and philosophies and orthodoxies; I now perceived that I had had far too many; so many, that I had been separated from my own senses, my own real experience of the natural world. (It took a great deal of experimentation and study and thought to find out the true nature and function of my various senses and faculties.) The impulse to write had overthrown all my theories as well as the question of "Where does it come from?"

allen ginsberg, philip whalen & william burroughs

People tell me that it must be very difficult to write, to be a writer. I no longer argue the point with them. I can only say here that I like doing it. I also enjoy cutting and revising what I've written, for in the midst of those processes I often discover images and visions and ideas which I hadn’t been conscious of before, and these add thickness and depth and solidity to the final draft, not simply polish alone.

In the act of revision and complication and turmoil, a funky nowhere piece of writing can suddenly pick up and become an extraordinary, independent creature. It escapes from my too certain, too expert control. It frees itself not only from my grasp but also from my ego, my ambition, my megalomania... simultaneously, the liberation of a piece of writing liberates myself from these delusionary systems. Ideally, the writing will give the reader that same feeling of release, freedom and exaltation: a leap, a laugh, a high.

"How long does it take you to write a poem," people often ask. "How much revising do you go through before you consider a poem finished? How many drafts?" No matter how I answer these questions, the inquirers always look disappointed afterwards. It is impossible to describe how poems begin. Some are simply imagined immediately, are "heard," quite as if I were hearing a real voice speaking the words. Sometimes I "hear" a poem in this way and it is a complete statement, a complete verbal or literary entity. Sometimes the same imagination provides me with single lines or with a cluster of lines which is obviously incomplete. I write them down and put them away.

Maybe a few hours later I'll "receive" more lines. Perhaps they won’t arrive until weeks or months go by. Some of my long poems took years to come, and then it took a few days or weeks in which to revise and fit all their pieces together.

Some poems arrive as dreams. Others being from memories. Some start out of the middle of a conversation I’m involved in or words that I overhear other people speaking. An imagination of the life of some historical person may occur to me: I may suddenly suppose I understand what it felt like to be Johannes Brahms on a particular morning of his life.

A landscape, a cat, a relative, a friend, a letter (or the act of answering a letter), walking, the unexpected receipt of a new poetry magazine full of work by new young writers, the arrival of a new book of poems by a friend or somebody I don’t know personally; re-reading Shakespeare or reading Emily Dickinson on the streetcar and suddenly moved to tears; shopping for vegetables, making love, looking at pictures, taking dope, sitting still and looking at whatever is happening in front of me, getting haircut, being afraid of everybody and everything, hating everybody, playing music, going to parties, visiting relatives, riding in trains, buses, taxis, steamboats, riding horses, getting drunk, dancing, praying, practicing mediation, singing, rolling on the floor, losing my temper, looking for agates, arguing, washing sox, teaching, sweeping the floor, operating this typewriter right now (bought in Berkeley 12 years ago and wrote ten books on it) which the cicadas and taxis all sing in ravening hot Japanese summer 1967... all this is how to write, all this is where poems are to be found. Writing them is a delight.

People tell me, "Of course, writing prose is a great deal different, isn't it." I don't think so. I finally found the novel, You Didn't Even Try, while I was walking in the woods in Mill Valley. First I had a page of dialog between some man and his wife — they had no names then. For a number of weeks it went no further; I wasn't thinking of writing a novel; I was worried about too many other things.

Then one day as I walked along through the woods I recalled that scrap of imaginary conversation. I began to see who the speakers were, where they were, and I could see or feel what they would do, and I suddenly knew that it could be arranged in three sections, three blocks of prose. The "blocks of prose" would each have a specific weight and shape and color. I wrote many independent sections and paragraphs in the succeeding days. The book wasn't written in sequence: I didn't start with the first sentence and end with the final one. Instead I wrote a great deal of material and then fitted it together to form the first edition of the book. The same technique was used to write the other two sections. The whole manuscript was typed and revised, then I could do no more with it until it had to be preapred for the press. At that time, my friend, Zoe Brown went through the manuscript and pointed out places in which the language or sense appeared to break down. I repaired them as best I could. The result is, I think, not a very good book, but sort of an interesting one.

At one point a friend of mine read the incomplete manuscript and asked me a question about how did one of the characters find the money to do something. The result of this question was the invention of a new character and a couple new scenes for the book, none of which I had planned on, and I was surprised to find the character already there in my mind, I had no trouble writing about her or the scenes in which she appears.

ginsberg in india

The novel which I completed earlier this year, Imaginary Speeches for a Brazen Head, began to be written while I was sitting in a bar in Kyoto. The place has a large and powerful stereophonic phonograph on which they play recordings of new American jazz. I sat listening and feeling homesick and so I began writing about an American couple in a hotel room in London. They weren't feeling homesick, but they were having lots of other feelings. Later I began trying to figure out how they got to London and where they were going next and what was their life like before and after, and who did they know and how. I had no architectural plan this time, I didn't know how long it would take — either in time of composition or in number of pages of writing — to tell all about these people.

And I did want to tell all. And what, after all, did I really know. I had to invent London and Vienna and Katmandu and someplace in Ceylon and some places in Oregon and California and Massachusetts and Colorado, and that was difficult. But finally I wrote it all, then I typed and corrected it all, and then, to my horror, I found that I had to correct and retype it all again, although I very nearly couldn't, I hated typing and thinking and keeping the whole story in my head continuously. Maybe some day it will be printed.

Writing this present essay or message or cri de coeur began several weeks ago. On July 9th I began writing what has become 48 pages of longhand notes, in reply to the request of Mr. Donald M. Allen that I write something about writing. I selected and condensed some of this material into three and a half typewritten pages on the 17th of July, but this typewritten version only suggested more ideas, recollections and fancies. This morning, 23 July, I wrote the final longhand notes and then began this typescript, adding and cutting as I went along. The idea of telling about the novels and the writing of this present essay occurred to me after I had typed five and a half pages. I must correct all of this and recopy it. Did I say that I did it by asking myself, "How do you do it?"

Philip Whalen died in 2002.

"Invocation and Theophany" - Philip Whalen (mp3)

"Monday in the Evening" - Philip Whalen (mp3)

"Letter to Michael McClure" - Philip Whalen (mp3)

more PW at PennSound

at the edge of night all thoughts to place of love

all worries to this place of love

all gestures to the place of love

- Anne Waldman