Here’s a book we’ve been waiting for (for more than a decade now) and we’re thrilled to declare that it’s finally available, Bowed Some, Chanted A Little.. Brian Unger‘s edition of Philip Whalen‘s Zen Journals, from the University of Alabama Press (type in the code BAMA and you get a 30% discount!)
“Philip Whalen (1923–2002)”, the publishers note, “authored twenty collections of verse, more than twenty broadsides, two novels, a huge assemblage of autobiographical literary journals, nine or ten experimental prose works, and dozens of critical essays, lectures, commentaries, introductions, prefaces, and interviews. But he came to regard his literary journals as his most important prose legacy.”
“Whalen’s literary work”, they go on, “represents a significant turn in American letters,
as he and his closest colleagues immersed themselves in East Asian literature and religion, reinvigorating strikingly new linguistic and aesthetic paths for North American writers and artists. However, until now Whalen’s forty-plus years of journals – sixty small eight-by-six-inch notebooks – have been largely inaccessible, archived in the rare book and manuscript library at the University of California, Berkeley, undigitized and unavailable online. Thus, the publication of a critical scholarly edition of Whalen’s journals and notebooks constitutes an important literary event and an invaluable resource for scholars, teachers, poets, and lay readers” – (Whalen was, of course, a roshi, an ordained Zen priest) – “who follow twentieth-century North American poetry.”
Early response is (of course!) enthusiastic – poet Susan M Schultz writes:
“The scholarship is excellent (especially in the interspersed essays by Unger about Whalen’s life) and some of the material compelling and crucial to future scholars, in particular the autobiographical sections about Whalen’s difficult family life and entries written while he was on LSD (sic)”
Unger’s work here comes out of his doctoral dissertation, “Space and Distance As I Require – The Journals and Prose Fragments of Philip Whalen“
Some pages have previously appeared in two short chapbooks, Philip Whalen’s Journals – Selections 1957-1977 (part 1 and 2), published as part of CUNY’s exemplary Lost and Found Initiative