NUNC COGNOSCO EX PARTE THOMAS J. BATA LIBRARY TRENT UNIVERSITY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/onbearshead0000whal ON BEAR’S HEAD Books by Philip Whalen POETRY The Calendar Three Satires Like I Say Memoirs of an Interglacial Age Monday in the Evening Every Day T/O Vanilla The Winter PROSE You Didn’t Even Try DOODLES & TEXTS High grade News from the Vegetable Kingdom The Invention of the Letter ON BEAR’S HEAD PHILIP WHALEN Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. and Coyote / New York V S'VSH‘5 . V\ \o 0^5 Copyright © i960, 196s, 1969 by Philip Whalen All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First edition Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 68-24399 Printed in the United States of America Author s Note I don’t like the idea of a volume of collected poems; I’m still writing more and I m not really satisfied with the ones which appear here. Nevertheless, here are most of the ones I’ve written “ad interim.” It s necessary to acknowledge here the love and patience and help which my family and friends have put into the production of this work. I must also thank several institutions: Reed College, San Francisco State College, and the University of California-’ at different times they paid me money to read my poems to them and made it possible for people to hear me. Quite unexpectedly the Poets Foundation gave me a prize one year, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters gave me a grant-in-aid which made it possible for me to travel to Japan, where friends had set up a part-time job for me. And last, or first, I must mention my great debts to the “underground’’ press: the little magazines where most of this material first appeared, and the individual publishers and printers who had to scrimp and borrow and blarney their way into money enough to print my first books: LeRoi Jones’s Totem Press, Dave Haselwood’s Auerhahn Press, Bill Thomas’s Toad Press, and the Coyote Books firm’s Bill and Zoe Brown and James Koller. (I must add here the fact that one magazine, North¬ west Review, and its editor, Mr. Edward Van Aelstyn, were sup¬ pressed, censured, fired, and investigated by the authorities of the University of Oregon, the Oregon Board of Higher Education, and the Oregon State Legislature because some of my work was pub¬ lished there. It was this trouble and bother that resulted in the founding of Coyotes Journal, and, later, of Coyote Books.) With¬ out the continued interest and encouragement of the private publisher and the little magazine it would have been much harder for me to find out how my writing looked in print and, inci¬ dentally, whether anybody could get any good out of it. I’m always flattered when somebody tells me that they did. FURTHER ACKNOWLEDGMENTS LeRoi Jones, Elias Wilentz, and Theodore Wilentz, of Totem Press and Corinth Books, New York, for permission to reprint Like I Say, first published by them in i960. David Haselwood and Jay Mcllroy, of the Auerhahn Press, San Francisco, for permission to reprint Memoirs of an Interglacial Age, first published by them in i960. “Monday in the Evening” first appeared in The Northwest Review, pub¬ lished at the University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. It subsequently appeared as a separate book, printed by serigraphy on handmade Italian papers in Milan by Serigrafia Pezzoli Milano, as number 3 in the series “Autori scelti da Fernanda Pivano.” Many thanks are due to the director and editor of the series, Fernanda Pivano Sottsass, and to her husband, Ettore Sottsass, whose photographs of the author embellish the book. Charles Plymell, brilliant young painter, poet, and revolutionary, was re¬ sponsible for the first publication of several poems and doodles and prose pieces of mine, either as broadsides or as contributions to his various maga¬ zines: Now; Now, Now; and Now, Now, Now. All of these were printed in San Francisco. Bill Thomas, of Toad Press, Eugene, Oregon, first published the poem “The Education Continues Along” as part of an issue of his magazine, In¬ transit, which was devoted to my work. I must acknowledge Diane di Prima’s immense good will and hard work and worry, expended on behalf of trying to get my poems before the public. The original crew of Coyote’s Journal, the Messrs. Edward Van Aelstyn, James Koller, and William Wroth, produced the first printing of the book Every Day in Eugene, Oregon, in 1964. The present management of Coyote Books, William D. Brown and James Koller, produced the second printing in 1967. They have also projected independent editions of several other books of mine, and produced my first novel, You Didn’t Even Try, in 1967. Three of the poems from Vanilla: “T/O,” “Love, Love, Love Again,” and Priapic Hymn, have been printed in a special small edition from hand-set type on handmade English paper by Dave Haselwood in 1967 at San Francisco. The poem called “Three Mornings,” from Braincandy, was first printed as a broadside for sale at a reading given by Gary Snyder, Lewis Welch, and myself in San Francisco. The broadside was published for the occasion by the Four Seasons Foundation under the direction of Mr. Donald M. Allen. Mr. Allen and the same Foundation also published a broadside version of “Hymnus ad Patrem Sinensis,” as a contribution to a portfolio of poems made for sale at the San Francisco Art Festival in 1963. I must also thank Mr. Allen for his continuous interest in my writing and for his endless efforts toward get¬ ting it published—first in Evergreen Review, of which he was editor; then in his anthology, The New American Poetry, and most recently in a Penguin book of contemporary American writing. Professor Thomas Parkinson’s anthology, A Casebook on the Beat, has in- viii troduced my work to many college students. He has also made it possible for me to appear on the University of California campus as a reader of my own work and as a fleeting consultant to young writers who may be passing through through or around the Berkeley campus. Thanks to the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., for the honor of inviting me to record my poems for their tape-recorded collection. Also thanks to Mr. John Sweeney, curator of the poetry room in the Lamont Library at Harvard, for the same favor. Thanks to Mr. Donald R. Carpenter and the committee who awarded me the first V. K. Ratliff Award in 1964, and who arranged for the printing of the poem “Goddess,” from Every Day, as a broadside. The broadside was produced from hand-set type, with a decorative capital letter designed by the author, on handmade Tovil paper, by Dave Haselwood at the Auerhahn Press. As I type this page, a number of projects are under way; I suppose they will be realized before this book appears. Consequently, I will add here my thanks to Miss Harriet Rohmer of the Brownstone Press in New York, who will produce a broadside version of the poem “Imagination of the Taj Mahal”; to Thomas Clark, Esq., and The Paris Review, for poems they are about to print; and to Mr. Lewis Warsh of Angel Hair magazine. I owe much gratitude to the people who have translated poems of mine into Swedish, German, Italian, Czech, and Hungarian: Mr. Reidar Ekner, of Stockholm; Prof. Walter Hollerer, of Hamburg; Mr. Karl O. Paetel, of New York; the Messrs. Stanislav Mares and Jan Zabrana, of Prague; the unknown Hungarian editor who is presently at work; Mr. Hugh Fox, of Los Angeles; and to an unknown (to me, at least) Brazilian or Paraguayan or whoever it was who pirated some things of mine into a Spanish anthology. And to the editors and publishers of the following magazines I wish to express my thanks for their first publication of so much of my work and for their permission to reprint: Ark II Moby I, San Francisco, and Ark III, San Francisco, the first edited by Mike McClure and James Harmon, the second by James Harmon alone; Beatitude, San Francisco, edited by several hands; C, New York, edited by Ted Berrigan and crew; Desert Review, somewhere in New Mexico; Evergreen Review, New York, edited by Don Allen and later by Barney Rosset and others; Fuck You / The Magazine of Art, edited by Ed Sanders, New York; Fux Magascene, edited by the painter Robert Ronnie Brannaman, San Francisco; Coyote’s Journal, edited by Edward Van Aelstyn, James Roller, and William Wroth, Eugene, Oregon, and later by James Roller and Bill Brown in San Francisco; Floating Bear, edited first by LeRoi Jones and later by Diane di Prima in New York; Nomad, Los Angeles; Open Space, edited by Stanley Persky in San Francisco; Poetry, edited by Henry Rago in Chicago; Foot, edited by Richard Duerden in San Francisco, who also pub¬ lished Rivoli Review; Richard Brautigan and Ron Loewinsohn, who were editors of Change, San Francisco; New Student Review at the University of New York, Buffalo; Intrepid, New York; Upriver, Philadelphia; Tri-quarterly Review, Northwestern University; Things, New York; Wild Dog, edited by Gino Clays and several other hands in several different cities and villages in IX the West; Poetry Review, Tampa; Between Worlds, Interamerican University, Puerto Rico; Northwest Review, Eugene, Oregon; Grande Ronde Review, published by Ron Bayes and his students at Eastern Oregon College in La Grande, Oregon; Ferret, California College of Arts and Crafts student pub¬ lication, Oakland, California; Outburst, London; Mithrander, San Francisco; Genesis West, Menlo Park, California; The Beat Scene, Corinth Books, New York, edited by Elias Wilentz; Variegation and Recurrence, both published by Grover Jacoby of Los Angeles; Origin, published by Cid Corman in Kyoto, Japan; Yugen, published by LeRoi Jones; Paris Review, New York and Paris; Boss, edited by Reginald Gay, New York; Lines, edited by Aram Saroyan, New York; Or, edited by David Sandberg, Berkeley; Neil Barret of Cambridge, Massachusetts, editor of Drainage.