Since You Ask Me

(A Press release, October 1959)

This poetry is a picture or graph of a mind moving, which is a world body being here and now which is history ... and you. Or think about the Wilson Cloud-chamber, not ideogram, not poetic beauty: bald-faced didacticism moving as Dr. Johnson commands all poetry should, from the particular to the general. (Not that Johnson was right - nor am I trying to inherit his mantle as a literary dictator but only the title Doctor, i.e., teacher - who is constantly studying). I do not put down the academy but have assumed its function in my own person, and in the strictest sense of the word - academy: a walking grove of trees. But I cannot and will not solve any problems or answer any questions.

My life has been spent in the midst of heroic landscapes which never overwhelmed me and yet I live in a single room in the city - the room a lens focusing on a sheet of paper. Or the inside of your head. How do you like your world?

(Philip Whalen)

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I like this.