Complaint: To the Muse

You do understand I've waited long enough

There's nobody else that interests me more than a minute

I've got no more ambition to shop around for poems or love

Come Back!

or at least answer your telephone

I'm nowhere without you

Phlip Whalen at the Poetry Foundation

Philip Whalen at LitKicks

Philip Whalen: An Introduction by Dale Smith, from Jacket

It's ironic that anyone would attempt to label Whalen's rich and varied poetic achievement. His work presents the perceptual artifact of one man's creative energy. While he is Boswellian in detail, the language moves with weird delight, offering a treasure of subjective phenomena. By turns cranky, amused, hungry or sated with experience, the poems remain uniquely personal and transformative. Rather than presenting poetry with lyric sensitivity, he uses the poem as a field, or graph, on which he arranges discrete phenomena.

Plums, Metaphysics, an Investigation, a Visit, and a Short Funeral Ode