Philip Whalen reading

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PHILIP WHALEN MEMORIAL READING

Friday August 30, 7:00 pm
@ Presentation Theater, University of San Francisco
(formerly The Gershwin Theater)
2350 Turk Blvd, west of Masonic
San Francisco

admission is free

Together with the Hartford Street Zen Center, and the MFA Writing Program at USF, The Poetry Center is sponsoring a memorial reading in honor of Philip Whalen's life and poetry. Philip Whalen's friends and fellow poets will speak and read from his work, and from their own and others' work in tribute to him. Michael McClure, Diane di Prima, Leslie Scalapino, David Meltzer, Clark Coolidge, Anne Waldman, Jane Hirschfield, and Bill Berkson are among the many poets and friends who will appear on the program.

* * *

i.m. Philip Whalen

October 20, 1923, Portland, Oregon -- June 26, 2002, San Francisco, California

* * *

HYMNUS AD PATREM SINENSIS

I praise those ancient Chinamen
Who left me a few words,
Usually a pointless joke or a silly question
A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick
splashed picture -- bug, leaf,
caricature of Teacher
on paper held together now by little more than ink
& their own strength brushed momentarily over it
Their world & several others since
Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it --
Cheered as it whizzed by --
& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars
Happy to have saved us all.

--from Memoirs of an Interglacial Age, 1960, The Auerhahn Press, San Francisco

Go to Whalen link page

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