They saw it all

The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen

Edited by Michael Rothenberg

Wesleyan University Press: 872 pp. $49.95

About Now

Collected Poems

Joanne Kyger

National Poetry Foundation/University of Maine Press: 798 pp., $34.95

--

PHILIP WHALEN and Joanne Kyger are often viewed as "poets' poets" -- a kiss of death that generally implies their music is out of most people's range. But really, what this means is they're the types of poets to whom other poets turn for their perfect pitch, to proclaim who they are.

Whalen and Kyger are essentially School of Backyard poets, who look out their kitchen windows and see the universe. Both have given themselves permission to write about what is immediately in front of them and/or on their minds, no matter how exalted or mundane. They are both domestics who leave plenty of room for splendor. Both have mastered the conversational; both feed off slang. Everything is the subject of their poems. Now, these two remarkable careers are represented by a pair of retrospective collections: "The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen," edited by Michael Rothenberg, and Kyger's "About Now: Collected Poems."

Whalen was born in 1923 in Portland, Ore., and raised in the Dalles, a small town in the Columbia River Gorge. After serving in the Air Force during World War II, he went to Reed College on the GI Bill. There, he lived off campus with poets Gary Snyder and Lew Welch and met William Carlos Williams when he came to visit the school.

Whalen was a few years older than his roommates. To Snyder, he was erudite. "Philip seemed to have read everything important in the English language, including a lot of basic Buddhist texts," Snyder writes in a foreword to "The Collected Poems." In October 1955, Whalen and Snyder joined Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia and Allen Ginsberg to read their poems at San Francisco's Six Gallery. This was the night that Ginsberg debuted his epochal poem "Howl" and helped usher in the Beat Generation.

Joanne Kyger was born in 1934 in Vallejo, Calif. After graduating from UC Santa Barbara, she arrived in San Francisco in 1957 during the "Howl" censorship trial. She got a job at Brentano's bookstore on Union Square and absorbed the informal teachings of San Francisco poet luminaries Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer.