News at Eleven: There is a sameness to the hundreds

of shorter poems [Philip] Whalen wrote mainly in America ("takes," he called them). A speaker addresses an absent reader in tones both plaintive and jocular, taking pleasure in beauty, fretting about day-to-day getting by, observing the inevitability of death and decay, leaving the reader with a cheerful non sequitur and flash of insight. As he self-deprecatingly put it in a poem from 1959,

I've run so far in one circle I'm
      visible now
      only from the chest upwards
Any poet who's really any good
Dances a complicated maze on top
      of the ground
      scarcely wearing out the grass

from The Nation: One Sun Roaring

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