The Beats: San Francisco

Self-Portrait From Another Direction

Self-Portrait From Another Direction

Philip Whalen San Francisco: The Auerhahn Press, 1959. Marvin Tatum Collection of American Literature.

An integral member of the San Francisco Renaissance, Philip Whalen attended Reed College where he roomed with Gary Snyder. They shared an interest in Zen Buddhism and it was Gary Snyder who invited Whalen to read at the Six Gallery. Whalen was inspired, as was Ginsberg, by the poetry of William Carlos Williams, and he acknowledged his debt to the Beat writers: "Other people's ideas of beauty or conventional notions about beauty in any kind of art were being blasted out of my head by the new music and new jazz and new poetry that Allen was actually doing and that Gregory was doing and that Jack was doing and there were these fantastic letters coming in at rare intervals from North Africa from Burroughs to Allen and Allen was reading them aloud and I was looking at them and they popped my head in another direction."

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