Philip Whalen

Philip Glenn Whalen (October 20, 1923 – June 26, 2002) was an American poet and a Zen Buddhist monk.
Whalen grew up in a small town, The Dalles, Oregon. He went to public schools, and he wrote poetry for his high school magazine. He was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1943 but stayed in the United States. After the war he went to Reed College. His tuition was paid by the G. I. Bill. There he became a friend of poets Lew Welch and Gary Snyder. They all met poet William Carlos Williams when he visited in 1950. In 1951 Whalen got a B. A. in general literature.
In the early 1950s, Whalen travelled around the West Coast. At one point, Snyder helped him to become a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains. 
He moved to San Francisco in 1955. On October 7, 1955, he read poems at the Six Gallery. He read with Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, and Michael McClure. This has been called " birth of the Beat generation." From this time, Whalen's friendship with Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac connected him to the Beat movement. The Six Gallery reading also was the start of the San Francisco poetry renaissance.
In 1973 Whalen became an ordained Zen Buddhist monk. He lived at Zen Centers in San Francisco and Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Whalen died in San Francisco in 2002.