"The person of whom you speak is dead."
Where is the second crystal?
One came in last night & took it; this one
Held the papers on the table
Now I want topaze.
 

from The Beat Page

It's ironic that anyone would attempt to label Whalen's rich and varied poetic achievement. His work presents the perceptual artifact of one man's creative energy. While he is Boswellian in detail, the language moves with weird delight, offering a treasure of subjective phenomena. By turns cranky, amused, hungry or sated with experience, the poems remain uniquely personal and transformative. Rather than presenting poetry with lyric sensitivity, he uses the poem as a field, or graph, on which he arranges discrete phenomena.