The Kindness of Strangers once again proves that imitation is a measure of love, not skill. Whalen belongs to the "spontaneous composition" cadre of poets associated with the West Coast and the so-called New York School since the 1950's, particularly Frank O'Hara and Ted Berrigan. He has, however, neither Berrigan's integrity nor O'Hara's wit.

Self-indulgence is Whalen's nemesis, the puerile belief that whatever he puts on paper assumes significance, bird-droppings raised to the curb heights of avant garde sculpture: 'Everybody downtown / Miserable today / Bought the wrong size / Overdrawn at the bank". This is the initial stanza of a poem intent upon relating the author's parochial hipster milieu to the larger inequities of a flawed American scene. Like so many of his fellow free spirits', Whalen's verses are readily identifiable by their persistent diatribes against national materialism and other of society's hideous crimes, which presumably grants automatic relevance to...