Those who buy [Enough Said: Poems 1974–1979] will know what to expect. Philip Whalen has been around for a while, at least in San Francisco, and the kind of poetry he writes—lightheaded rococo graffiti—has passed from cult to corporation. Through the shredder of what he calls his "blissed out" sensibility he feeds the "incunabula tightrope novel of blank mind," so that a "neutrotic smoke alarm gribbers in the zendo."… Whalen's book is mindful of its abandonments, its "aimless luxury." There is little conceptual shape, no argument of vision or from experience. Still, there is a certain charm. Some of it may be the misérable miracle (in Michaux's phrase) of drugs; certainly it is the "trill and marble hallelujah" of language and free association. Is it self-indulgent? Very. Hans Memling and Sonny Rollins are thrown together in the same poem, while Thomas Mann boogies with "'a lady...