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>> See the correspondence in PDF format Introduction Philip Whalen (1923-2002) and Franco Beltrametti (1937-1995) met in Kyoto, Japan in 1966. Before coming to Japan, Whalen had lived on the west coast of America and been an active voice in the New American Poetry that developed in the 1950s and 1960s. Beltrametti had trained as an architect in his native Switzerland and come to Japan to teach. In the years that followed, Beltrametti became a writer and visual artist, edited and contributed to several magazines and anthologies, devoting great energy to actively connecting a broad community of writers and artists in Europe and the United States. After returning from a second sojourn in Kyoto in 1971, Whalen lived as a priest in Zen Buddhist communities in California and New Mexico. In 1995, in what turned out to be the last year of his life, Franco Beltrametti wrote an autobiographical essay. Like all forms of autobiography, it records the way things are remembered. He grew up on the Swiss side of the Swiss-Italian border, in the town of Chiasso, close to the village of Riva San Vitale where he lived much of his adult life. Describing how, when he was a teenager, his family chose among places in Italy and France for summer holiday trips, he wrote: For summer vacations we later moved to Nervi, east of Genova. I remember blinding afternoon light, large processions of red and black ants, cicadas in the pine trees. I bought my first poetry book there, Il Dolore by Ungaretti, and couldn't get over the impact: I built a special place for poetry in my mind and wrote hermetic attempts. It took years to find out some basics: the only way to write is to write. Later on in Japan, when at twenty-eight I still was very shy regarding poetry, Philip Whalen confirmed it: in order to write you've got to sit down and do it. (Autobiography, F.B.) The meeting between Beltrametti and Philip Whalen took place in Kyoto, Japan. Beltrametti had arrived, via the Trans-Siberian Railway, to teach architecture. The introduction took place through a series of friends, as Judy Beltrametti described in a recent note. When Franco first arrived in Tokyo in May of 1965 he went straight off to the coffee house where foreigners and intellectual and far-out Japanese went whose name escapes me. There on his first or second day in Tokyo he met Nanao Sakaki, renowned 20th century samurai-poet and activist. At that time Nanao was walking the length and breadth of Japan spreading the word about new and more fulfilling lifestyles that were possible and encouraging a back-to-the-land movement. After Franco moved to Kyoto, I joined him in the Fall of 1965. We lived in the Ginkaku-ji part of Kyoto in an "apatto", a small room of about four tatami by four tatami. We shared washing facilities down the hall with the other apatto dwellers and could use the owner's phone, who lived on the ground floor. One day, not long after my arrival, Nanao telephoned and soon was at our place. He asked Franco, "Do you meet Galy Snyda?" Franco, who was a fan of Gary's mainly because of his book "Cold Mountain", said he had gone on a pilgrimage to Gary's house, which was clear across town, but wasn't able to have a meeting with him. Nanao said "I go. You must meet!" Nanao set off on the trek across town and, lo and behold, he returned some time later the same evening with Gary in tow. We all had dinner together and a friendship had begun. Gary said he had a good friend whom he would like us to meet, an American poet living just down the road from us, it seemed. Within the next few days we heard two American voices coming down our road and it was Gary and Philip Whalen. Another meal was shared and the deep friendship between Franco and Philip began as well. (26 March 2006 email to the author) Gary Snyder - American zen student, merchant seaman, poet, translator, essayist - had already been in Kyoto for nearly a decade and was to return to the United States in 1967 to build a home in foothills of the California Sierra Nevada Mountains. Philip Whalen had just arrived in Japan for this first time. He was known in the US as one of the Beat poets, due to his association with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and had been a friend of Snyder's since their college years. He had published several books of poetry, but had not succeeded in making a living as a writer. In Kyoto, he had a job as an English teacher, but he had not come to Japan to be a teacher. His travel was motivated by a profound interest in Buddhism and Asian culture. Nineteen Sixty-Six was the first time Whalen was able to live in a Buddhist setting. He was fourteen years older than Beltrametti. On Bear's Head, the book that was to contain his published and unpublished writing up to that time, was being prepared by James Koller in San Francisco and was to appear in 1967. The year 1966 was the only time that Beltrametti and Whalen actually lived close to one another. Beltrametti remembered the moment this way: Phil would visit us, announcing his arrival by blowing a conch shell. He gave me Gertrude Stein, Olson, and Blake to read and I went several times through his own books, like Every Day. Oral transmission. Now he's a Roshi, a Zen teacher in San Francisco, Soto lineage. My practice has always been rather informal, walking meditation is my way; I've a strong refusal for anything formally set up. Yet the Diamond Sutra is a daily study along with Lao-tzu. I try to practice their essence in art and life, which have become very much the same, a daily thing, renewed by necessity and chance. (Autobiography, F.B.) Beltrametti and his family (his son, Giona, was born in Japan that year) left Kyoto for a teaching job in California. In the next few years, both men moved frequently, Beltrametti going from San Luis Obispo, California to Zurich, Rome and Sicily. His first books of poetry were published in Italy, soon followed by English translations. Whalen returned to the San Francisco area, then back to Kyoto. In 1971 he left Japan for the last time and returned to San Francisco. This selection of their letters (1967-1970) tells a part of this story. The letters are preserved in the Beltrametti Archives (Riva San Vitale, Switzerland) and the Philip Whalen Papers (Bancroft Library, University of California). Further publications concerning Franco Beltrametti's work and collaborations continue to appear in ALORA, published by the Beltrametti Archives. The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen, edited by Michael Rothenberg, will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2007.
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