"ON THE WALLS, maps of the John Muir Trail & High Sierra 
Region, big portrait of my mug by Mike McClure, & on this side, what looks like beautiful abstract painting but is colored & shaded relief map of Yosemite Valley—all the rest is white paint. GOOFBOOK, laugh & cry, look at the ceiling, out the window, rearrange & tenderly scratch your balls... Meanwhile, this is the 30th (holograph) page of GOOF & all the paper I happen to have... all you get..."

Whalen focused on everyday beauty in his prose and poetry. Like many of his fellow Beat writers, his "living in the moment" style was heavily influenced by Buddhism. And he didn't just pay lip service to cross-culturalism; he lived it. He became a Buddhist monk—robes, bald head and all.

But this book, which is simple, quiet and often hilarious, was a personal letter to Jack Kerouac. Here, Whalen was writing about the particular beauty of day-to-day interactions between friends.

This is very possibly the first bit of prose poetry to extol the simple pleasure of scratching one's scrotum. We jest. But maybe.

Anyway, Whalen never really meant to publish this stuff. He was one of the poets who read at the infamous Six Gallery Reading, with Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. (But not with Kerouac, because as you'll recall, he was too drunk to read that night.)

Whalen's growing influence in the San Francisco area earned his writing a good deal of critical exposure. And having Kerouac, now a superstar novelist, as a bud didn't hurt either.

On the whole, while Whalen's work can sound like silly guy-stuff poetry, it's still part of that confessional intimacy that Ginsberg and Kerouac and the rest of the boys were aiming at. It helps to throw open the doors of masculine expression.

Let the bromances flourish.

There is magic in the everyday—including scratching your own scrotum. That's what this passage is all about. And, lucky for us, the writing style of the piece is as straightforward as its content.

There are no big words or cryptic, hallucinatory images here. Whalen loved the plain, simple things that his Buddhist practice emphasized: small words, small phrases, small life moments. Unlike Burroughs, Whalen wasn't inventing a fresh style.

But, in a way, Whalen's frankness was innovative. While all his post-modernist buddies were writing complex and convoluted stuff, he was just doing his own thing; his easy-to-read style was the poet's distinctive contribution to post-modernism.