“More than a biography or a memoir ... a CELEBRATION of Zen Being…”

—Michael McClure, author of Of Indigo and Saffron

"Philip Whalen’s poetry is complex, generous, and utterly amusing, as he was. David Schneider’s biography uses Phil’s own circular sense of time to fascinate us with this life of a poet and Buddhist; part beatnik, part 19th century throwback, part profound animal.  Part roshi, still calling us to order and to rejoice.”

—Alice Notley, author of Negativity’s Kiss

"Crowded by Beauty is an exceedingly vivid and nuanced portrait of the inimitable Philip Whalen, a secret hero to many of us coming after. Schneider captures Whalen’s life, work, and the dharma ‘path,’ carving out a time capsule of, as yet, unexplored counter-cultural practice and ethos.”

—Anne Waldman, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University

“‘Our real life is in other persons,’ Philip Whalen once said. His larger than life-sized poems, Zen teachings, journals, and letters all live on in this moving and big-hearted biography-by-friendships—made up equally of scholarship, personal knowledge, gossipy quotes, foodstuffs, desires, realized interconnection, and quicksilver perception.”

—Jane Hirshfield, author of Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World