This is a column that started its life as one thing, came off the rails half way through, then took me by the scruff of the neck and frog-marched me off to a completely unexpected ending. You judge for yourself, but I think someone must have slipped a Substance into my Muse's coffee. My original intention was to write a tribute to Philip Whalen, Beat poet and abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center in San Francisco, who died at the end of June.

Whalen was a founding member of the Beats, whose genesis is fairly well known. They were first just a group of friends - Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and Bill Burroughs - who met each other in the neighbourhood around Columbia University in the late 1940s. They added another two New Yorkers, Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke. Pretty much en masse, they moved across the United States to San Francisco. (Kerouac's account of his journey with Neal Cassady is the classic Beat novel, 'On the Road'.) In San Francisco, five West Coast poets became blistered on to the group - Gary Snyder, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Lew Welch and Philip Whalen. Beat buffs will remember that the friends became a movement, and the movement's journey to real fame began with a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in October, 1955, when Allen Ginsberg first read his poem 'Howl' to a public audience. Whalen was another of the half dozen poets who read that evening. Kerouac really enjoyed his company. He wrote about him at least twice that I know of - he was Ben Fagen in 'Big Sur' and Warren Coughlin in 'Dharma Bums'. To prepare my tribute to him, I first dug out my little collection of those quarto-sized literary magazines of which there were so many at the time, some of them containing scraps of Philip Whalen poetry. I wanted to re-read them to put myself, a little bit, back into that 1950s picture. That is where my original intention started to come off the rails. It was like opening Pandora's ghastly little Box. I had forgotten just how downright awful some of that stuff was. How about this little fragment (from a poet who shall forever be unnamed, I hope):

"Caramba! Let me dismantle!...

flesh unravelling death dispels/under your vast esplanade, gitano Caramba, for sure".

So I had to do a little Facing Up To the Truth. As a cultural phenomenon, yes, the Beat writers were fantastic. That tiny group of people had a huge effect - some of it, yes, on American literature, but most of it on American culture. The waves created by the Beat Generation (a phrase invented, incidentally, by Jack Kerouac) in the United States of the 1950s and early 1960s, a culture frozen in the Cold War's strange rictus, are still rippling through our lives today.

In literature, 'Howl' was good. 'On the Road' was good. But they were good because they were influential, not because, in and of themselves, they were milestones in the history of writing. They were snapshots of society at an important turning point in cultural history, and that made them important. The only truly serious talent in the Beat camp was William Burroughs - ironically the man whose connection to them was weakest. Furthermore, I was ashamed to have to admit to myself that I had never been terribly enthusiastic about Philip Whalen's poetry. Some of the work he published early in his life seemed more than a little affected, as if he were some self-conscious poet wannabe in a beret. Somebody, I remember, used his 'BIG HIGH SONG FOR SOMEBODY' on an LP of poetry read to jazz (an experiment that, thankfully, lasted not much longer than the taste for berets).

These are the first few lines:

"F Train Absolutely stoned Rocking bug-eyed billboards waff: No more bridge than adam's off ox Pouring over it 16 MPH sodium - vapor light yellow light LOVE YOU."

See what I mean? The capital letters were a trademark of Whalen's, much-imitated, for some reason. Maybe you just have to put that kind of verse down to youthful over-enthusiasm, and it has to be said that his poetry did improve and mature over the years. But it still seemed a little thin, as if the sap of poetry didn't run very strongly in his veins.

I discovered that Whalen himself admitted as much in 'Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism in Contemporary American Poetry', published by Shambhala Press in 1991.

"I became a poet by accident. I never intended to be a poet. I still don't know what it's all about. If I wrote poetry at all, it's because I could finish it at the end of the page. Maybe it would run halfway down the next page, but it would come to a stop. What I wanted to do with writing was to write novels and make money like anybody else. And now I find myself in this ridiculous industry of writing these incomprehensible doodles, and why anybody's reading them I can't understand."

So I came right off the boil where my tribute to Mr. Whalen was concerned. But as long as I was doing the research, I thought I would read some of the things he'd said in recent years about Zen Buddhism. That was much more where his centre was...you could sense him taking on a new authority as he talked and wrote about it.

His Buddhist name was Zenshin Ryufu, a Japanese phrase which he says conjures up four English words - Zen, Mind, Dragon and Wind.

What, he asked rhetorically, does that name have to do with me?

"So that is a problem that becomes more or less clear as you continue being a monk - what your name is. And of course, names and poetry all come together. Gertrude Stein says poetry is calling the name of something. That's what we do all the time, actually - call ourselves. There's the story of the Zen Master who every day would call his own name. He'd say, 'Zuigan!' And he'd say 'Yes!' 'Zuigan! Don't be misled by other people!' Of course the other people were Zuigans too."

Well, here the story takes another turn, because that is a paragraph much to be admired. Suddenly, this man was looking interesting, again, and a lot more like a poet than I had begun to think.

Philip Whalen was not the only Beat to take up Zen Buddhism. Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Lew Welch were all converts to a greater or lesser degree. But Whalen was the one who took it most seriously. Allen Ginsberg considered him the only Zen Master Poet practising in America.

It's time to explain Zen. It's an introspective process of moving towards a sudden, cathartic realisation of the true, hidden significance of being. You get there, at least in part, through meditative exercises called koan (remember 'What is the Sound of One Hand Clapping?'). It is not a religion at all in the usual sense of the word. There is no worship, no reliance on faith. It is possible to argue that this is a god-less religion.should you feel there is a point to doing that. Zen Buddhism tends to produce unusual people. The sudden realisation for which Zen Buddhists search fills those who find it with qualities that arise from possessing a penetrating understanding - calm, wisdom, helpfulness, worldliness, the ability to move easily through life with little baggage, and .there's no other way to describe it .a certain touch of crazy humour.

As he grew older, Philip Whalen began to lose his sight. In the last few years of his life, in order to be able to read at all, he was forced to move to a room in the San Francisco Zen Center that was sunnier than the one he had had before, but much smaller. As a result, he was forced to pare down his considerable library to a more manageable size.

I found, by fortunate accident, a list of what he kept. In addition to his books on Buddhism, he kept a favourite book, Laurence Sterne's 'Tristram Shandy'. He kept a little poetry - something of Gary Snyder's, all of Emily Dickinson, all of Edith Sitwell, some Robinson Jeffers, some Eliot, all of Wallace Stevens. He kept a couple of volumes of Thoreau's Journal, all of Stravinsky's letters, all WB Yeats's plays, a copy of 'Finnegan's Wake', a Bible, a volume of Plato and another of Aristotle and.a bunch of Krazy Kat comic books.

Whoa. Krazy Kat? And Ignatz Mouse and Offissa Pupp? I hadn't thought of them for years. That really pops me back in time. And I remember with great pleasure that Krazy was what in the '50s would have been called, with a giggle, the Hippest Cat in the Universe, man .Ignatz was the Stonest Li'l Mouse .and Offissa Pupp? Well, I'm not sure about Offissa Pupp. But he certainly was loaded with meaning. I'm going to have to think about that one . And suddenly I realised that Allen Ginsberg had been right all along.

So, thanks for yourself, crazy Zen Master Poet Philip Whalen .and thanks for the koan.

(Anyone who would like to learn more about Philip Whalen should visit a quite excellent tribute to him by several writers that has been put up on one of the Internet pages of Jacket, an Australian literary magazine www.jacketmagazine.com. Quite why it should have been placed in an issue dated April, 2000, more than a year before he died, I don't know. But it is worth reading.)

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