He worked as a gardener, a school teacher, an actor, a newspaper reporter, and a script writer.

In 1968–69 he was a guest lecturer in poetry at the University of California, Santa Barbara, as were Basil Bunting, Fred Turner, and Kenneth Rexroth.

In the mid-1980s he taught a graduate poetry seminar in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

The dust jacket and frontispiece for this book was done by artist and professor Gary Hugh Brown.

[1] Whigham died on 6 August 1987 in Humboldt County, California, of injuries he suffered in a car crash.