Note: This essay appeared in the first issue of Lip magazine (1971), published by Middle Earth Books and guest edited by Victor Bockris. Other contributors included Gerard Malanga, Patti Smith, Tom Pickard, Aram Saroyan, Tom Clark, Andrew Wylie, Tom Raworth, and John Wieners.
Left: Tom Weatherly, ‘Thumbprint,’ 1971; right: John Ashbery, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,’ 1977.
Tom Weatherly’s poetry seamlessly combines jazz-inflected improvisational tendencies and the cool minimalism of Pound and H.D. How can this be? Well, you had to know Tom to know the answer. He was always relaxed and funny in person, but you were somehow given to understand that this attitude was formed by darker and more serious forces. You always wanted to spend more time with him because of the ease with which it passed. I remember how disappointed I felt when I learned he had moved back to the south, and regretted not having seen him oftener than I did.
Note: What follows is a reminiscence of a reading in celebration of the journal Lip, of which Tom Weatherly and Kenneth Bluford were a part, on Sunday, November 19, 1972. — David Grundy
