Articles

Maumau American Cantos, Tom Weatherly’s first collection of poetry, possesses one of the best titles for a book of any decade of the twentieth century, and perhaps even for the century as a whole. Yet, three years after his death, his work remains almost completely ignored. In this essay, primarily via readings of poems from the Maumau Cantos, I will hope to show why such neglect is borderline criminal.

This time you were a man
Akua Lezli Hope
for TEW II

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.

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