In the winter of 1968, LeRoi Jones went on trial for possession of guns in Newark. At his trial, the judge cited three poems that had appeared in Evergreen Review as evidence of the defendant’s guilt. A flyer circulated showing Jones handcuffed, wearing a prison uniform, and sporting a gash down his forehead that obviously hadn’t resulted from hitting his head on the typewriter. The caption read: “Poetry Is Revolution / Revolution Is Poetry.”
Editorial note: What follows is an excerpt from a review Stephens wrote of Tom Weatherly’s Maumau American Cantos and Andrei Codrescu’s License to Carry a Gun, a review originally published on page 6 of The Village Voice on December 31, 1970.
M. G. Stephens and Tom Weatherly, mid-1970s. Photo by Nicki Hitz Edson.
Tom Weatherly will also be known for his long tenure at the Strand Bookstore on West 12th Street and Broadway in downtown Manhattan. For many years, he was a fixture working in the basement of the Strand, the gentle giant with the long white beard, looking like a benign character in a fairy tale.
Editorial note: M. G. Stephens’s obituary for Tom Weatherly was originally published in Milk Magazine on July 25, 2014. — Julia Bloch
Detail from front cover of ‘Maumau American Cantos.’
One morning a little later when I was staying at a house in Philadelphia with Victor Bockris I found him downstairs, waking up on the living room sofa. “How are you?” I said, and he looked up and said, “Oh man, seems like the worst things in the world happen to me and it doesn’t seem to matter.” You had to love the guy.
Although I didn’t know him well, Tom Weatherly made a great impression on me from our first meeting — back in the days of Telegraph Books — when he said, “Hey, your dad’s William Saroyan? No wonder you so smart” — which was surprising and charming coming from this big black dude. One morning a little later when I was staying at a house in Philadelphia with Victor Bockris I found him downstairs, waking up on the living room sofa.
Detail from back cover of ‘Maumau American Cantos.’
I’m Janet Rosen. Some of you know me as Mrs. W #4. Not funny: he was an optimist, not a guy who said marriage didn’t work for me I’m never doing that again. No. He just kept trying, and he also had profound relationships without benefit of legal or religious ceremony.
I’m Janet Rosen. Some of you know me as Mrs. W #4. Not funny: he was an optimist, not a guy who said marriage didn’t work for me I’m never doing that again. No. He just kept trying, and he also had profound relationships without benefit of legal or religious ceremony.
Sumerian symbols, from the opening and closing of Tom Weatherly’s ‘Thumbprint.’
Thomas Elias Weatherly Jr., forged and purified by the white heat of nonconformity, has responded to the external, fragmented reality of the black-white world that he has engaged and sought to conquer through mythmaking.
Editorial note: Evelyn Hoard Roberts’s entry on Tom Weatherly, written in the 1980s, originally appeared in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 41: Afro-Americans Poets Since 1955, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious M. Davis(Detroit: Gale, 1985), 338–42, and is reproduced here in slightly edited form. — Julia Bloch
