Articles - September 2019

On Tom Weatherly, February 2017

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.

Reminiscence

On Thomas Elias Weatherly

Thomas Weatherly with Eugene Richie and the poet Tom Breidenbach at Weatherly’s sixty-fifth birthday celebration, Pace University, New York City, November 3, 2007.

I first met Thomas in a poetry writing class taught by David Ignatow in the Columbia MFA program in creative writing in September 1974. David had invited him to join the class as a special student. Tom had just finished a delightful interview with Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie, which was printed in April in The World (published by the New York Poetry Project). 

On 'Short History of the Saxophone'

Of course the word is a brick. This notion, and also that of poet as mason, is gorgeously confirmed in Thomas Weatherly’s new book, short history of the saxophone (Groundwater Press, 2006). Though Weatherly has been publishing poetry for almost forty years, short history of the saxophone is his first published work since the early ’70s, when he put out two books — Maumau American Cantos and Thumbprint — and coedited Natural Process: An Anthology of New Black Poetry