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
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).
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).
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.
Editorial note: This review of Tom Weatherly’s short history of the saxophone (New York: Groundwater Press, 2006) originally appeared in The Poetry Project Newsletter no. 212, October/November 2007). — Julia Bloch
