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
Note: The following open letter was originally published in Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock’s journal of ethnopoetics, Alcheringa, no. 3 (Winter 1971): 94–95 (a facsimile is available online at Independent Voices). The immediate occasion was a statement made by Ted Wilentz, Weatherly’s coeditor for the Natural Process anthology, in his introduction to that volume.
Note: The following open letter was originally published in Jerome Rothenberg and Dennis Tedlock’s journal of ethnopoetics, Alcheringa, no. 3 (Winter 1971): 94–95 (a facsimile is available online at Independent Voices).
