Tom Weatherly

The technological poetics of Thomas Weatherly

Lauri Scheyer (Ramey)

Thomas Weatherly’s literary productivity during the last stage of his life is an important chapter of work. His last years of truly phenomenal creative output also reveal the limitations that still prevail in the ways literary value is often measured and respected, especially in scholarship on African American writers.

December 4, 2019

Emails to Lauri Scheyer (Ramey), 2005–2014

Tom Weatherly

Note: Below are excerpts from four emails written to Lauri Scheyer (Ramey) between 2005 and 2014, including reflections on Weatherly’s writing process, friends and enemies, family, aging, poetic form, teaching, and first arrival in New York (during which “I rewrote [Allen Ginsberg’s] Howl; Kaddish a great poem didn’t need revision”). Sometimes it feels as if we heard in these emails a speaking voice, fragments of an ongoing conversation constructed of anecdote, reminiscence, description, opinion.

December 4, 2019

Uncollected later poems (1984–2006)

Tom Weatherly

Note: Weatherly published relatively little from the mid-1970s on, his occasional appearances in little magazines mainly making up the poems eventually printed in short history of the saxophone (2006).

December 4, 2019

Weatherly's words

A tribute to Tom Weatherly

Rosanne Wasserman

He read the Hebrew name of G-d, the tetragrammaton’s four unpronounceable letters, as a representation of respiration: one breath in, one breath out. That sound was the Holy of Holies. He told me this last summer, over the phone. I was sixty years old, but that insight sounded like the most brilliant thing I’d ever heard. He took very seriously his midlife conversion to Orthodox Judaism, talking to rabbis and Hasids, reading Maimonides and Hillel, and using his middle name, “Elias,” to sign himself at times. Eclectic defined him, as did sudden turns at perpendicular angles. 

Editorial note: Rosanne Wasserman’s tribute to Tom Weatherly was originally published at the blog for The Best American Poetry on August 4, 2014, and is reproduced here in slightly edited form.

September 6, 2019

These poems are loaded

M. G. Stephens

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.

September 6, 2019

Obituary

Tom Weatherly

M. G. Stephens
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 

September 6, 2019

On Tom Weatherly, February 2017

Aram Saroyan
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.

September 6, 2019

Tom Weatherly's memorial, November 2014

Janet Rosen
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.

September 6, 2019

Tom Weatherly in 'Dictionary of Literary Biography'

Evelyn Hoard Roberts
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

September 6, 2019

Reminiscence

On Thomas Elias Weatherly

Eugene Richie
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).

September 6, 2019
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