Uncollected later poems (2009–2014)
I want to know every thing about the universe. I get a little pissed when I realize won’t live long enough, even a thousand years not enough time. I will learn what I can. — Tom Weatherly on Facebook
Note: During the last few years of his life, Weatherly published other poems, not in literary magazines, but in online forums such as his blogs Ecletic Git and Saint Satin Stain, Facebook, and the political site Left in Alabama. A selection of those poems appears below: a wealth of late material that we can view as a supplement to that published in short history. An avid technophile, who in a contribution to an Elon University project called “Imaging the Internet” describes himself as a “computer user amazed by much of golden age of sci-fi realized,” Weatherly was also wary of surveillance culture: the same piece imagines a constitutional amendment that permits “view cams everywhere interfaced with data-mining software, including inside of the bedrooms, kitchens and bathrooms in every dwelling,” and, as he outlines in one email, Weatherly used fourteen separate email addresses and numerous forms of antivirus and security software. Within this technological interface, addressed in Lauri Scheyer (Ramey)’s essay, Weatherly treated his various blogs, such as Saint Satin Stain and Eclectic Git, along with his email lists (the “Weatherly Report”), as informal publication venues, and many of the poems come from these sources.
This selection from Weatherly’s digital contributions includes eight poems from correspondence with Lauri Scheyer (Ramey) that provide fitting further evidence of his “rogue blues.” In particular, the 2011 poem “censer,” its title a typically witty pun traversing religion, the digital age, and the holiness of the poet’s calling, seems to encapsulate his ethos as a self-described “cranky counterculture” or “just plain nerd”: poems as (blog) “posts,” blog posts as poem, both as “honest speech” which Weatherly “codes in sense” as a “poem scene.” The selection also includes poems from email correspondence to Jerome Rothenberg: a New Year’s card from 2011; a duet for two voices; a tribute to the Swedish American poet Rönnog Seaberg; a poem deploying the “never muted heart” refrain which forms the theme to the sequence “wally,” published in short history of the saxophone; and a short piece called “papa dues,” Weatherly’s mouth munching oats and humming cantos. The remaining poems are taken from the online venues which served as Weatherly’s primary publishing outlet during his later years. “scrapple poesy” riffs on the moniker adopted for one of his blogs — “saint satin stain” — while “confederate cemetery” is a remix of the fourth poem from Maumau American Cantos. (The original is reproduced below it in order to illustrate the development of Weatherly’s work.) “how i do it” serves as a characteristically concise statement of poetics; the other poems tackle the information age and serve as an illustration of Weatherly’s increasing shift to the political left. Fittingly, we end with two meditations on mortality from Weatherly’s final month. “you aint safe from dying until you’re dead” — of which there’s also a poignant recording on Weatherly’s Penn Sound page — sees Weatherly reflecting on the “mortal / line” that is both the web of inheritance, lineage, and family, and the poetic line that he, as a poet above all else, “lived and breathed.” And in “antisemantic,” an elegy for another recently deceased writer, Walter Dean Myers, whose work is seen to live on in the transfer of breath from writer to reader, reactivated in word: “your breath / readers breathe.” — David Grundy
CONTENTS
5772 [New Year’s Card, 2011]
xxy1
simple honest speech
[blues skies]
exile
papa dues
scrapple poesy?
confederate cemetery
to old elm, in cemetery for confederate dead
every man a kin
Needed correction, so here again
how i do it
[you aint safe from dying until you’re dead]
antisemantic
hellhound bark
hellhound bark
hoodoo bard from heaven
uncharted west blues
cargo blues.
hoodoo bard from heaven
061809
for Ronald Edson[1]
grind coffee berry
coarse to french
press friend of course
french and lawful
sashay evoke melody romance
actual legend way poet weaves
preach wasteland poetic canon joke
holier passion rector teach pray
hold rapt attention lazy deacons
saxophony phrase peccant bleeps
sashay weaves spoken breath fancy
peccant bleep saxophone phrasal
sashay weaves spoken breath fancy
poems she alleges sashay dances
Weatherly 1111909
for David Amram[2]
sashay
beast
heshe
beast
chassé
101212
weatherly
for John
he posts hence
speech not he
codes in sense
poem scene
chosen once he
hones spec
honest speech
bard sense
weatherly 061011
no threats
at thrones
hasten rot
torah sent
at thrones
honest art
seedy daisy
conceivable
daily grief
woman agree
is theodicy
sod’s giddy
oxeye image
labia image
aha holy is
for Vivian Gornick
xxy1[3]
love
survive
we believe
the trope alive
save within the grave
dodona grove
haunted heaven
naive
love
love
survive
we believe
the trope alive
save within the grave
dodona grove
haunted heaven
naive
love
love love
survive survive
we believe we believe
the trope alive the trope alive
save within the grave save within the grave
dodona grove dodona grove
haunted heaven haunted heaven
naive naive
love love
Weatherly
for Ursula Hoebner Bromberger
poem moll 11-17-2008
simple honest speech rare
in public rare in private
say the fact some say
you opine some opinion
you speak as fact
In politics occupation
of governance
simple honest speech
peaceful free society
language without guile
pretension or calumny
you clarify
public policy not obscure
Language you do
not need to parse to understand
Weatherly 032510
for Rönnog Seaberg 1932–2007[4]
blues skies
mountains of the moon
blues skies above
mountains of the moon
weatherly
for Rönnog Seaberg, 1932–2007
never muted heart
pumps every music
muses dealt gɘloos
helen proof rebel
heard judah rebel
papa dues
loud hugs
muse mama
mouth can
oat munch
hum cantos
Weatherly
for Ursula
scrapple poesy?
retard your brain
saint satin stain
the melanin
in darky skin
pine smell
elm tree
document wind not deed
leaves
fall
listen elm bark in passage
dixie landed gentry
round its trunk
children chant
games above
roots grow through grave
neither desecrate nor revere
to old elm, in cemetery for confederate dead
The pine fragrance,
the magnolia graveyard,
surrounds a gnarled, old elm …
among conferences of silence,
honors heaped upon dead men,
it stands, to document the wind,
not their deeds …
leaves,
fall,
journalistic season
past historic years:
listen to elm bark in passage
of dixie landed gentry,
it makes no gesture of sound …
round its trunk children
chant their games
over buried roots.
Elm roots grow through graves,
neither desecrate nor revere,
crack the skulls open
to brace against the wind.
owl watch, perched in what dark
limbs silent swaying
with the wind.[5]
beasties go
megabytes and i
big easy smote
bigots set by
stagey biome
weigh down home
beastie limns
meioses gat by
holy poly isms
thine messages cry
easiest bog
so steamy they beg
may bigots see
holy biases meet
gibes so steamy
biomes gat yes
gibes believe boss
stymie base
Needed correction, so here again
there are still a few good ideas
from the right, except no one on
the right says them in public. A
fact some folk on the left state
them proves them more thoughtful
than most folks on today’s right.
The right will not accept ideas
spoken on the left, even if the
original source is on the right.
So lefty should state in public
that all people should eat less
than two grams of lead each day
how i do it
elias loose
usual easel
limns style
stole image
limns while
sound write
water tower
trope wrote
water tower
weatherly
031614
loose elias
rogue blues
saucy blues
lying cease
belie cause
cease elias
eager rogue
agree cause
argue cease
040414
weatherly
[you aint safe from dying until you’re dead]
you aint safe from dying until you’re dead
preacher said so
you work your brain to bone until you’re gone
rotted in your grave or enjoy the blessings
of breath until you have nothing else
to do but die because you can’t go on
forever
whether you truly lived or no one knows
you lived and breathed and bred your mortal
line in the shifty sand alongside a sea
you can’t control even you were a god
050614
Weatherly[6]
antisemantic
three
thirds people
poems breathe
breathe
yes breathe
yep it’s breath
music
limns music
until useful
ever
the breath
lessness ceases
stead
your breath
readers breathe
for walter dean myers
08 12 1937–07 01 2014
010614 weatherly
Sources: “crossroad,” “[grind coffee berry],” “she allege actual holy sashay,” “[sashay],” “censer,” “[blues skies],” “[loose elias],” and “[you aint safe from dying until you’re dead]” were kindly provided from email correspondence by Lauri Scheyer (Ramey). “5772,” “xxy1,” “simple honest speech,” “exile,” and “papa dues” were kindly provided from email correspondence by Jerome Rothenberg. “scrapple poesy” appeared on Left in Alabama, October 2010. “confederate cemetery,” a 2010 remix of “to old elm, in cemetery for confederate dead” from Maumau American Cantos, appeared on Left in Alabama, August 2010. “every man a kin” appeared on Left in Alabama, January 2013. “needed correction, so here again” appeared on Left in Alabama, September 2013. “how i do it” quoted in Wasserman, dated March 2014. “antisemantic” appeared on Saint Satin Stain, July 2014.
1. Included as part of Weatherly’s “Weatherly Report” email newsletter to select correspondents, this poem comes with a list of 101 blues songs, beginning with Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” and culminating with Weatherly’s own “Wally,” with which it shares the refrain “hoodoo bard from heaven.”
2. From an email enclosing the poem: “My bud David directs orchestra traffic, composes European, and plays the jazzy wif Dizzy.”
3. For two voices: “female voice first stanza, male voice second; last stanza female voice left & male voice right.” On one of his (now defunct websites), Weatherly notes of this poem that the phrase “haunted heaven” is “stolen[en]” from Wallace Stevens’s “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman” (Harmonium, Knopf, 1923) — “Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame. / Take the moral law and make a nave of it / And from the nave build haunted heaven” — and “dodona grove” from “dodona oaks” in his own poem “chaos aglow” (short history). “In the lingo arts it is allusion; in the sound arts it is sample.”
4. Swedish American poet Rönnog Seaberg and her husband, Steve Seaberg, invented what they called acrobatic poetry. According to The History of Nordic Womens’ Literature, Seaberg grew up in Umeå and moved to the US in 1955, “where she worked as writer-in-residence in schools in Georgia and was involved in cultural exchange activities between Sweden and Georgia. … She wrote short stories, novels, and poems for performance, and her works also include Hemlig dagbok, 1975, which was based on autobiographical material, as were many of her other novels, including Utrest, 1978, and Återresan, 1985. Her motifs were the family, emigration, and love.” Weatherly himself adds: “ronnog and husband steve & friends performed gymnastic poetry, often nude. she stripped language to the buff,” and notes that this poem is “aimed at the Bush administration.”
5. Weatherly notes on one of his websites: “the first version was the first poem i read in joel oppenheimer’s workshop at st.mark’s poetry project.”
6. See also the recording of the poem on Weatherly’s PennSound page.
Edited by David Grundy