David Grundy

David Grundy: 'mistish liftings'

N. H. Pritchard manuscript notes

East Village Other, from Pritchard, “The Vein,” 1968

Thanks to David Grundy for this Pritchard update:

After years of neglect, 2021 was an auspicious year for the work of N. H(Norman) Pritchard II,  with the long-awaited reprinting of his two published volumes, The Matrix: Poems 1960–1970 and EECCHHOOEES by Ugly Duckling Presse/Primary Information and DABA Press respectively. In July, Jacket2 published a 1978 interview with Pritchard conducted by Judd Tully, providing an acute insight into Pritchard’s philosophy, and a far more detailed biographical picture than has been previously available. Nonetheless, there are still many gaps to fill in. In particular, Pritchard’s extensive writings and visual artworks remain unpublished. The following note provides a brief outline of these writings based on available evidence in the hope of contributing to our ongoing sense of Pritchard’s legacy. A forthcoming article will expand on some of this in more detail.

August 9, 2021

'never muted heart'

Tom Weatherly's trespass

David Grundy

Maumau American Cantos, Tom Weatherly’s first collection of poetry, possesses one of the best titles for a book of any decade of the twentieth century, and perhaps even for the century as a whole. Yet, three years after his death, his work remains almost completely ignored. In this essay, primarily via readings of poems from the Maumau Cantos, I will hope to show why such neglect is borderline criminal.

September 6, 2019

This is provocation

Tom Weatherly with Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie

Tom Weatherly
Victor Bockris

Note: Victor Bockris and Andrew Wylie conducted a series of interviews with numerous contemporary American poets during the early 1970s, published in various venues. The playful style of the interview with Weatherly is typical of these. (These interviews were collected for a book to be titled The Life of Poetry in 1973, but the book never appeared in print.

September 6, 2019

Black oral poetry in America

An open letter

Tom Weatherly

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. 

September 6, 2019

Preface to 'Natural Process'

Note: In 1970, Weatherly and Ted Wilentz coedited an anthology of African American poetry titled for the workshops Weatherly had been running from East Harlem for the past few years: Natural Process. A fixture on the New York scene, Wilentz and his brother Eli co-owned the Eighth Street Bookstore at 32 West 8th Street in New York.

September 6, 2019

Uncollected poems

Note: The uncollected texts printed here date from the same period as Tom Weatherly’s Maumau American Cantos (1970) and Thumbprint (1971), and include a number of additional cantos that were not published in the former collection.

September 6, 2019
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