Thomas E. Weatherly Jr.

Add links
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Thomas Weatherly Jr. (November 3, 1942 – July 2014) was an American poet, associated with the Saint Mark's Church Poetry Project in New York City.

Life

Born in

African-American
community. His grandmother, Mary E. Hunter, was the first black school principal in the county.

Weatherly attended

CUNY Manhattan, and Columbia University
.

Weatherly served in the

Umbra poets, a circle of African-American poets and writers founded in the early 1960s, he did not include himself among them, having arrived late on the scene. He attended the inaugural poetry workshops at the Poetry Project, taught by poet Joel Oppenheimer, and soon began to teach there himself. Publishing in small journals such as Gandhabba, Minetta Review, Whetstone, The World, and Exquisite Corpse, Weatherly began describing himself as a poet; his first book, Maumau American Cantos,[2] appeared in 1970.[3]

He worked at the Strand Bookstore (rare and first edition bookstore) in New York City for decades, as well as at The Lion's Head, a local pub in Sheridan Square.

His work career also includes serving as a teacher of creative writing at St. Mark's Church in

State University of New York-Buffalo in the seventies. He taught Afro-Hispanic art at Rutgers University-Newark and conducted poetry workshops at grade schools, universities, prisons and poetry projects. He was an avid bicyclist, computer enthusiast and music lover. In later years, he split his time between New York City and Huntsville, Alabama. His blogs, Eclectic Git[4] and saint satin stain, discuss topics ranging from prosody and politics; the last entry of saint satin stain is poem Weatherly wrote as a memorial for Walter Dean Myers, who had died just days before Weatherly himself.[5] He also wrote for Left in Alabama, a political community blog.[6]

In 1971, he published Thumbprint, and in 2006, Groundwater Press published his noted short history of the saxophone. Weatherly also edited and co-edited several anthologies, including Natural Process (1970), New Black Voices (1972), The Poetry of Black America (1973), Uplate (1989), Everybody Goodbye Ain't Gone (2006), and The Second Set (2008).

Weatherly was photographed by

Paul Blackburn."[8] His work "condenses the wisdom of a life and vast readings into brilliantly compact music," the writer Andrei Codrescu has said; Howard Kissel of the New York Daily News calls him "that rarest of birds, a mystic with a sense of humor . . . a red-blooded American Zen master."[9]
Among Weatherly's innovations was a counted-syllable, patterned-sonic form that he called the double glory, and which he explains in eclectic git, as follows: 

a x x b  a x
x a x a x
x x a x c
x a x a c
a x b x a

tr lē ə lōn my lē

nōz trs děth my zĭk

něv ər my tĭd härt

nōz m dē brt hûrtz

hy mən blōz sound blz

The rhyme begins at both ends and moves toward the center and back out toward the beginning and end. The poem written in syllabic prosody, a pattern of the number of syllables, deploys lines of the same number of syllables, with one exception. That one exception does not break the rule. The rhymes in the main pattern identical rhyme, true rhyme and assonance plays against two consonant rhymes heart/hurts.[4]

Weatherly was buried in a traditional Jewish ceremony in Huntsville, Alabama, upon his death in July 2014.

Publications

  • Maumau American Cantos, New York: Corinth Books, 1970 (facsimile at
    Eclipse Archive
    ).
  • Thumbprint. New York: Telegraph Books, 1971 (facsimile at Eclipse Archive).
  • Climate/Stream (with Ken Bluford). Philadelphia: Middle Earth Books, 1972.
  • Short history of the saxophone. New York: Groundwater Press, 2006.

References

  1. ^ "Thomas Elias Weatherly Jr.'s Obituary on The Huntsville Times". The Huntsville Times. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  2. ^ "MAU MAU AMERICAN CANTOS". Eclipsearchive.org. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  3. ^ "Thomas Elias Weatherly". Pw.org. 29 December 2008. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  4. ^ a b "Eclectic Git". Xyxx1.wordpress.com. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  5. ^ "Saint Satin Stain". Archived from the original on August 7, 2015. Retrieved May 18, 2015.
  6. ^ "saint satin stain interviews "Junior" Weatherly of Scottsboro, Alabama". Leftinalabama.com. May 29, 2010. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  7. ^ "Obituary: Tom Weatherly [by M.G. Stephens]". Milkmag.org. July 25, 2014. Retrieved May 17, 2018.
  8. ISBN 9781438140667
    | Autobiographical note
  9. ^ Short history of the saxophone. New York: Groundwater Press, 2006.

External links

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_E._Weatherly_Jr.&oldid=1215897925"