Remembering Tom Veitch (1941-2022)

Ron Padgett: “In 1961 I was introduced to Tom Veitch in the apartment of a Columbia undergraduate classmate of mine. Tom was a recent dropout, due to a spiritual crisis, but was hanging around the neighborhood, said to be a fiction writer. When I mentioned that I had to go buy some books, Tom asked if he could tag along. After browsing a bit, I found the volumes I needed and paid for them, then walked over to tell Tom I was ready to go. He was holding a stack of books that went from his groin almost to his chin. As we approached the sales counter, which was next to the front door, I paused to allow him to stop, but he walked around me and straight out the door. Astonished, I followed him out, lagging slightly behind him as he walked down Broadway—I didn’t want to get involved in what might be his shoplifting arrest. … Soon Tom became part of a group that included Ted Berrigan, Johnny Stanton, Joe Brainard, Dick Gallup, my classmate Lorenz Gude, and me. Tom and Lorenz had known each other as children in Walpole, NH, and had attended the same high school, in Bellows Falls, VT, though Tom was a year older. By 1962 he was sharing a threadbare apartment at 210 West 102nd Street with a young construction worker named Edelblute. I have no idea how this arrangement came about, as the two of them had nothing in common except a certain footloose and fancy-free attitude. When Tom drove down to New Orleans with Ted on a lark, he let me use the apartment. One night at 3 a.m. I was awakened by the sound of breaking glass and, in the hallway between the kitchen and living room, there stood Edelblute. … Tom’s writing was an exciting blend of his influences—Henry Miller, William Burroughs, perhaps Rabelais, and fantasy comic books, with an underpinning of Carl Jung—but he had an insouciance and good humor that gave his experimentalism a goofy, companionable feeling. His first published collection, aside from the elaborate family newspaper that he and his siblings had written, designed, and printed at home, was brought out by Ted’s C Press in 1964: Literary Days. By then Tom had become a welcome addition to our little band of ex-Tulsans (Ted, Dick, Joe, and me), though, always a free agent, he never made any effort to be accepted. He bounced back and forth between the Lower East Side, where Ted and Joe were living, and Morningside Heights, where Lorenz and I were. But the spiritual seeker in him came to the fore, and in 1965 he entered the Weston Priory, a Benedictine monastery in Vermont, where he became Brother Robert. …”
Poetry Project
YouTube: Tom Veitch Documentary
W – Tom Veitch
TCJ: Tom Veitch, 1941-2022

from Tom Veitch Magazine, no. 2 (1970). Granary Books