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the

hatcheck

girl

by tony whedon

Tony Whedon is the author of three books of poems and a prize-winning essay collection. He is a working trombone player and the leader of the poetry/jazz ensemble PoJazz. Along with Neil Shepard, he founded Green Mountains Review. He lives with his wife Suzanne in Montgomery, Vermont.

Tony is available for readings.

He can be reached at (802) 326.4105

Border Crossing - Tony Whedon with Tom Fay
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Hatcheck Girl Interview - NPR Write The Book
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Hatcheck PoJazz Reading 1 - Tony Whedon
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Hatcheck PoJazz Reading 2 - Tony Whedon
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Here is the poet as jazz musician at the height of his creative power, fluent in the magic of written word and pursuing musical pathways that are hidden in shadow or bathed in furious sun. Like pieces of sculpture, Tony Whedon’s poems offer innumerable vistas and can be taken out of sequence or subjected to the reader's own sequence. A feast no doubt, "The Hatcheck Girl" also offers beautiful garish Whedon watercolors that unite poetic and musical worlds.

Tom Fay, jazz pianist with Gerry Mulligan, Clark Terry, Dizzy Gillespie, and Benny Goodman.

The poet Hayden Carruth once said, "I’d have rather been a trombonist than anything else in the world,' and I know he would have relished this latest collection by Tony Whedon, who’s an active jazz trombonist in addition to being a writer. (Add painter to the mix and you have, as Duke Ellington dubbed Ray Nance, a triple threat.) Everything in this varied, unfailingly honest collection swings.

 

Sascha Feinstein, editor of Brilliant Corners

From the downbeat of “The Hatcheck Girl,” Tony Whedon claims musical authority in a far broader sense than we know it as a rule. He uses nothing jingly, no labored syncopation, no other mere effects to achieve such authority: rather, his poems display a mind like the first-rate jazz player’s, uncannily combining lightning reflexes with deep command of the art’s prior literature. “The Hatcheck Girl” is beautiful, to be sure, but not merely that: the author is akin to the pianist Phineas Newborn, whom he describes as reaching “past the beauty that dogged him all his life”– on the far side of that beauty is a wisdom so deep as to beggar efforts to articulate it. But articulate it Tony Whedon does.

 

Sydney Lea, Vermont Poet Laureate (2011-2015)

Book launch picture gallery

Bryan Memorial Gallery, Jeffersonville, VT

October 21, 2016

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