Did I Miss Anything?: Selected Poems 1973-1993

"His is a wry, down-to-earth, often humourous vision - a perceptive, everyman's view of life, couched in straight forward, accessible language." -"Coast News"

About the author

Tom Wayman was born in Ontario in 1945, but has spent most of his life in British Columbia. He has worked at a number of jobs, both blue and white-collar, across Canada and the U.S., and has helped bring into being a new movement of poetry in these countries--the incorporation of the actual conditions and effects of daily work. His poetry has been awarded the Canadian Authors' Association medal for poetry, the A.J.M. Smith Prize, first prize in the USA Bicentennial Poetry Awards competition, and the Acorn-Plantos Award; in 2003 he was shortlisted for the Governor-General's Literary Award. He has published more than a dozen collections of poems, six poetry anthologies, three collections of essays and three books of prose fiction. He has taught widely at the post-secondary level in Canada and the U.S., most recently (2002-2010) at the University of Calgary. Since 1989 he has been the Squire of "Appledore," his estate in the Selkirk Mountains of southeastern BC.

Summary

Tom Wayman has been writing and publishing the poetry of everyday life for over twenty years. This anniversary collection gathers the best of Wayman's published work from eleven previous volumes, along with some provocative new poems, in celebration of his commitment to honest, accessible writing with a sense of humour.

Although Wayman laments the disappearance of poetry as a popular art form, and its adoption as "an instument of torture" in educational institutions, "like a steadily-promoted deck officer on the Titanic" he has been having a darn good time as a writer. For years he has been considered the guru of the work poetry movement, and has held a number of blue-collar and white-collar jobs across Canada and the USA.

Foreword

CONTENTS

Introduction: Glad I Was Born

from WAITING FOR WAYMAN (1973)
On Relating California Atrocity Tales
The Projected Poems of Lyndon Johnson
The Dream of the Guerillas
Life on the Land Grant Review
Despair
On the Interstates
Poem Composed, etc.
Picketing Supermarkets
Melancholy Inside Organizations
Wayman in the Workforce: Urban Renewal
Days: Construction
Unemployment
Wayman in Love

from FOR AND AGAINST THE MOON: BLUES, YELLS, AND CHUCKLES (1974)
It Is Seven O'Clock
Wayman in the Workforce: Teacher's Aide
Second-Hand Street
The Knot, the Snail, the Tooth
The Day After Wayman Got the Nobel Prize
The Banffiad: The Silence That Is Like a Song
The Country of Everyday: Literary Criticism
The Country of Everyday: Workplace
Dead End

from MONEY AND RAIN: TOM WAYMAN LIVE! (1975)
The Blue Hour
Cumberland Graveyard, February 1973
Wayman in the Workforce: Actively Seeking Employment
The Factory Hour
Neil Watt's Poem
Routines
The Old Power
Violence
The Death of the Family
The Kenworth Farewell
The Chilean Elegies
The Return
The Kiss and the Cry

from FREE TIME: INDUSTRIAL POEMS (1977)
Industrial Music
Factory Time
Friends Logging
Kitchen Poem
Saturday Afternoon in Suburban Richmond
Wayman Ascending into the Middle Class
Highway 16/5 illumination
Grandmother
Wayman in Quebec
Rainy Night on the 401 Headed West Across Hastings County
Sugar on the Rim
Where I Come From: Grandfather
The Death of Pablo Neruda

from LIVING ON THE GROUND: TOM WAYMAN COUNTRY (1980)
What Good Poems Are For
Garrison
The Refuge
Travelling Companions
Teething
The Feet
La Lluvia de Tu Muerte

from COUNTING THE HOURS: CITY POEMS (1983)
Asphalt Hours, Asphalt Air
The Detroit State Poems: Tennenhouse
The Detroit State Poems: Marking
Two Students, etc.
New and Used
Taking the Dead Out of My Address Book
Meeting Needs
White Hand

from THE FACE OF JACK MUNRO (1986)
Articulating West
Raising a Relationship
Hammer
Paper, Scissors, Stone
Country Feuds
Students

from IN A SMALL HOUSE ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF HEAVEN (1989)
One Lump or Two
The Big Theft
Hating Jews
The Poet Milton Acorn Crosses into the Republic of Heaven
Defective Parts of Speech: Have You Really Read All These?
Marshall-Wells illumination

NEW POEMS
Did I Miss Anything?
Billy on Industrial Progress
Poetry Overdose

Backcover copy
A Generation Speaks

For a generation, Tom Wayman's poems have been the voice of men and women fully engaged with the world.

Over the past twenty years Wayman's humour, wit and imagination have illuminated social issues from Vietnam to the 1983 BC General Strike, and economic concerns such as the work we do and its effects on us both on and off the job. His vibrant poems have also created hilarious and searching assessments of love, death and the state of our natural environment.

The clarity and emotional power of Wayman's writing have long been legendary. Now for the first time Did I Miss Anything? makes available a selection of two decades of Wayman's widely read and frequently honoured poems, and a few new ones as well.

"I mean these poems to be a gift," Wayman writes in the foreword. "I want my poetry to be a tender, humourous, engaged, piercing but always accurate depiction of where we are."

Indeed, Wayman's poems are enjoyed not only by people who want to better understand the present - they are treasured as well by everyone determined to improve the future.

INTRODUCTION: Glad I Was Born

This year, 1993, is the twentieth anniversary of the publication of my first book of poems, Waiting For Wayman. To mark the occasion, I wanted to make a selection of the best writing I have done to date. Since temporal distance, for me, is a great aid to evaluation and judgment, Did I Miss Anything? offers the most memorable poems from my first six books, which appeared between 1973 and 1983. Also here are a sampling from my two most recent collections (from 1986 and 1989), which remain in print from Harbour Publishing, and some new poems that bring the reader up to the present.

These two decades have been a wonderful experience for me as a writer, and for my poems. Together we have had more than our share of recognition, media attention, public readings and literary festivals, magazine and anthology publication, grants, translations into other languages, awards, writer-in-residenceships . . . everything, in fact, that any author could want. Meanwhile, I have watched helplessly as the art form I love has diminished in the public's perception of its value and importance. Arrayed against poetry are a swelling and seemingly unbeatable coalition that includes a declining readership for any written material, the adoption of poetry as an instrument of torture in Our secondary school classrooms, and the confusion by a number of authors between obscurity of presentation and depth of thought, and between exclusiveness and superiority.

However, like a steadily-promoted deck officer on the Titanic, I have been having a marvellous time as a writer. During the past twenty years my poems have taken me to fascinating places, and introduced me to many astonishing and delightful people, that otherwise I never would have known. I also have been privileged to help bring into being-along with dozens of others - a new movement in poetry, literature, and the arts generally: the incorporation into the human story of the actual conditions and effects of daily employment. In this task my contribution has been the editing of anthologies and the writing of essays, in addition to my own poems. The endeavor, however, has introduced me and my poetry to non-literary audiences that the already-blazed cultural trails would never have led me to. These audiences, along with the first-year college classes I teach, have provided me with a continual reminder of the ever-widening gap between literary pursuits and the concerns of a majority of my fellow citizens.

And yet, throughout twenty years my poetic aim has been to provide an accurate depiction of our common everyday life. I have tried to combine this with a sense of humor and with a vision of a better possibility for people than what we have so far achieved. My hope is that the latter two aspects of my writing provide perspective on the balance of what I portray. As for spirituality, I long ago was a convert to the concept expressed by Robert Bly in his poem "Turning Away From Lies" (from The Light Around the Body, 1967): "The Kingdom of Heaven does not mean the next life / ... The two worlds are both in this world."

Overall, my intention is that the complexities revealed by my poems should be the complications of our everyday existence, rather than newly-created difficulties or mysteries generated by tricks of language or poetic form. Clarity, honesty, accuracy of statement have been my goals-subject to, naturally, the limits of human discourse found in every genre or means of communication. My aim is that my poems should be useful: to myself, and to others who share my community and world. I mean these poems to be a gift; I want my poetry to be a tender, humorous, enraged, piercing, but always accurate depiction of where we are-as individuals functioning in a society, and as members of a rawly self-conscious species now occupying the third planet from a nondescript star.

Much that I have encountered in my life in the way of events, individuals, and popular and high art has influenced my writing. In poetry, two important Canadian influences were Earle Birney and Al Purdy. I was impressed by the range of their subject matter and by their careful craftsmanship, even though the latter often appears within a deceptively conversational tone. Internationally, my major influences were T.S. Eliot and Pablo Neruda. I attended university in a period when Eliot dominated English letters. For many years the shadow of Eliot lay across whatever I wrote; my "Asphalt Hours, Asphalt Air" is an attempt to banish that dry darkness forever. The poem is based closely on Eliot's "The Waste Land," but my poem places its concerns within a landscape of contemporary North American industrial and societal myths and activities. Neruda has been a much sunnier and more vigorous model for me. The Chilean poet's attention to the real elements of this world-things-finds reflection in my writing in "Kitchen Poem," for example. And Neruda's huge affection for people has influenced many poems of mine, including "New and Used," where the initial inspiration came from Neruda's poem about a Valparaiso clockmaker.

What I bring to poetry that these writers do not is the centrality of daily work to our life. I believe that to try to articulate the human story without depicting the core of daily existence is a tragic mistake. We all dream of a world without work, but we remain victims of our form of social organization as long as we-and our art-refuse to honestly consider how our jobs shape us, positively and negatively.

An imaginary world where we do not work to survive may be an adolescent dream, and may offer a picture of a more beautiful existence than is now an actual possibility for us. But sooner or later a functioning adult must face and make choices that involve work. The alternative is to remain dependent - on luck, chance, friends, relatives, the mercy of those with more power, the state. That is why I believe what I write is the literature of the future: an adult literature. As I stated in my 1983 book of essays, Inside Job:

"Just as a child or adolescent often does not under- stand work or money, so our literature mostly has ignored these and focussed instead on the unlikely lives of those whose day-to-day existence apparently is not governed by concerns of work or money: the rich, killers, outlaws, or fantastic representations of people doing certain real jobs (doctors, cowboys, policemen, and so on).

"The new work writing takes up the challenge of portraying the world an adult sees and attempts to understand and/or change. A grown person who constantly evades having to cope with reality, who lives in a world of dreams however beautiful, we consider immature if not mentally ill. The contemporary industrial writing provides maturity and a healthy balance to literature."

Because most of us do not like what we see when we look at our jobs, we frequently engage as individuals and a community in acts of denial about daily employment. Most jobs constitute a "distinct society" we participate in each day, where during the central part of our existence most of the democratic rights and privileges Canadians enjoy off the job are suspended. Briefly, we live our productive lives-the majority of our waking hours-as free-lance serfs. We are free to choose and change the masters we will obey for money, free to be destitute or marginal, free to go into debt, free to purchase as many of life's necessities and/or drugs and toys as our rate of remuneration permits. We are even free to employ other serfs. But most of us at work have no significant control over what happens to us, over who gives us orders, over the organization of production, over the distribution of the wealth our labor produces, over the social uses of what we create. The alternative of self-employment often turns into self-exploitation as we strive to remain competitive with enterprises employing serfs.

Our denial of this state of unfreedom leads ourselves and many of our cultural products to ignore the realities of the present, as well as the painful and frightening and exhilarating effort necessary to change the present. Instead, there is an urge to leap forward to an imaginary era where what is denied today never has to be looked at or understood, or changed for the better in the face of enormous opposition. But an adult literature does not pretend to have already resolved our current dilemmas; this literature cannot be categorized as post-modern, post-industrial, post-feminist, etc. Adult art recognizes itself instead as pre-liberation. Firmly anchored in the realities of the modern era, such art acknowledges and responds to the industrial organization of the globe and that organization's attendant inequalities and injustices concerning class, gender, race, ecosystems and more.

This is not to say that an adult poetry must be dreary. No one has ever, for example, accused my writing of that. To an adolescent, adulthood may seem a reduced state of being, as responsibilities and commitments limit the boundless possibilities of dream. But to a functioning adult, skills and knowledge gained make possible the creation of a life, not merely the response to it. This sense of strength, of efficacy, of potential power to solve problems that are encountered and thus to tangibly shape the world a better way, move the competent adult out of passiveness into life-enhancing activities that can benefit both the self and the surrounding community.

In any case, every human emotion is part of adult life, that is, of work. Joy, wonder, laughter, games, rebellion, lust, love can be experienced at the jobsite, since work-however undemocratically structured today-is in its last analysis a place where human beings gather to remanufacture the world. Yet every activity found in the shop or office or factory is warped by its occurrence within a more-or-less authoritarian environment, just as our lives are warped by our and our neighbors' daily participation in this environment. We deny this, as a society, at our peril. I do not see my role as a literary artist as contributing - through denial - to the ongoing affliction of myself or my friends and co-workers.

Instead, the task of helping build an adult literature remains an immense challenge, that I know will involve my writing for many years ahead. The two decades represented by this book sketched the outline of my participation in a new and maturer direction for poetry. I cannot imagine a more exciting time to practice one's writing than at the beginnings of so momentous a shift in art.

As an author, I owe much to many people who have helped me and my poems; some of these are listed on the Acknowledgements page here. But the core of my gratitude must go to my readers, who despite the prevailing aesthetic have welcomed not only my poems but also the vision of literature toward which I struggle. It is ultimately my readers' response that has made my artistic adventures during these decades such intensely rewarding ones. How can I express an overwhelming gratitude? Near the end of Marcel Camus' 1958 film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus), the grieving Orpheus asks this same question of his beloved Euridice, whose dead body he is carrying in his arms. She has given him total happiness, has immeasurably enriched his life; how can he tell her this? His friend Hermes, who like Orpheus in Camus' version of the myth is a Rio de Janeiro transit company employee, advises: "Say a poor man's word, Orpheus: 'thank you.'"

To all my readers, then-past, present and future - I say: thank you.

Tom Wayman
"Appledore"
Winlaw, B.C.
1 January 1993

Product details

• Authors: Tom Wayman
• Publisher: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.12.2022
• EAN: 9781550170924
• ISBN: 978-1-55017-092-4
• No. of pages: 224
• Dimensions: 151 mm x 218 mm x 17 mm
• Weight: 331 g
• Subject: Fiction > Poetry, drama