In "What Good Poems are For," a man in his 50s reads one of Tom Wayman's works to strangers in a bar because the poem was about work he did, what he knew about, / written by somebody like himself ("What Good Poems are For," Did I Miss Anything? Selected Poems 1973-1993). The poem could've been any number of Wayman's works that come at industry from different angles.
In "The Factory Hour" (68), the poet depicts the work day as a voyage on the blue tide of the early morning sun. The workers share experiences of car pools, the grey plastic lunch bucket and safety boots. Walking in through the asphalt yard / we enter the hull of the vessel for a voyage marked by the sounds of machines, the drone of the PA system, and short breaks. We're immersed in the sounds and feeling of the journey.
One of the co-workers named by the PA gets his own poem on the next page of Wayman's collection, a paean to the experience of the iron itself, dormant for eons before it's pulled into the light and transformed miraculously to bolts with purpose ("Neil Watt's Poem" 70). Playful in its personification and language (the iron proclaims We are ore), the poem conveys awe, admiration, and pride. In another poem, one worker's steady beat draws all the men into a joyful jam/dance. The foreman goes away shaking his head ("Industrial Music" 100).
The foreman is a bad guy, or at least incompetent, in many of Wayman's poems. The foreman harangues his workers to go faster, but when they team up to finish ahead of schedule -- showing how superfluous he is -- he obstructs them ("Asphalt Hours, Asphalt Air" 155). The foreman at the sugar silo who's supposed to monitor safety from uptop is MIA while men deep in the silo risk their lives ("One Lump or Two" 201). When Wayman, just hired, asks to be trained for his dangerous new job, the foreman says only, "Nothing to worry about... Can you start tomorrow?" ("Wayman in the Workforce: Actively Seeking Employment" 66). The foreman in "Factory Time" is so polite on Friday afternoon, long cheques dripping out of his hands (102).
Why should the foreman earn more than the ones who exhaust their bodies all day? "Socialism" in Canada wasn't such a dirty word in the 1970s the way it has been in the US, but Wayman still doesn't hammer us with Marx. Some of these poems did wear me down, ones that seem like documentaries, in which Wayman gives distinctive voices to many men and women on the workforce. I prefer the playfulness in "Paper, Scissors, Stone" (192), which makes a children's game of figuring the worth of work:
An executive's salary for working with paper
beats the wage in a metal shop operating shears
which beats what a gardener earns arranging stone.But the pay for a surgeon's use of scissors
is larger than that of a heavy equipment driver removing stone
which in turn beats a secretary's cheque for handling paper.
Wayman figures everyone should be paid the same for their time. Sixteen years earlier, figuring how hourly expenses squeeze hourly wages every hour of the day, Wayman gives us this delightful vision of harmony and justice:
...every bright season, chemical workers
in the factory of the leaf
effortlessly, without wages, and with everything they want
change sunshine and water into a living thing ("It is Seven O'clock" 41).
So Wayman's poems give us trees and sunshine, too, with friendship, love, and whimsy.
He has a dialogue with his poor tired body: "You go to work if you're so keen," / it says. "Me, I'm going back to sleep." ("Routines" 72). He empathizes with "The Feet," so important during the day, but made to lie down naked / in a part of the bed no one visits... with nothing to do, crossed like a blind horse putting his head over the neck of another blind horse (145).
He plays with personification: Some unfamiliar people who call to him from a bar say they're his needs, including talkative Friendship, a guy with hard hat and hammer named Shelter, and the unnamed woman who smiles every time he looks her way. Wayman asks, Shouldn't there be someone here named, uh, New Stereo? ("Meeting Needs" 178). Things get uncomfortable when he asks about "the Major," as in, Major Social Change. His "Kitchen Poem" is both a cooking lesson and an allegory for global inequities (106). [This inspired my poem On Track.]
Wayman comes up to the edge of scorn when he's dealing with consumer culture, but he doesn't forget the humanity of the misguided. Each object in a suburban home "whispers" its four numbers all day long -- purchase date, price, savings, and present worth -- until the woman of the house goes berserk ("Saturday Afternoon in Suburban Richmond" 109). After he tells us that a particular family's TV is like a grandmother, he carries that idea through the day so vividly that it's not a screen I picture in the corner of the family room, but a little old lady talking to herself ("Grandmother" 114). The chatter of radios and the whining of tourists intrude on the reverence of trees gathered at a mountain like worshipers at a cathedral ("The Banffiad: The Silence That is Like a Song" 49).
The title poem of the collection, "Have I Missed Anything?" is Wayman's greatest hit. He gives a special page to it on his website. It was a meme before there were memes, circulated by FAX, posted to professors' office doors, passed around teachers' lounges, often attributed to "Anonymous." It's all the snarky things that come to a teacher's mind when a student returning from absence asks that question.
My gateway to Wayman was "What Good Poems Are For" (1986) from Christian Wiman's anthology Home. Wayman imagines that a poem is like a potted plant on a sunlit windowsill in a lake by a cabin, a decoration you might not notice -- but you'd notice its absence. As I've been writing poems all year, I can identify with Wayman's experience:
Only those who work on the plant
know how slowly it grows
and changes, almost dies from its own causes
or neglect, or how other plants
can be started from this one... (131).
Catching up with 30 more years of Wayman's work, I have work to do.
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