WAYMAN, Tom

---

Nationality: Canadian. Born: Thomas Ethan Wayman, Hawkesbury, Ontario, 13 August 1945. Education: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1962–66, B.A. 1966; University of California, Irvine, 1966–68, M.F.A. 1968. Career: Instructor in English, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, 1968–69; worked at construction, demolition, and factory jobs, and as a teacher's aide, 1969–75; writer-inresidence, University of Windsor, Ontario, 1975–76; assistant professor of English, Wayne State University, Detroit, 1976–77; writer-inresidence, University of Alberta, Edmonton, 1978–79; faculty member, David Thompson University Centre School of Writing, Nelson, British Columbia, 1980–82; writer-in-residence, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, spring 1983; instructor, Kwantlen College, Surrey, British Columbia, fall 1983; faculty member, Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver, British Columbia, 1984–87; instructor, Kwantlen College, Surrey, British Columbia, 1988–89; professor, English department, Okanagan University College, Kelowna, British Columbia, 1990–91, 1992–95; faculty member, writing studio, Kootenay School of the Arts, 1991–92, 1996–98; writer-inresidence, University of Toronto, 1996. Since 1998 faculty member, English Department, Kwantlen University College, Surrey, British Columbia. Awards: Helen Bullis prize (Poetry Northwest) 1972; Borestone Mountain poetry award, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1976; Canadian Authors Association prize, 1975; Canada Council senior grant, 1975, 1977; A.J.M. Smith prize, Michigan State University, 1976; U.S. Bicentennial award, 1976. Address: P.O. Box 163, Winlaw, British Columbia VOG 2JO, Canada.

Publications

Poetry

Mindscapes, with others, edited by Ann Wall. Toronto, Anansi, 1971.

Waiting for Wayman. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1973.

For and against the Moon: Blues, Yells, and Chuckles. Toronto, Macmillan, 1974.

Money and Rain: Tom Wayman Live! Toronto, Macmillan, 1975.

Routines. Seattle, Black Eye Press, 1976.

Transport. Toronto, Dreadnaught Press, 1976.

Kitchener/Chicago/Saskatoon. Windsor, Ontario, Flat Singles Press, 1977

Free Time: Industrial Poems. Toronto, Macmillan, 1977.

A Planet Mostly Sea: Two Poems. Winnipeg, Turnstone Press, 1979.

Introducing Tom Wayman: Selected Poems 1973–1980. Princeton, New Jersey, Ontario Review Press, 1980.

Living on the Ground: Tom Wayman Country. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1980.

The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech: New and Selected Poems. Saskatoon, Thistledown Press, 1981.

Counting the Hours: City Poems. Toronto, McClelland and Stewart, 1983.

The Face of Jack Munro. Madeira Park, British Columbia, Harbour, 1986.

In a Small House on the Outskirts of Heaven. Madeira Park, BritishColumbia, Harbour, 1989.

Did I Miss Anything? Selected Poems 1973–1993. Madeira Park, British Columbia, Harbour, 1993.

The Astonishing Weight of the Dead. Vancouver, Polestar, 1994.

I'll Be Right Back: New and Selected Poems 1980–1996. Princeton, New Jersey, Ontario Review Press, 1997.

The Colours of the Forest. Madeira Park, British Columbia, Harbour, 1999.

Other

Inside Job: Essays on the New Work Writing. Madeira Park, British Columbia, Harbour, 1983.

A Country Not Considered: Canada, Culture, Work. Toronto, Anansi, 1993.

Editor, Beaton Abbot's Got the Contract: An Anthology of Working Poems. Edmonton, NeWest Press, 1974.

Editor, A Government Job at Last: An Anthology of Working Poems, Mainly Canadian. Vancouver, MacLeod, 1976.

Editor, Going for Coffee: Poetry on the Job. Madeira Park, BritishColumbia, Harbour, 1981.

Editor, with Calvin Wharton, East of Main: An Anthology of Poems from East Vancouver. Vancouver, Pulp Press, 1989.

Editor, Paperwork: Contemporary Poems from the Job. MadeiraPark, British Columbia, Harbour, 1991.

*

Critical Studies: "Tom Wayman: An Introduction" by Paul Delany, in Little Magazine (New York), winter 1975–76; "Way Out with Wayman: The Engaged Voice" by Marlowe Anderson, in CV 2 (Winnipeg), January 1976; "The Condition of Being Alive: Tom Wayman's Poetry" by Jenné Andrews, in Colorado Review (Fort Collins), fall 1985; "Waiting for Wayman to Get Off Work" by Phil Hall, in Quarry (Kingston, Ontario), December 1987; "Tom Wayman: Working Poet" by Doug Smith, in Canadian Forum, 74(843), 1 October 1995; Tom Wayman and His Works, monograph by John Harris, Toronto, ECW Press, 1997.

Tom Wayman comments:

What I want to do with my poems, and with the poems by others that I encourage and collect, is bring into Canadian literature a poetry of everyday life based on the central experience of that life for most people—daily work. By "work" I mean what men and women do for a living, whether paid or unpaid, blue- or white-collar. I consider this experience central because I believe the work we do profoundly affects every other aspect of our existence—our standard of living, how much time and energy we have off the job, who our friends are, and more. Even our attitudes to such traditionally "poetic" subjects as love, death, and nature are very strongly influenced by the conditions and content of our daily work. An accurate description of contemporary Canadian jobs and how these affect our lives is virtually taboo at present in our entertainment and fine arts media. I find it discouraging that the literary arts—which are touted, and funded, as epitomizing the human spirit—should help perpetuate the taboo against accurately depicting the central and governing life experience of most Canadians. My efforts as a writer are dedicated to revealing the many dimensions to how work is currently organized and the tangible and intangible implications of such jobs for human beings.

*  *  *

Tom Wayman is one of the few Canadian political poets, and it is perhaps to his advantage as a poet that his politics is somewhat distanced from the contemporary Canadian scene. His is the politics of the North American 1960s, when Wayman was personally involved in the radical student movement in California and when, as he has said, he later lived by "hustle, construction labouring, unemployment insurance, and welfare." It is, reaching even farther back, the turn-of-the-century politics of the unpolitical, stemming from the antigovernment propaganda of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or Wobblies, and the anarchist movement of that time.

Wayman's is a politics with its own kind of realism, accepting defeat without disillusionment and having—at least in the imagination—its own imperatives of action. This is suggested in Wayman's early and moving poem "The Dream of the Guerillas": "And night quiet / after the dream. / Street lights burn on. / The slogans are calm as dim walls. The clock, the clock says: now / the guerillas are coming and you must go with them."

Wayman's radicalism is mingled with a great deal of nostalgia, and he looks to the lost causes of the past as well as to the losing causes of the present. He has actually been a member of the moribund IWW, and he ends a 1977 poem on the continuity of submerged libertarian ideals ("The Ghosts of the Anarchists Speak of George Woodcock") by having a Spanish anarchist say,

Still, we don't win So now what happened here
must be written down 	Not that anybody could list
all the arguments, the wind, the food,
the sweat and thinking and fighting
that led us to try this and try that
to be successful here and fail there. But we need
true words that tell what we did
so compactly, so magnificently
they are like a seed you hold
in your hand and see in it all the intricate beauty
of the strong dark flowers that will come.

Wayman first emerged out of publication in magazines when a group of his poems was printed, with work by three other writers, in Mindscapes. The volumes he has published since then, including Waiting for Wayman, Money and Rain: Tom Wayman Live!, and Living on the Ground: Tom Wayman Country, have projected, as their titles suggest, not only a resolutely minority political attitude but also a highly idiosyncratic personality. There is a great deal of the dramatic in Wayman's poetic method. A comic person named Wayman faces the world as a Schweikian guerrilla, and in this role he dominates a whole series of poems devoted to exposing the enormities of the world against which the poet clumsily and futilely but relentlessly fights.

But underlying the comedy, and expressed in other poems with a good deal of sincere pathos, is a recognition of the misery and pain of the economically and politically oppressed, who represent the greater part of the world's population. Despite this recognition Wayman does not give way to despair, but he no longer rises high in the heavens of hope and no longer sees self-sacrifice as an imperative: "I no longer believe my pain / will help another human being."

In his book In a Small House on the Outskirts of Heaven Wayman remarks in an afterword, "Personally, I find it discouraging that the literary arts—which are touted (and funded—as epitomizing the human spirit)—should help perpetuate the taboo against accurately depicting daily work and thus contributing to human pain. I find offensive each new anthology of Canadian poetry, prose or drama that once again offers a literary poetry of a country—in which nobody works." Wayman himself has written a great deal about work and how it should fulfill and satisfy a person but how in modern society it usually results in a person's feeling degraded.

Wayman is not only a good urban poet with a red Wobbly card in his wallet, however. He is also a man sensitive to his environment and avid to spend his leisure in it, and some of his finest poems are about backpacking through the Canadian wilderness. In a Small Town on the Outskirts of Heaven as well as his earlier books contain remarkable lyrical and elegiac pieces about the mountain and island country and the cityscapes Wayman has loved. "Vancouver Winter," which is almost Eliotian in its clear luminosity, is brief enough to quote entirely:

   Like cats at a window
the houses along the wet street
look out on the downpour.
   In the window of a house
a cat. In the cat's eye
   drenched asphalt, the line of houses,
smoke from the chimneys streaming
toward the ground
through the sodden air.

There is a broad sweep to Wayman that someone has not unjustly compared to Walt Whitman. He is vigorous, protean in fancy, and more self-critical than most poets of his highly productive kind. Facility is his temptation, but it has rarely led him away from true feeling.

—George Woodcock