The Order in Which We Do Things: The Poetry of Tom Wayman

by Tom Wayman, Owen Percy (Editor)

Overview

Tom Wayman’s poetry has been published around the world to great acclaim. Wayman is one of Canada’s most prolific and public poets, and his writing since the 1960s has been by turns angry, engaged, hopeful, tender, and hilarious. His voice and persona are his alone but simultaneously ours too. His recurring themes—work, mortality, love, lust, friendship, the natural world—make his work a poetry of human inevitabilities, a poetry that exults in the inevitability of seeing poetry in the everyday.

Wayman’s craft is poïesis (from the Ancient Greek “to make”)—making a change, making a difference, making a ruckus, making the most of our time. His working life has always been inextricable from his writing one; his poems offer an honest and candid consideration of the ideological underpinnings, practical realities, and subtle beauties of a life lived on job sites and picket lines, in union halls, classrooms, and book-stuffed offices, and on the page itself.

The Order in Which We Do Things is a collection of more than thirty of Wayman’s best poems, selected and introduced by Owen Percy. Percy’s introduction explores the genesis of Wayman’s print persona and contextualizes his politically engaged, conversational voice within the pantheon of its various publics. In his afterword, “Work and Silence,” Wayman reflects on his more than forty years in print as a work poet, and underlines poetry’s sustained power to engage readers, invite solidarity, and stoke the fires of critical resistance to the order in which we do things.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781554589951
Publisher:	Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Publication date:	02/19/2014
Series:	Laurier Poetry , #20
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.25(d)

About the Author

Tom Wayman has published nineteen poetry collections, edited six anthologies of poets writing about their employment, and published three collections of essays on labour arts. He has taught at the post-secondary level in the United States and Canada and co-founded the Vancouver Industrial Writers Union and the Vancouver Centre of the Kootenay School of Writing. Wayman has been the recipient of several significant literary awards over his career, most recently the 2013 Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry for his book Dirty Snow.

Owen Percy is a teacher, writer, editor, and critic of North American and postcolonial literature. He earned his Ph.D. in Canadian literature and literary culture from the University of Calgary in 2010. He is a professor of literary studies at Sheridan College in Brampton, Ontario

Table of Contents

Foreword Neil Besner vii

Biographical Note viii

Introduction: Wayman in Print: "He Do the Polis in Different Voices," Owen Percy xi

Days: Construction 1

Picketing Supermarkets 2

Wayman in Love 3

The Country of Everyday: Literary Criticism 4

The Factory Hour 6

The Old Power 8

Industrial Music 10

Factory Time 12

Garrison 15

Friday Night in Early September at Morris and Sara Wayman's Farm, Roseneath, Ontario 21

White Hand 23

Silos 25

Paper, Scissors, Stone 27

The Face of Jack Munro 29

A Cursing Poem: This Poem Wants Gordon Shrum to Die 43

The Poet 46

Defective Parts of Speech: Official Errata 47

Did I Miss Anything? 48

The Man Who Logged the West Ridge 49

For William Stafford (1914-1993) 51

War on a Round Planet 53

Cup 55

Epithalamium for a Former Lover 56

Calgary 59

Postmodern 911 61

Mt. Gimli Pashtun 64

Air Support 68

Whistle 70

The White Dogs 73

Minutes 75

Breath 77

Afterword: Work and Silence Tom Wayman 79

Acknowledgements 87

Editorial Reviews

''Wayman...believes that poetry exists beyone ‘the money economy’ and because of this freedom it creates the highest potential to drive social change. His concerns are humanist and folksy, infused with the moral responsibility of integrity. This series, because of its...scope and space...allows the reader to see how Wayman's immersions in these moral concerns have developed and morphed from those of the lowly factory worker to those of acute environmental observance. Always the poems are permeated by intense attention to...a sense of justice.''

Alberta Views, June 2014 - Micheline Maylor