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

Introduction: Wayman in Print: “He Do the Polis in Different Voices,”

Introduction Wayman in Print: “He Do the Polis in Different Voices” See! Without labour nothing prospers well! — Sophocles, Electra (945) Meet me at the bottom, don’t lag behind Bring me my boots and shoes You can hang back or fight your best on the front line Sing a little bit of these workingman’s blues. — Bob Dylan,“Workingman’s Blues #2” The Order in Which We Do Things marks more than forty years in print for Tom Wayman. To say that he has been prolific in those years would be an understatement; in his nineteen books of poetry since 1973—nearly 800 poems on more than 2000 pages—Wayman has developed one of the most recognizable voices and personas in Canadian poetry. The poems presented here are broadly representative of Wayman’s larger oeuvre. We hope that, in addition to introducing new readers to the world of Wayman and reminding the initiated of the range and prescience of his finest work, The Order in Which We Do Things might serve as a springboard from which all can dive into the larger pool of verse—whatever works for them—from which these poems are drawn. Like Walt Whitman, another public poetic persona, Wayman contains multitudes; his poems speak to and from a wide range of perspectives, exploring the universals of work, love, sex, death, and much else besides. One minute Wayman is conceptualizing string theory, the next he is contemplating the politics of taking a shit on company time; he is lamenting the banality of grading student essays and then raging against Canada’s participation in the war in Afghanistan. And inasmuch as it is always a version of Wayman at the helm of a poem, it is always also what Wendy Keitner identifies as “a contemporary Everyman” (par. 2)—someone who speaks his own truth, but in whose truth we see a version of our own, of our friends’ and family’s, and of that of the larger polis—that is, of the communities and collectives to which we belong in relation to the forces of industry, authority, and capital that would xi have us believe, terrifyingly, that we are alone, powerless, and at their mercy. As R. Alexander Kizuk puts it, in Wayman,“the exploded self converts to a kind of figural labour in which the poet-penseroso becomes his own errant Tribe and Glory” (par. 26); in a Wayman poem, the voice is the collective—the construed universal within the specific. But inasmuch as Wayman is never just Wayman, Wayman is always Wayman; like Whitman, Al Purdy, or Leonard Cohen, he is often a distinct persona within his own verse and the central, guiding referent to the real world and the everyday lived experience the majority of his poems revolve around. So Wayman’s “Wayman” is not Wayman himself but, like all narrative personas, a performative, universalized amplification of certain aspects of the poet’s self. The persona is, like us, by turns angry and passive, loving and loathing, self-conscious and self-righteous, learned and learning. Wayman’s is a voice that speaks as authentically as it can, and that aspires, as he himself put it in his 1983 collection of essays, Inside Job,“to share with other people what I noticed about the condition of being alive” (9) in the hope that they might recognize and celebrate some solidarity in the shared human experience. As a poet, Wayman recognizes and celebrates this solidarity in the real-life voices of others, too. While he might seem to have little in common with a notoriously cryptic poet like T.S. Eliot, Wayman in fact shares the great anglophile’s penchant for finding the poetry inherent in the real-life language of people, as Eliot does in The Waste Land. Wayman’s world is a sight more hopeful than Eliot’s, but the poets share a suspicion of and disillusionment with the failures of institutionality and modern capitalist material culture. While not quite the heap of broken images of Eliot’s post-WWI moment, Wayman’s portrait of industrialized society today is one that relies on the similar tactic of harnessing voices, real or approximate, from across the social spectrum and allowing them to speak in their own idioms alongside one another. The result is rarely as disjointed and apocalyptic as it is in Eliot, but the approach achieves a similar collective murmur from which singular voices can emerge and retreat. Consider in the...