Of Birds and Factories, and: Meshugah and Other Stories, and: Inside Job: Essays on the New Work Writing, and: Counting the Hours: City Poems (review)

reviews 177 It is for poems such as these that Marge Piercy is a major force in American poetry, and is able to speak for the many who have her poems pinned up on their walls. CAROLYNE WRIGHT Sue Doro. Of Birds and Factories. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: People's Books and Crafts, 1983. 104 pp. $5.50 (paper). Emanuel Fried. Meshugah and Other Stories. Clarence Center, New York: TextUe Bridge Press and Labor Arts Books, 1983. 32 pp. $2.95 (papeT). Tom Wayman. Inside Job: Essays on the New Work Writing. Madiera Park, British Columbia : Harbour PubUshing, 1983. 101 pp. $6.95 (paper). ________________ Counting the Hours: City Poems. Toronto, Ontario: McClelland and Stewart, 1983. 158 pp. $7.95 (paper). In Inside Job, Tom Wayman has coUected his essays on contemporary North American work writing and included a valuable select bibliography of recent books of poetry, fiction, and drama which deal with work. Wayman, author of eight books of poetry and editor of three anthologies of poetry about work, argues in each essay for the validity of this new writing. The title of the book, Inside Job, suggest both Wayman's belief that writing about work should come from the insider's (the worker's) point of view, and that any improvment in the way in which our society perceives industrial work must be enacted by the workers themselves. Wayman feels that the new work writing fills a gap which has existed in our Uterature for a long time; while he notes that love, death, and nature have long been the three main subjects for poetry, he points out that "a person's attitudes to love, death and nature are in large part shaped by the kind of daily work he or she does." While most artifacts of traditional and popular culture offer excapes from everyday life, Wayman believes that the new work writing forces people to examine their lives, their jobs. He asks, "What is the failure at the core of our daily Uves that leads us to seek solace in another, illusory place?" Throughout the essays, he expresses his frustration with a literature which ignores this question, and ignores the Uves ofa majority ofthe population. He argues that we exist in a "Boss culture" which ignores the existence of an industrial culture. Wayman, who beUeves that writers have a social responsibility, names three main concerns of the new industrial writer: "to document reality, to do so in order to help alter reality for the better, and to do so in the form of imaginative writing." In the past, those with more leisure time because of their wealth and/or social position have dominated Uterature because they were the ones who had the education and the time to write; for this reason, work is absent from most Uterature prior to this century. As Wayman points out, however, the population of North America as a whole has become more and more educated, especiaUy since World War II, and, consequently, there have been more literate, articulate people in jobs at all levels who have been writing about work. Wayman believes this new work writing is much more approachable and more meaningful than much traditional Uterature. He doesn't want to aboUsh other kinds of art; he simply wants work writing to be taken seriously and considered alongside more traditional literature. Wayman's arguments are clear, bold. Inside Job is an important addition to the new industrial writing because, to my knowledge, it is the first book of essays about this writing. While most work writers, Uke Wayman, speak through their poems, stories, plays, no one had written about the new work writing in the medium of the critics—the essay. It is unfortunate that this coUection will not reach many of the teachers and writers m the Uterary estabUshment here in the United States who need to read this book in order to begin to appreciate a Uterature which says, as Wayman puts it, "both 'Look at our Uves' and 1We can do better than this.'" Sue Doro's first book of poems, OfBirds and Factories, includes an introduction from 178 the minnesota review Meridel Le Sueur, a feminist, working-class writer...