Tom Wayman - If You’re Not Free at Work, Where Are You Free: Literature and Social Change

LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE

SELECTED ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS 1994-2014

ESSENTIAL ESSAYS SERIES 69

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We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

Tom Wayman

IF YOURE NOT FREE AT WORK, WHERE ARE YOU FREE?

LITERATURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE

SELECTED ESSAYS AND INTERVIEWS 1994-2014

Copyright 2018, Tom Wayman and Guernica Editions Inc.

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Wayman, Tom, 1945

[Essays. Selections]

If you're not free at work, where are you free? : literature

and social change : selected essays and interviews 1994-2014 / Tom Wayman.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77183-287-8 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77183-288-5

(EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-77183-289-2 (Kindle)

1. Literature and society. 2. Essays. I. Title.

OTHER BOOKS BY TOM WAYMAN

COLLECTIONS OF POEMS:

Waiting For Wayman (1973)

For And Against The Moon (1974)

Money And Rain (1975)

Free Time (1977)

A Planet Mostly Sea (1979)

Living On The Ground (1980)

Introducing Tom Wayman: Selected Poems 1973-80 (1980)

The Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (1981)

Counting The Hours (1983)

The Face of Jack Munro (1986)

In a Small House on the Outskirts of Heaven (1989)

Did I Miss Anything? Selected Poems 1973-1993 (1993)

The Astonishing Weight of the Dead (1994)

Ill Be Right Back: New & Selected Poems 1980-1996 (1997)

The Colours of the Forest (1999)

My Fathers Cup (2002)

High Speed Through Shoaling Water (2007)

Dirty Snow (2012)

Winters Skin (2013)

The Order in Which We Do Things: The Poetry of Tom Wayman (ed. Owen Percy; 2014)

Built to Take It: Selected Poems 1996-2013 (2014)

Helpless Angels (2017)

FICTION:

Boundary Country (2007)

A Vain Thing (2007)

Woodstock Rising (2009)

The Shadows We Mistake for Love (2015)

NON-FICTION:

Inside Job: Essays on the New Work Writing (1983)

A Country Not Considered: Canada, Culture, Work (1993)

Songs Without Price: The Music of Poetry in a Discordant World (2008)

EDITED:

Beaton Abbots Got The Contract (1974)

A Government Job At Last (1976)

Going For Coffee (1981; 1987)

East of Main (co-edited with Calvin Wharton; 1989)

Paperwork (1991)

The Dominion of Love (2001)

We like the word abstract. Sometime we like the word language too much. But if we use those words in a community, we wouldnt get anywhere. So maybe the word role is better. So one of the roles is community. If you can get your poem into a community then you will have opened up a large, beautiful gate that is going to lead you to beauty, wisdom, and community, and warmth, and heart, as opposed to paper, text, pat on the back, and black coffee.

Juan Filipe Herrera, California Poet Laureate 2012-2014;

U.S. Poet Laureate 2015-2017

TABLE OF CONTENTS

If Youre Not Free At Work, Where Are You Free?

Voices murmur concerning a work/life balance

or reverberate with conviction about

our revered parliamentary heritage

or intone why municipal tax subsidies are needed

to persuade someone to finance

a new mall. The words surge and drop and swell

like the fluctuating clamour of the drunken dinner parties

symposiumswhere the ebb and flow of wit

created the concept of democracy,

while around the guests

the lash, shackles, branding iron

ensured that grains and animals were raised

and brought to market, the meal was concocted

and served; locked windows and beatings

that resulted in broken limbs and teeth, permanent hearing loss

meant grapes were harvested, wine fermented,

bedchambers readied. Days, years of hopeless sweat,

the shattering of families

caused fresh flowers to be grown, cut,

arranged amid the company in vases

other slaves threw on wheels slick with wet mud

flowers also placed

along the Senates benches

in preparation for the next debate.

INTRODUCTION

T his book, a selection of my essays and interviews from the past twenty years, for the most part continues the exploration of an absence, some of whose aspects and implications were discussed in my previous essay collections, Inside Job: Essays on the New Work Writing (1983) and A Country Not Considered: Canada, Culture, Work (1993). The absence that is my ongoing concern is a missing accurate depiction in art of the effects of peoples daily employment on their lives on and off the job. For instance, in the literary world anyone can attend a writers festival, or scan the shelves of a bookstore, or prowl the aisles of publishers displays at a book fair and never hear or see any indication that the central and governing experience of peoples daily existence, and the place where the communitys goods and servicesalong with their attendant social hierarchies of wealth and powerare created, is the workplace. Most literary anthologies offer a portrait of a nation in which nobody works. Visit a series of art galleries, take in a ballet or other dance performance, and the result is the same.