Tom Wayman, Songs Without Price

I've got a more complicated relationship with Tom Wayman's writing than with any other writer's, but mostly for personal reasons that almost certainly won't matter for any other reader, so consider yourself forewarned.

To some extent, Wayman's editorship of Going for Coffee: Poetry on the Job is what helped me persist through first-year university English. I collected most of his books of poetry during my undergrad (Money and Rain: Tom Wayman Live!), and I appreciated their deliberate clarity, their secret handshakes for readers who'd grown up working-class, their humour, their poignancy.

On the other hand, well, sometimes they thudded rather than sang, the jokes felt staged rather than real, and at times I felt taken for granted as a reader. These things happen, and when was a poetry collection ever perfectly consistent or accomplished etc, but I still felt disloyal for feeling that way. When I read his novel Woodstock Rising, which I very much didn't love, I thought I'd more or less come to terms with all this, but it turns out that's not quite true.

Now, I'm a fan of many elements involved with the books produced through the Institute for Coastal Research (which seems no longer to exist at VIU?!?!?), through the Gustafson Poetry Series, and through Gaspereau Press. As such, I was absolutely ready for Wayman's contribution Songs Without Price, even if it has taken me this many years to gather my thoughts about the wee thing.

It's just that I was inexplicably unready to have such a divided response to the thing. In retrospect, it was inevitable, but you've got to have hope, you know?

Wayman's militancy about the job of literature is one element that I've always gone to him for, and this 2008 book (developed from a 2007 lecture) remains exactly on point:

"Poets, like the rest of the population, have to force our way each day against a stream of words directed at us by authorities of every kind who do not have our best interests at heart.... Our goal of honest communication of our feelings and ideas, our attempt to push past our solitude to offer our vision of existence to the community of which we are part, is made doubly difficult when the very substance from which our art takes shape is debased by the rulers of our lives" (pp.11-12).

Right? It's not only about poetry, crucially, because Wayman refuses to separate poets from "the rest of the population" and insists that poets need to speak to their community, but it's also very much about poetry. I'm HERE FOR THIS. 

The trickier bit starts when Wayman begins to praise Charles Seeger, father of the folk singer Pete Seeger, on the question of what poetry is for: "not an end in itself but a means to an end" (p.17). In Charles Seeger's phrasing, the question isn't "Is it good music?", but "What is this music good for?". Wayman agrees with Seeger that if the music is good for something, then that's what matters. In some senses, I'd agree with them, especially given the immediate context for Wayman's argument (60s and 70s feminist literature, Black poetry from the same time, etc).

But ... can't it do both?

And what about art for a community you're not part of?

I wish that Wayman hadn't bothered to wade into a little light bashing of literary theory. He had enough to say about poetry here that there's no benefit to the digression, because a digression is all it can be within so few pages. More than that, the digression steals space that could've been dedicated to more of the good stuff. The book's title, Poetry Without Price, puns on the pricelessness of poetry and the sense that no one wants to pay for it, and it was clear to me that he was inspired by this collision and could've gone further with it than he did.

Essentially, Wayman argues that World War One induced a kind of collective PTSD, which meant many of us have become congenitally unable to trust anyone with authority, or indeed the concept of traditional authority. I'm very sympathetic to this argument, even if I'm not one of those people who keeps reading books about the twentieth century's European wars. It provokes in me a sense of rightness, because it would explain the distrust of governments, the search for non-traditional leaders elsewhere (celebrities, leaders of actual cults, so-called "cult" artists -- the "I liked their early stuff, before they sold out" types -- and so on), and the sense of cultural directionlessness that has kept recurring since the 1920s.

Where he loses me is in arguing that poetry has wilfully and more or less nihilistically pursued a lack of clarity for its own sake. He uses the term "corporate cheerleaders" at one point to (I think?) describe theory types as well as those pushing poetry toward what he describes as incomprehensibility. I've said before on this blog that I don't always get where a poem's going, what a poet's trying to achieve, or how a poetry collection hangs together, but sometimes I love it anyway. Is it as simple as my accepting that I'm not part of a particular In Crowd, and Wayman not accepting his own exclusion?

Take his rejection of the online world, for example, part of which I agree with wholeheartedly:

"I see no concrete evidence that to have millions of people sitting in their rooms emailing or texting each other, or shopping online, constitutes either a community or a culture of resistance or, indeed, anything other than a new niche market, regardless of the claims sometimes made for these activities" (p.45)

Your initial response might be to agree, because in this year of our lord 2025, I suspect we're all feeling some despair about how to change the world's trajectory, and we're all blaming online tech both for the despair and for what we're despairing. But if you look more closely, Wayman is looking only for a community that falls within his definition of the term, or for what he would define as a "culture of resistance." Those seemingly thrown-away terms "another other than" are actually absolute, declaring that in Wayman's mind, the online world is exactly one thing: a niche market.

Although it IS a niche market, or rather a whole ecosystem of niche markets, Wayman's phrasing is pointlessly reductive, and his reductionism is pointlessly absolute.

The world's a complicated place, and Wayman has always been at his best when he dwells in that idea, especially when he's punching back and shouting and making fun. Unaccountably, though, sometimes he loses track of that. Those are the moments when I find myself resisting Wayman's aesthetics and politics, and it's in that resistance against someone whose work I sometimes adore where dwell the relationship complications mentioned in the first line of this commentary.

Like I said at the outset here, my reaction to Wayman feels more individual than my reaction to almost any other writer. I'll keep reading Wayman, I'll always keep reading him, because my view is that his writing will always be worth the time I put into it. In the same way that I'm maddened by some of my uncles' opinions, though, I'll never be sure how I'll react.

It's complicated, in sum, and I don't think my comments here will be relevant for a single other reader.