Going for Coffee: Poetry on the Job

by Tom Wayman (Editor)

Here is the populist anthology that touches the heart of North American life, a collection that achieves in poetry what Stud Terkel's Working did in prose. Its wide appeal is obvious.

Included are 200 selections by 90 Canadian and American writers, from foundry workers and short-order cooks to the likes of Joyce Carol Oates, Patrick Lane, Pier Giorgio di Cicco and Wayman himself.

Genres: Poetry

209 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

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.

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blessedly honest poems about work written by folk with dirt under their fingernails (or used to — now many seem to teach). Mostly plain-spoken without MFA pretensions. I've worked 40+ years in construction trades so these poems hit my sweet spot.

We tend to bitch about our jobs, it's human nature, and there's a lot of that here, maybe too much. But we also take pride in what we do, how we do it and often it's expressed here, too, starting on page one with Jim Daniel's "Short-Order Cook" about preparing 30 cheeseburgers, 30 fries.

Poems about mining, about salmon fishing, about truck driving, about machine work, about health care. And logging:

You can't help smiling
when the chain saw is roaring
you've got chips in your mouth
exhaust and turpentine in your nose
and your hands are numb

you're limbing cutting
stacking working up
one hell of a sweat

"It's just like it was when..."
Carl thinking of Idaho
me of the mountains
north of Montana
both of us younger then

and it's a good work
swinging the saw along the limbs
burning it through thick logs
getting the blade bound
and working it loose

then noticing
when you stop for a breather
the morning mist
just pulling away
from the mountains

You can't help smiling

—Jim Green

I'm withholding one star because there's no index, which is inexcusable in an anthology. And because like many anthologies it piles poem after poem on the page without starting a new page for a new poem so they pour out like industrial effluent, which is so disrespectful of the poems they're asking us to respect.

[Kaplan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a useful compendium for anyone wanting to read the poetry of labor at the outset of the bleak 1980s. It is organized by different kinds of jobs—from pink collar to industrial farmwork—in a way that almost reminded me of the pluralistic portrait of America in Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony. From what I could tell, the majority of the contributors are not poets with a capital “P,” and the anthology is the only place they’ve ever published. As a result, the poems have a gruff unguarded quality that, for better or worse, feels of another historical moment—before the advent of Taylorized creative workshop polish. One of the treats is a short selection of early poems by Erin Moure. Of the two or three contributors still recognizable today, Moure is here simply identified as “waitress, cook, waitress, commercial letterer, waitress.”

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great anthology of poems about work.