SONGS WITHOUT PRICE:
THE MUSIC OF POETRY IN A DISCORDANT WORLD
Tom Wayman
In a wide-ranging lecture rich in poetic example, Tom Wayman addresses the challenges today’s poets face in connecting with a modern audience distracted by ceaseless war, intense commercialism, and absurd celebrity. Well known as a “worker’s poet,” Wayman questions the “job” of poetry in all its varied forms from Elizabethan and Victorian works to those in the experimental, avant-garde, and postmodern era.
Wayman’s lecture is a call to arms against the mindlessness of war, greed, and vacuous entertainment and a rallying cry for peace, generosity, and introspection—states poetry can traverse like few other art forms whether ballad, sonnet, villanelle, lyric, chant, shanty, or holler.
Songs Without Price
Tom Wayman
$25.00
ICR, 2008
64 pages, 4 ½ x 7 inches
ISBN: 978-1-896886-07-7
“Poetry, which nobody wants to buy, stands nearly alone in possessing the potential to speak the truth. Its location outside the rule of money gives it a perspective unique in our dollar-haunted society. Precisely because poetry has no cash equivalent, poetry is both literally and metaphorically priceless.
Yet the genre, like ourselves, exists in a time of enormous obfuscation about the realities of existence, a purposeful confusion generated on behalf of corporations and governments with a vested interest in having people turn away from understanding their own daily lives …
What has all this to do with poetry? The world in which Canada is at war is the world that poetry, and Canadian poetry specifically, must sing. Poets, like the rest of our 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. And poets, like all writers, create their art of the medium of words. 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.”
—Tom Wayman
Tom Wayman holds an MFA from the University of California and worked as a reporter for The Vancouver Sun. He has been writer-in-residence at the universities of Windsor, Alberta, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Toronto as well as at SFU. His bibliography includes over twenty poetry collections, and he co-founded the Kootenay School of the Arts and the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union. He has been the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. He received the Acorn-Plantos Award in 2013 and the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022, and he was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark in 2015.
Read an interview with Tom Wayman in Portal 2008.
Influences
Wayman’s lecture cites the stylings of Jas Duke, Howard White, Kate Braid, Bronwen Wallace, William Matthews, Ben Jonson, WB Yeats, Charles Dickens, George Moore, George Gissing, Kenneth Rexroth, Marshall McLuhan and Pablo Neruda.
Poetry
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 (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? (1993)
The Astonishing Weight of the Dead (1994)
I’ll Be Right Back (1997)
The Colours of the Forest (1999)
My Father’s Cup (2002)
High Speed Through Shoaling Water (2007)
Dirty Snow (2012)
Winter’s Skin (2013)
Built to Take It (2014)
The Order in Which We Do Things (2014)
Helpless Angels (2017)
Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back (2020)
Wayman’s non-fiction includes Inside Job: Essays on the New Work Writing (1983); A Country Not Considered (1993); and If You’re Not Free At Work, Where Are You Free? (2018).
His fiction includes Boundary Country (2007); A Vain Thing (2007); Woodstock Rising (2009); and The Shadows We Mistake for Love (2015).
His editorial work includes Beaton Abbot’s Got The Contract (1974); A Government Job At Last (1976); Going For Coffee (1981); East of Main (1989); Paperwork (1991); and The Dominion of Love (2001).
Poetry
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 (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? (1993)
The Astonishing Weight of the Dead (1994)
I’ll Be Right Back (1997)
The Colours of the Forest (1999)
My Father’s Cup (2002)
High Speed Through Shoaling Water (2007)
Dirty Snow (2012)
Winter’s Skin (2013)
Built to Take It (2014)
The Order in Which We Do Things (2014)
Helpless Angels (2017)
Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back (2020)
Wayman’s non-fiction includes Inside Job: Essays on the New Work Writing (1983); A Country Not Considered (1993); and If You’re Not Free At Work, Where Are You Free? (2018).
His fiction includes Boundary Country (2007); A Vain Thing (2007); Woodstock Rising (2009); and The Shadows We Mistake for Love (2015).
His editorial work includes Beaton Abbot’s Got The Contract (1974); A Government Job At Last (1976); Going For Coffee (1981); East of Main (1989); Paperwork (1991); and The Dominion of Love (2001).
SONGS WITHOUT PRICE:
THE MUSIC OF POETRY IN A DISCORDANT WORLD
Tom Wayman
In a wide-ranging lecture rich in poetic example, Tom Wayman addresses the challenges today’s poets face in connecting with a modern audience distracted by ceaseless war, intense commercialism, and absurd celebrity. Well known as a “worker’s poet,” Wayman questions the “job” of poetry in all its varied forms from Elizabethan and Victorian works to those in the experimental, avant-garde, and postmodern era.
Wayman’s lecture is a call to arms against the mindlessness of war, greed, and vacuous entertainment and a rallying cry for peace, generosity, and introspection—states poetry can traverse like few other art forms whether ballad, sonnet, villanelle, lyric, chant, shanty, or holler.
ICR, 2008
64 pages, 4 ½ x 7 inches
ISBN: 978-1-896886-07-7
$25.00
“Poetry, which nobody wants to buy, stands nearly alone in possessing the potential to speak the truth. Its location outside the rule of money gives it a perspective unique in our dollar-haunted society. Precisely because poetry has no cash equivalent, poetry is both literally and metaphorically priceless.
Yet the genre, like ourselves, exists in a time of enormous obfuscation about the realities of existence, a purposeful confusion generated on behalf of corporations and governments with a vested interest in having people turn away from understanding their own daily lives …
What has all this to do with poetry? The world in which Canada is at war is the world that poetry, and Canadian poetry specifically, must sing. Poets, like the rest of our 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. And poets, like all writers, create their art of the medium of words. 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.”
—Tom Wayman
Tom Wayman holds an MFA from the University of California and worked as a reporter for The Vancouver Sun. He has been writer-in-residence at the universities of Windsor, Alberta, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Toronto as well as at SFU. His bibliography includes over twenty poetry collections, and he co-founded the Kootenay School of the Arts and the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union. He has been the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. He received the Acorn-Plantos Award in 2013 and the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022, and he was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark in 2015.
Read an interview with Tom Wayman in Portal 2008.
Tom Wayman holds an MFA from the University of California and worked as a reporter for The Vancouver Sun. He has been writer-in-residence at the universities of Windsor, Alberta, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Toronto as well as at SFU. His bibliography includes over twenty poetry collections, and he co-founded the Kootenay School of the Arts and the Vancouver Industrial Writers’ Union. He has been the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Creative Writing at Arizona State University. He received the Acorn-Plantos Award in 2013 and the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022, and he was named a Vancouver Literary Landmark in 2015.
Read an interview with Tom Wayman in Portal 2008.
Influences
Wayman’s lecture cites the stylings of Jas Duke, Howard White, Kate Braid, Bronwen Wallace, William Matthews, Ben Jonson, WB Yeats, Charles Dickens, George Moore, George Gissing, Kenneth Rexroth, Marshall McLuhan and Pablo Neruda.
Poetry
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 (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? (1993)
The Astonishing Weight of the Dead (1994)
I’ll Be Right Back (1997)
The Colours of the Forest (1999)
My Father’s Cup (2002)
High Speed Through Shoaling Water (2007)
Dirty Snow (2012)
Winter’s Skin (2013)
Built to Take It (2014)
The Order in Which We Do Things (2014)
Helpless Angels (2017)
Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back (2020)
Wayman’s non-fiction includes Inside Job: Essays on the New Work Writing (1983); A Country Not Considered (1993); and If You’re Not Free At Work, Where Are You Free? (2018).
His fiction includes Boundary Country (2007); A Vain Thing (2007); Woodstock Rising (2009); and The Shadows We Mistake for Love (2015).
His editorial work includes Beaton Abbot’s Got The Contract (1974); A Government Job At Last (1976); Going For Coffee (1981); East of Main (1989); Paperwork (1991); and The Dominion of Love (2001).