20 pages • 40 minutes read
Tom WaymanDid I Miss Anything?
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary context
“Did I Miss Anything” is arguably the most popular poem of Tom Wayman’s long career, a work which he acknowledges has assumed a life of its own through the ubiquity of a newsletter text or Internet meme. Immensely popular with teachers around the world, the poem evokes an emotional response because of its universal themes, savage humor, and no-nonsense diction. These qualities are typical of Wayman’s work; he often places himself in the literary tradition of the people’s poet, a writer who chronicles everyday life in accessible language. Like “Did I Miss Anything,” Wayman’s poems are often written in blank verse and enjambed lines to capture the rhythm of thoughts and conversations. While his style is distinctly modernist, his work is also layered and lyrical. Wayman frequently experiments with diction, irony, and line arrangement to construct poems with an internal rhythm and layers of complexity.
Wayman’s poetic style is marked by a fierce individualism and a refusal to ally with any particular literary school. However, because work and workers remain the subjects of his poems, literary experts often characterize his style as “work poetry,” which captures the lived reality of daily work, is anti-elitist, and easy to read. Wayman’s poetry is also influenced by the Beat generation, a group of American poets and writers in the 1950s whose popular works shunned overtly academic and formal writing and advocated political but non-conformist points of view. The greatest Beat writers include poets like Alan Ginsberg (1926-1997) and Lew (Lewis Barret) Welch (1926-1971).
In his literary style, Wayman actively avoids the use of convoluted language and technical jargon, since these create a distance between poem and reader. Further, Wayman’s poems always have a narrative structure and tell a definite story. In “Did I Miss Anything,” the story is clear, told from the viewpoint of an incandescently angry teacher. The poem’s epigraph – “Question frequently asked by students after missing a class” – establishes its context very definitively, leaving no room for error of interpretation. This clarity is important for Wayman, who has little patience for postmodern or abstract poetry in which “grammatical and logical connections between words, phrases and concepts are frequently missing,” as he says in an essay titled “Avant-Garde or Lost Platoon” (2015). In this sense, Wayman’s literary style can be read as a reaction to what he calls post-modernism in poetry. Wayman’s biggest objection to abstract poems are that they are too self-indulgent and unwelcoming to readers, focused on style rather than substance. For Wayman, poetry should engage with the reader and draw them in, much like the teacher in “Did I Miss Anything” wishes to connect with the absentee students.
Historical context
Wayman’s emphasis on straightforward language, direct and open stances, and meaningful poems directly stems from his place in history as a poet. Frequently allying himself to the everyday working class, Wayman is concerned with the technical intricacy of labor. His poems often deal with the “how to” aspect of work and derive their power from negotiating this direct lived experience. Because the teacher in “Did I Miss Anything” works hard to create meaning for students, the teacher is upset when the students underestimate and ignore that work. In “Factory Time,” the worker feels the urgent sense of missing out on life because his time passes in predetermined shifts of quarters “marked off by breaks.” Wayman’s writing on the subject reflects his actual experience as a poet who had always held other jobs for a living from a manual laborer to a teacher. His education in the United States further cemented his beliefs about the dignity of labor and the importance of poets being involved in social change. Wayman went to the University of California in Irvine between 1966-1968, a period in which social activism was at the forefront of cultural and literary life. During his stay in California and then Colorado, Wayman made his living as a construction and demolition laborer, factory assemblyman, and high school English marker. He also participated in rallies for labor rights and equitable race relations. These experiences laid the foundation for the continuing thematic concerns of Wayman’s poetry.
Wayman’s poems and essays are also informed by his political work as an activist for the rights of factory workers and coal miners as well as his critique of corporations and technological addiction. Guided by such a clear sense of purpose, Wayman’s poems are often prescient, such as in “Did I Miss Anything,” where the knowledge-imparting angel foreshadows the era of the Internet and wisdom that can be accessed and downloaded instantly. The teacher’s lesson about students being absent from the present moment rings particularly true in an age where virtual reality can become a means to avoid the daily work of living.
His experience as an educator and mentor is also vital in the context of “Did I Miss Anything.” Beginning with his job as a high school marker, Wayman has taught post-secondary students for four decades with many years of experience in the British Columbia community college system. He has also been instrumental in founding two alternative post-secondary creative writing schools, the Vancouver Centre of the Kootenay School of Writing and the writing department of Nelson, British Columbia’s Kootenay School of the Arts. Educating students about writing and the meaningful study of literature is one of Wayman’s primary vocations and calling.
Wayman is very clear in asserting that poetry is not an escape, but a tool for social transformation. Without being preachy or polemical, Wayman’s poems try to speak from the viewpoint of the working class, especially in Canada. He forms a distinct strand in Canadian poetry; a writer who investigates the role of work in determining how human beings love, live, and die. In his essays, Wayman often critiques the way literature is taught and studied in contemporary Canadian universities. According to Wayman, postmodernist literary studies in Canada prioritize form over substance and peddle a destructive skepticism that discourages students from forming any one definite point of view. His poetry continually seeks to dismantle such an approach to reading and writing, and in response, many critics have argued that Wayman’s ideas of what constitutes postmodernism are narrow.
