Going for Coffee: Poetry on the Job [Paperback]

Tom Wayman (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1981

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.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Tom Wayman was born in Ontario in 1945, but has spent most of his life in British Columbia. He has worked at a number of jobs, both blue and white-collar, across Canada and the U.S., and has helped bring into being a new movement of poetry in these countries - the incorporation of the actual conditions and effects of work. He received his MFA in English and writing at the University of California in Irvine has been awarded the Canadian Authors' Association medal for poetry, the A.J.M. Smith Prize for distinguished achievement in Canadian poetry and first prize in the USA Bicentennial Poetry Awards competition. His poetry has been published in literary magazines across the world, including The Paris Review, Saturday Night, The Hudson Review and Canadian Forum. He currently teaches at the University of Calgary and remains Squire of "Appledore," his estate in the Selkirk Mountains of southeastern BC.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Harbour; First Edition edition (January 1, 1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 092008009X
• ISBN-13: 978-0920080092
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,113,172 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A broad, accurate, representation of work through poetry., June 17, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Going for Coffee: Poetry on the Job (Paperback)

I read "Going for Coffee" as part of an English class at the University of Regina. Although I am not a big fan of poerty, I was intrigued and sympathetic to many of the poems compiled within this anthology.

In his introduction, Tom Wayman states that accurate representaions of work are rarely treated in television, movies, and novels. He goes on to show that this may have been a driving force for the 93 authors contained within this book to write about their own, "accurate, insider's" experience of work. My class and I analysed many of the rewarding, disgusting, hilarious, and humiliating situations and feelings portrayed through these poems and found accurate detail, a full range of human emotion, and relation to the jobs we have worked. I found myself thinking, "I know how he feels," while reading many of these poems.

"Going for Coffee" is an excellent anthology of poetry spanning a diverse spectrum of the labour market: paid or unpaid; assembly line workers, oil riggers, doctors, managers, teachers, farmers, housewives and more. This books has something for just about everyone and I would recommend it for both academic and personal reading.