Gina Myers, Works & Days

 

Everybody’s working for the weekend
Unless you’re working for the Clampdown
The Jam sing, If we tell you that you got two days to live
Then don’t complain
John Maynard Keynes thought that technology
Would advance enough to give us
A 15-hour workweek
And David Graeber pointed out that it probably has

The latest from Philadelphia poet Gina Myers [see my review of her prior collection here] is the book-length suite, Works & Days (Philadelphia PA: Radiator Press, 2025), a collection that plays off the dailyness and immediate title of Works and Days (New York NY: New Directions, 2016) by the late American poet Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022). Instead of articulating the dailyness of being, Myers works through, as Marie Buck offers in their back cover blurb, “[…] all the hours we’ve lost to working; it also registers the continuous urge to want more from life than just sustaining oneself with a paycheck.” “Once I commit to writing a long poem about work,” Myers writes, near the end of the collection, “I decide to read a number of books about work / And this too becomes work, thankless and unpaid / And it begins to make me feel worse / And I begin to dread the work of reading about work [.]”

There has been an interesting anti-capitalist work poetry emerging from Philadelphia for some time, centred, as my awareness provides, around the work of Myers and Ryan Eckes [see my review of his latest here], offering a kind of continuation of the 1970s “work poetry” ethos worked through by Canadian poets Tom Wayman, Kate Braid, Erín Moure and Phil Hall, and furthered by poets including the late Vancouver poet Peter Culley (1958-2015) and other elements of The Kootenay School of Writing (Wayman being one of the founders), to more recent examples, whether Vancouver poet Michael Turner (think Company Town, for example), Chicago poet Andrew Cantrell or Vancouver poet Ivan Drury [see my review of his full-length debut here]. Whereas those early Vancouver days of “work poetry” championed the idea that labour was worth articulating as literary subject matter, an idea that evolved through poets such as language-specific interrogations and pro-labour criticisms of capitalist culture—leaning into the work of poets such as Jeff Derksen, Louis Cabri, Dorothy Trujillo Lusk, Clint Burnham, Colin Smith, ryan fitzpatrick and others—Myers employs numerous of those same threads with the added flavour of general frustrations, one that I know she shares with numerous other writers (few who ever discuss such in their writing): the mere fact that requiring employment takes time away from actually writing.

And yet—I tell myself I am unlearning productivity
Then I found out I have to have surgery
And will be off work for a couple of weeks
I ask for recommendations of movies and TV shows
To watch and make stacks of books to read
I think maybe I’ll finally work on that essay
That has been kicking around in my head
Or write a book review or two
Things I enjoy doing but have felt too depleted
By work in recent years to work outside of work
When it is time for me to return to work
I feel like a failure even though I know it is wrong
I was not productive at all as my body healed
And I slept entire days away

Not everyone holds the same physical requirements, the same mental load, for employment, which can allow for a very different level of post or pre-work energy. We all know about Frank O’Hara working poems during his lunch break, Dr. William Carlos Williams sketching upon prescription pads, or Toronto poet bpNichol, who used to compose his thoughts directly into a tape machine, during his long commutes from downtown Toronto to his lay-work at Therafields. Vancouver poet George Stanley composed a long poem while commuting around on BC Transit. Minneapolis poet Mary Austin Speaker composed The Bridge (Bristol UK: Shearsman Books, 2016) [see my review of such here], her accumulation of untitled, stand-alone poems as she made her daily commute across New York’s Manhattan Bridge. I also know of writers too exhausted to even think about writing, once they leave the physical threshold of work.

In a cohesive collection of accumulated, first-person lyric interrogations, Myers writes on writing and work. She writes on writing and not writing, and offering her best energies and time to what she cares less about than other elements of her life, and of wanting to keep her writing life and writing time separate from ideas of “product,” a notion she feels enough pressure, put upon through capitalism, to resist. “It turns out when I wasn’t writing” she offers, “I still filled notebooks with words / But I didn’t think it counted / Because there wasn’t a product to show [.]” Myers writes of fear and of silence, and of being too tired to think about writing, despite such fervent wish to get to the page. She writes of her own expectations, and through capitalism and propaganda, wasted time and work-speak, reminiscent of the corporate-speak that Canadian expat Syd Zolf examined through their own full-length collection, Human Resources (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2007), attempting to turn a dehumanizing language back in upon itself. Simultaneously many-layered and straightforward, these poems are very different than how Bernadette Mayer might have approached the same subject matter. One might say the world is different now, certainly, as Myers pushes her lyric far deeper into a critique on capitalism, and a study around how writing gets made, among and between the requirements and expectations of full-time employment.

This is the fear: that we go through our lives unable to do
The things most important to us, everyone making demands of our time
The working condition says there will never be time enough
When you think you’ve made it, it’s too late
Or as the Dead Kennedys say in “At My Job”:
Thank you for your service and a long career
Glad you gave us your best years