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

 

Gina Myers, Some of the Times

 

New city same shit
Moving through
the streets
pre-fall golden
in late afternoon
sunlight / bright red
crumbling brick
& shoddy griffiti
asks freedom?
Each year I fight
& each year
the things that hold
me back feel stronger
Shirking the day’s
responsibilities
to sit by the river
this afternoon
I wouldn’t give this
up but no it’s not
freedom. (“PHILADELPHIA”)

From Philadelphia poet Gina Myers comes her third full-length collection, Some of the Times (Baltimore MD: Barrelhouse Books, 2020), following A Model Year (Coconut Books, 2009) and Hold It Down (Coconut Books, 2013), two books I now regret having missed. Some of the Times is a collection of first-person lyrics that explore her lived experience and geography, that being the city of Philadelphia, a city that to her was fairly new at the moment of composition. Most of the poems are shorter, almost clipped, but provide the sense of being very much part of a larger structure, suggesting the collection less an assemblage than a suite of contained lyrics. Myers writes on paying rent, police brutality, tenuous employment, chronic illness, labour camps in Cuba, baseball games and thunderstorms. Her poems occupy the ground level of a city in ruin amid dangerous heat. There is a particular flavour of working class ethos that permeates the culture, and the poetry, of Philadelphia that is reminiscent (positively, of course) of work I’ve seen over the years out of Hamilton, Ontario, or even the border city of Windsor. Myers aesthetic, of course, is very much that, but blended with an influence from the lyric of the New York School of Poets, something she wrote about in her short 2016 piece “Is there room in the room that you room in?” for the ottawa poetry newsletter:

In an interview, Eileen Myles defines what it means to be a New York School poet: “As an aesthetic it means putting yourself in the middle of a place and being excited and stunned by it, and trying to make sense of it in your work.” This, putting one’s self somewhere and being excited to be there despite all that being there involves--the joyful as well as the heartbreaking and ugly--and trying to make sense of it, is what poetry is for me. And I am happy to be here. And I’m happy you’re here too.

The poem “PHILADELPHIA,” a longer sequence near the beginning of the collection, sits as a poem of arrival and of placement, rife with self-dismissal and regret: “How much of / an asshole am I / that I live / somewhere / for a month / & think I can / tell its story / Every day there / is news of / a new police / brutality / What use / is love / right now?” According to the notes at the back of the collection, the poem was composed from August to October, 2014 (which is, curiously, exactly during the time I was in Philadelphia, and was first able to meet Myers). In a conversation with Krystal Languell, posted at Entropy on September 26, 2017, Myers discusses the poem, which had appeared earlier that same year as a chapbook with Barrelhouse:

Philadelphia was written within the first two months of my move to Philadelphia, which was a time of great uncertainty and instability for me personally. The book wrestles with that instability along with wrestling with larger social and political issues. The world outside of me has remained to be uncertain and unstable, certainly hostile and perhaps increasingly so under the current government–or at least whatever veil of “democracy” and “justice” there was has been lifted. In that sense, not much has changed from the time of writing the book. However, personally, I am feeling more settled in, more at home here in Philly, though I’m reaching my three year mark, which is when my wanderlust usually comes on strong.

There are elements of influence in her first-person explorations of self and the crumbling infrastructures of city and culture, from Eileen Myles to fellow Philadelphia poet ryan eckes; structural echoes to her poems that run similarly down the page and through the excess of sirens, unkempt streets and the ravaged potential of human accomplishment. This is her restlessness, her “wanderlust,” as she calls it, alongside a hardscrabble lyric, one pulled together from lyric scraps, struggle and observation. “I don’t need your theories,” she writes, to close out the poem “4.18.14,” “to understand my lived / experience. There is / an anger I carry / inside I will never / let go of. Something basic / to hold onto while everything / else disappears.”

 

Ongoing notes: Canada Day, 2016

Happy Canada Day! I’m behind on everything, as you might imagine.

I’m attempting to be less behind on some of these reviews (again). I’ve yet to start going through the material I picked up at the most recent ottawa small press book fair, but hope to be getting into that soon. Otherwise, are you checking out the activity on some of my other blogs, whether the ottawa poetry newsletter, above/ground press, Chaudiere Books or the “Tuesday poem” series over at the dusie blog?

I think we’re going somewhere for brunch today. Not sure yet. Maybe something else as well.

It only takes us an hour, these days, to leave the house at all…

Brooklyn NY: I’m quite taken by New York City poet and doctor Jennifer Stella’s debut poetry collection, Your lapidarium feels wrought. (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2016), a small suite of erasure poems, all of which share the same title. Who is this Jennifer Stella? Her line and breath breaks are stunning, staggering and staccato-precise. I want more.

Your lapidarium feels wrought

After bus to plane to train to

          bus, street

          sweeping dictates horse-like

                    machines. It’s much colder

          in Colorado. Typhoons

          are only signs, but curbs

are hydrant glass. Once

          I am driving, I

          drive. The Pacific

is far from

          momentum, my Pacific is so

                                        close

Philadelphia PA: I like the twenty-six poems that make up Laura Theobald’s odd edna poems, produced (undated) in an edition of one hundred copies by Gina Myers’ Lame House Press.

XI

edna read a book by mark twain. “i will never be a book,” she said.

edna looked in the mirror. all twelve of her eyes blinked.

The poems, titled via Roman numerals, exist as self-contained moments that, as they progress, give a sense of movement, almost as a flip-book constructed out of poems (instead of images).

XIV

edna couldn’t decide whether to be a princess or a scoundrel. “if i was a scoundrel,” edna thought, “i could ride a raft downriver. if i was a princess, ii could ride the back of a horse.”

“i wish i was the elephant man,” she said.

edna rode a raft down the river in her mind for 15 yrs. it was a lot like driving.

when edna woke there was nothing left. her sheets were blue like a river and she thanked god. “god,” she said. “for the sheets.” there were screams coming from all around her but she didn’t know why.