Tom Wayman was a long-time contributor to the minnesota review in an earlier incarnation of the magazine. His most recent collection of poems in the U.S. is I'll Be Right Back (Ontario Review P, 1997), and in Canada it's My Father's Cup (Harbour, 2002).

ns 69 | Fall/Winter 2007

Featuring an interview with MH Abrams, reviews of new books by Walter Benn Michaels, John McGowan, and Paul Smith, plus a special section on online criticism.

Read this Issue

Published Spring 2006

Carrot

by Tom Wayman | ns 65-66

For years I dwelt in an apartment
whose window gazed at a bridge across Burrard Inlet
over which traffic at every hour rose toward downtown
or returned, while the hours themselves
flashed from a distant neon sign, so I had everything
I could want: youth and time and the sea

In my third-floor room I was happy
with the typewriter I returned to each day after clocking out
with friends scattered throughout this building
as well as people I scarcely knew: the couple through the south wall
whose fights and unhappy love
leaked in nights above the steady rain against my window
Or beautiful Kathy one floor below
I occasionally had to phone at two in the morning
to ask her to quiet down a party

                                                           In those days
I was aware five thousand dollars
would provide my needs for a year
And since interest
drew easily ten per cent
all I had to save was fifty thousand
to recline at my ease forever
hunched over the keys of my typewriter
filling the dwelling around me and the street outside
where the cars raced down to the beach
with my words

                    This was the carrot
I have pursued my entire life
Each time I approached, inflation
meant the sum I had calculated was sufficient
now could provide only half a year
of existence, then a quarter
Next, after I readjusted my figures
interest rates began to plummet
so the amount I needed to amassdistended exponentially

                                     Decade upon decade
the carrot has swung before me
from a pole hoisted aloft by fleering faces
who adroitly step back whenever I lunge
or shuffle closer to the suspended vegetable

                                                Nor have the years been kinder
to the carrot
Even as it blurs
in its incessant wavering motion
its desiccated status is evident
by its flaccid greenery, ever-more-pallid color
I believe that only once it retains absolutely no food value
will I be permitted to clutch it
in a withered fist

                  Far better to have joined
with my friends and successfully planted
our own seeds, to have raised
a different crop
Though we worked to this end
we failed to organize a different arrangement
than to have a dying succulence
constantly dangled just ahead, while the tide
advances and falls, the dollars swell
nearer the required line
and recede, the traffic
climbs each morning toward the sky

MR BOOKS

Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.

Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.

Purchase Critics at Work.