Sunday Poem

BARGING IN

All afternoon wide Port Moody's schooner

baits my interest. Lithest, no schooner

clips along beside her, each schooner

daft as a flat ale, or some Moses schooner

edging out Nile-lazy. Hot gusting swells, and schooner

facile in the morning grows afternoon gauche, tho' schooner

given half a chance might schooner

half a chance redeem, I chide. Hitting Big Schooner

Island out near Halifax. Or Schooner

Joliette I imagine whale watching, tall Schooner

Kootenays, or Confederation Schooner,

legislative big bateau Senate Schooner

marking off the long territories, Schooner

northwinding runs out of breath, Arctic schooner

opposed, motion melted and defeated, Schooner

parliament won't let anyone new aboard the schooner:

quaint policy that'll bite back schooner

rather than later. I look again, blue schooner

slipping down the dime, jingling schooner

to jingling schooner, & think of old Mac, one schooner

under the flag and crown. Bowing out, schooner

veers portside at the thought. Then bright red schooner,

wagon-red, grabs the knots Schooner

X laid out, like Bell's tin cable. Schooner

yowling starboard, then flanked, schooner

zinger received, copy: never go it alone, schooner.

From Concordia University Magazine (Spring 2015) by Jacqueline Hanna. Hanna received Concordia University's 2014 Irving Layton Award for Poetry, handed out each year to an undergraduate student.  

Good as Gone

Anna Pottier has published a memoir about the 14 years she spent with Irving Layton in his declining years, leaving him in 1995 when she was 35. She explains the genesis of her title:

Towards the latter part of our time together when stress and anxiety began creeping into Irving like arthritis into bones, he would turn to me with increasing frequency for answers and reassurance as to who was coming over or had such-and-such a letter been answered, etc. My joking response was to say that I could title my eventual memoir One Minute and Forty-nine Seconds: My Life with Irving Layton. “Why?” “Because that is how long I have between questions.” I began writing Good as Gone in January 2006, almost immediately after Irving’s death. Some seven years later, I was writing the chapter about an epic road trip I took in 2008. In it, I respond to a Craigslist ad from a singer-songwriter seeking a travel companion from New York to LA. My email made an impression, and when Ray Tarantino called, saying meet me at Nietzsche’s Bar in Buffalo on Saturday, that’s all it took. I was good as gone. The moment I typed that line, I knew I’d found my title.

John Glassco Letters: Excerpt II

To: IRVING LAYTON 

August 11, 1957 

Dear Irving,

I’m projecting a violent attack on your poetry in the public prints, but have not all the copies of your published books.

If possible, please send me copies of all your published works (except Here and Now and Love the Conqueror Worm) and bill me for same.

The blows will be delivered below the belt—the seat of your uncontested genius—but otherwise the amenities will be observed, within certain limits,

Best regards to you and Betty, and hope to see you soon.

Yours as always,

Buffy Glassco

From The Heart Accepts It All: The Selected Letters of John Glassco, edited by Brian Busby

Irving Layton's Last Poem?

"I found this in Box 31 of the Layton collection at Concordia University in Montreal. A clutch of pages stapled together; multiple drafts of a poem Irving Layton began, but never completed, towards the end of his writing. An invocation to the muse who was abandoning him. Twenty-five lines on lined paper, in the cramped handwriting of his old age; both neat, and, paradoxically, difficult to decipher. It was dated, with a question mark, early in 1989. Less than four years, then, after I had filmed him happily scribbling poems amid the ruins in his beloved Greece, for my film Poet: Irving Layton Observed. Now in 2001, I was trolling the archives seeking visual material for a new documentary on the poet's life. What struck me immediately was that the power was still there, even as the poet felt it slipping away: "my scribbles are as pale as a watermark." And the voice. This is no self-pitying plaint. It is the poet standing up to his muse and speaking his mind the way the Biblical prophets he so admired stood up to their God. Jocular, prodding, the poem, even in its uncertain state, gives forth the same wounded majesty as those ruins among which Layton paced, mouthing verse, almost 20 years ago."

—Donald Winkler

_________________________________________________________________

THE POET'S INVOCATION TO HIS MUSE

by Irving Layton

My alter ego, my diabolical other Self

where are you? A whole month goes by,

yet not a single peep from you.

Let me have it straight! Did you grow careless

from too long service? Or was it the tremors of old age

made you spiteful and prankish. You gone

invoking your attendance

my scribbles are as pale as a watermark.

No fire in them, no punch. Return, make my brain

boil again. Make it seethe with the blood

of electrified hitmen and of gallant warriors

dying in an odious cause. How many sheets

must I blacken before you [set?] a premonitory fire

to make my Self [shudder?] with familiar joy.

I'm serious, not even Coleridge's famous ode

on despondency cheers me, nor Shelley's moan,

marvellous and eloquent, while the bay's waters

around him sparkle and dance.

What hope for that mortal so lost to gloom even

another's misery fails to restore his self-esteem

[to rectitude?] with one of life's vital lies or illusions.

My case is desperate. Haul your ass over here

pronto. Abandoned, I'll sit here forever

like a paralytic, like a just-invented Frankenstein

waiting for that first charge to shock him back to life.

(Translated by Donald Winkler, with help from Anna Pottier. Photo by Terry Brynes. Originally published in Books in Canada, March 2003. )

What Made Irving Layton so Unforgettable?

Kenneth Sherman captures it:

Layton’s teaching style was dramatic: a booming voice punctuated by insistent hand gestures. He had a restless intelligence and a wrestler’s physique, and he would stride about the classroom as if he were stalking an idea. In a writing class, Layton made you aware of poetry’s physicality — its pulses and cadences — and of the fact that poets write with their bodies. A typical Layton class included scholarly lecture, Talmudic-like question and answer, and bursts of guerrilla theatre. Once, addressing a lecture hall of bewildered undergraduates, Layton ran up and down the aisles, crying “You’re sheep! Wake up! Who chloroformed you?”