“Everything except writing poems and making love ends up finally boring me,” Irving Layton apparently said. His parents immigrated from Romania when he was young to the working-class neighborhood of St. Urbain in Montreal. His father died when he was only thirteen, leaving the family in such a fragile position that Irving went door to door selling household goods. Lord Alfred Tennyson’s “The Revenge,” a ballad about a 15th Century sea battle in Spain, set him on the path to poetry in high school: Spanish ships of war at sea! we have sighted fifty-three! A carnal, crude man, “he never tired of explaining that he was born without a foreskin, thus circumcised by God, a matter of wonder for his family and of pride for himself,” writes Cathryn Atkinson in The Guardian. He had five wives, the last being Anna Pottier, just twenty-three years old when she married the poet forty-eight years her senior. A marriage which began as an invitation to be his housekeeper. His poem “Misunderstanding” enrages me, with its meager twenty-three words and twelve lines: “I placed / my hand / upon / her thigh. / By the way / she moved / away / I could see / her devotion / to literature / was not / perfect.” I remember, with bitterness, every man who stood in the way between me and my vocation in poetry: the undergraduate professor, the fellow contributor in my first publication, the troubadour with his poem about my breasts, my “doe eyes,” my lace underwear. Irving Layton was Leonard Cohen’s “literary mentor.” Men made literary mentorship a fraught impossibility for me. Diane Seuss, in frank: sonnets, writes of the 1970s scene: “the famous poets came for us they came on us or some of us…their genius sprayed on us they preyed on us…” She won the Pulitzer with that book, thank god.
-Morgan English