The Selected Poems of Irving Layton

Having agreed that Simone de Beauvoir's feminism is a bad joke That Sartre is a has-been and a stupid Jansenist muddlehead That Camus posessed more integrity than talent That there are no longer any poets in France Worth mentioning That much the same could be said for her novelists And that, in general, French culture Is in a parlous condition, if not actually dead Not having cared to move A single centimetre beyond Flaubert and Valery And that no one except the two of us Seemed to know what is happening in that wretched country Having agreed politely to disagree About Hemingway, Rimbaud, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Brecht, Lawrence, Moravia, Jaspers, Kafka, Strindberg, and Psternak’s Dr. Zhivago having dismissed politics as a betise and religion As a folie AND Having inevitably but cautiously left the high ground Of literary and philosophical discussion To speak of more personal, more mundane matters I.e. one’s dissatisfactions with conventional marriage, one’s Adulteries, fornications, venereal diseases (there were none) And given a description of the circumstances attendant on one’s Best and worst fucks Having slyly dropped two or three hints About one’s favourite erogenous zones and the best means For stimulating them And having led from this to the over-riding, paramount need in Sex for tenderness, mutual esteem, humour, delicatesse and for Similar though not necessarily identical tastes in literature, music, Philosophy, art, theatre, and contemporary films We are now ready to make love