I don’t know

why I think of Irving Layton today, but I do. I was in his class many years ago, I imagine it would have been around 1970? He was teaching creative writing at York University and I imagined myself to be a a writer, even back then, and I took the class. There were many future notable Canadian writers in the class, including Sally Clark (who I became friends with and still am) Judith Fitzgerald, Daniel Moses (who, sadly, died recently of cancer) and of course Irving Layton’s future wife Harriet Bernstein. I may have told this story in my memoir but who cares, after all it’s another COVID-19 lockdown party now, so anything goes; and I will tell it again, but differently. Layton was incredibly imposing and intimidating and very macho. In 1970 you expected ‘great writers who are legends’ to make grand statements as teachers. He opened up one of the first classes with this remark: “No woman will ever be a great writer” — quite amazing, actually to think that anyone might have been able to get away with such a remark, ever, and there were several female students in class. And if one considers that he ended up sleeping with one of them  — and that she later became his wife — well, it adds a certain irony to his opening remarks, don't you think? I was in the closet. But Irving -- though macho -- was very sexual, so I don’t think he would have minded my sexuality. Indeed his favourite writer was the gay poet Edward Field, which was revealed when he made us read a poem called ‘Graffitti’ which I still remember with some fondness: “They leave behind a wall scrawled all over with flowers / That shoot great drops of gism through the sky.” I can’t remember reading a poem recently that contained the word ‘gism’ --certainly one of my favourite words (and one of my favourite things). The poem reminds me very much of ‘Kids Who Love Each Other’  by Jacques Prevert; he talks of kids who ‘kiss each other where they stand against the gates of night.’ This is all circling around the same notion; that adolescent sexuality is joyous and that the old hate it because they are puritans. That’s what I loved about Irving Layton’s class actually; that he was not a puritan, and that he spoke his mind about it. Harriet Berstein, his future wife (have I mentioned that?) sat next to him and was plotting and planning to snare him. I was very naive and had no idea. My friend Sally pointed this out to me though, after Harriet read out loud a poem that began -- “The fire in you, inspires the fire in me” — or something to that effect. And yes, the fact that I had absolutely no idea what was going on shows that at age 18 I was extremely screwed up. Apparently Layton divorced his first wife in the wink of an eye after Harriet Bernstein appeared on the scene --in no time he was married to Harriet who later wrote a book about him. This is the way it used to be in the olden days; now we daren’t mention ‘gism’ in university classes and professors must pretend that they are not attracted to their students, ever. And yet if you did a little tally of how many male professors marry their female graduate students you would come up with quite a tidy number I reckon. But I am here not to talk of pedagogy but poetry, which, if it is not sexual, is, I think, not worth the computer it’s written on. Poetry is of course love, and love is of course, sex. I know some of you won’t agree with that but it’s true. Love without sex is called affection, and yes we all need a lot of that, but love — the overpowering, life-messing-up kind of love is what it’s always been about. My lover committed an unspeakable act with me last night, which was, in the last analysis, sexual, or let’s just say it certainly involved the body. There, I’ve got you interested now, haven’t I? No I’m not going to tell you. I’m not going to name it.  Let’s just say that even though my lover and I hardly ever do anything that could be called sex anymore (after 21 years or so, I can't remember!) my attraction for him is and was always sexual, and I still quite enjoy watching him sway around the house naked (that is, it sways when he walks around naked, yes). And here we get to the crux of it; 21 years (the relationship) 17 years (am I older than him) and if I tell you that freely, and remind you once again that I am old and lame, you will probably accuse me of objectifying my lover. And yes I still do, and did, because love is very much involved with‘objectification’ Don’t you see? That’s what so wonderful about it! You are drawn to the person initially because they have a big penis or or big lips big eyes or big breasts (it’s often about something physically ‘big) and then, if love develops, then what's interesting is that even though you fell in love because of that big thing, then you find you actually love them as a person -- and their 'big thing' too. And that’s not a awful. It’s kind of what separates us from animals; I mean we are animals, but what makes us human is that we can objectify people and love them at exactly the same time. Getting the body involved -- at one point or another --is what makes it so compelling. Irving knew this; and that’s what happened with him and Harriet Bernstein, and he was a victim of love, as all poets are. I’m reading a very befuddling analysis of The Faerie Queene right now. It says that classic poem all boils down to sex. This makes me think of Stanley Wells' Looking for Sex in Shakespeare. I hate Stanley Wells, almost as much as Harold Bloom -- but at least Bloom was likely an old pervert (he loved Falstaff a little too much to be a normal person) whereas Wells is obviously a puritan. Wells, on top of running the incredibly corrupt Shakespeare Birthplace Trust also believes that dirty perverts like me corrupt Shakespeare by reading our disgusting sexualities into work that is sublimely innocent. Which I will do now. I’m sure you know Shakespeare's Sonnet 20: 'A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted....', which contains the line: “And for a woman wert thou first created, / Till nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting” The poem is Shakespeare’s ode to a beautiful boy. But what Shakespeare does in that particular line is -- with the rhythm and his choice of words, create a perfect oral simulacrum of the gentle fall of a non-erect penis on a ripe boyish scrotum -- ‘fell, a-doting.’ So take that, Stanley Wells. If I am reading stuff into the poem that’s not there, then, well, good for me -- but one of the reasons I despise you so much Stanley is because you don’t understand that poetry is love, is sex. Is beauty.