2023-06-14 13:17:04
In it Culture Supplement of the newspaper PROFILE we offer every week “Narcolepsy – Coordinates for an approach to poetry”, and the one chosen on this occasion is “Aesthetics”, by Canadian Irving Layton:
Good poems must roar like a fire
burning all things, burning them with great splendor.
A flame wrapped at noon mixes
the inhuman gaze of the seer, the trance of the algae.
And the poems that love the truth count
all things that have value being fireable.
Of the rubbish that burns and roars
Mozartian ecstasy arises jumping with the flames.
(Trans. Juan Arabia)
the canadian poet Israel Pincu Lazarovitch, or better known as Irving Layton (1912–2006), was born in the Romanian city of Târgu Neamt. His family moved to Montreal when he was one year old; when his father died Layton, just 13, temporarily left school to sell housewares door-to-door before enrolling in high school., where his encounter with Tennyson’s poem “The Revenge” inspired him to write. He earned a degree in agriculture from Macdonald College, where he joined the Youth Socialist League. layton enlisted in the Canadian Army in 1942 and was honorably discharged a year later. He served as editor of First Statement Press, which published his debut, Here and Now (1945), as well as for Contact Press. The poet and singer Leonard Cohen was her student and became a close friend.
Layton’s lush, elemental poems explore sexual and spiritual intimacy. He published numerous collections of poetry, including The Black Huntsmen (1951), A Red Carpet for the Sun (1959), The Pole-Vaulter (1974), The Selected Poems of Irving Layton (1977), Final Reckoning: Poems 1982-1986 (1987) y A Wild Peculiar Joy: Selected Poems 1945-82.
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