sewn paper
Canadian Poetry
Spring 1992
176 pages
ISBN 0-88984-135-7
$12.95
Readers who are interested
in the poetry of Irving Layton
may also be interested in
The Improved Binoculars
(1991)
Dance With Desire
Selected Love Poems
Illustrated by Richard Gorman
Irving Layton
William Wordsworth was turned on by daffodils; I'm
turned on by women. He saw their golden cups tossing
beside the lake and stored the sight away in his
mind to give him a lift whenever he felt vacant or
depressed. I treasure the sight of firm-titted
women walking on Avenue Road or St. Catherine Street.
He didn't pluck every daffodil he celebrated, nor have I
every woman I've written poems for and now lay
gratefully between the covers of this book.
My first poem was to a Grade Six teacher, Miss
Benjamin. I yearned for her as only a horny pre-adolescent
can who doesn't know what to do with his impulses, a
riot of romanticism, idealism and burgeoning sensuality.
I can still recall the excitement `in the blood' I felt each
time she entered the classroom, the dizziness and
rapture I experienced when I looked up and saw her
dimples, the lovely flush of her cheeks, her wavy
brown hair. I used to pretend I had some difficulty
with the arithmetic problem she had set the class to get
her to bend over my desk so that I might see the
crimson tinge that began at her chin and went right down
to her tantalizing cleavage. Indeed, it has often
occurred to me that every woman I've ever loved has
been a materialization of Miss Benjamin, the fleshly
incarnation of my boyhood desire for her.
Everything poets write about when they describe the
delirium and ecstasy of love I have known from that
time on. It has been difficult, sometimes impossible
to give my attention to anything else; difficult for
my mind with its penchant for abstractions
and concepts to trick my heart into paying them the
slightest heed or consideration. How can anyone who
has known the intensities of love, its sudden
spirallings upward to glory or downward to disaster
and grief seriously entertain for any length of
time notions on politics, religion, philosophy,
literature, or even the meaner appetites and
ambitions prevalent upon this planet. `The food of
love' is the only kind I've ever cared to eat, the
only food I've ever hungered for. And talking about
food: didn't I bolt down tiny black pellets
of goat dung because I didn't want my first love,
watching me pick them up in her backyard, to think
that her eleven-year-old
gallant couldn't tell
the difference between them and olives? Symbol
or omen? Foretaste of things to come? Metaphor
for the inescapable paradoxes of love? All these,
of course.
I may have written two- or three-hundred love
poems since my first one for Miss Benjamin. Many
of them with more propriety could be called
hate poems, for surely love and hate are two sides
of the coin we call sexual interest or desire.
For the present collection I've tried to cull those
poems that when put together in one volume will
give the reader the startling thrill of a
déjà vu.
I want him to exclaim with understanding, amusement
and sympathy: `Yes, the writer of these verses knows
what he's talking about. He has really been there,
on those scarred slopes inhabited by ``La Belle Dame
Sans Merci''. He has paid for them in agony and
exaltation for they have the authentic feel only
personal knowledge can confer, without which poems
are as lifeless as a pickled fetus. Only someone
who has been on those slopes can have reproduced so
faithfully the glory and carnage of the love emotion.'
What is the love emotion? When you are lost and
most yourself. Or to be comical and light-hearted about
the matter: when you are a Sufi with Sophie on the sofa
and you feel most alive, most intensely yourself and
most generous.
When the antinomies of existence dissolve and
dance into one another, merging into a music one
hears at no other time; when clapping your hands with
them as they melt into oneness you behold in a moment
of ecstatic vision the seamless unity of creation.
At that moment dictator and tyrant are worms' food and
you know with luminous certainty that all who hanker
after titles and money are sick unhappy cripples the
world would do beautifully without.
Let the philosophers rave on about the summum
bonum and mystics about embracing God. They are still
vertical humans and therefore even their adorations
still have something aggressive about them. Humans
in the horizontal position have always struck me as
less likely to be violent and destructive. So I take
my place
beside the poets, and less arrogant than the
philosopher or mystic, am prepared
to find the greatest
good and embrace God whenever I hold a woman in the act
of love. It is then I know with assurance and inexpressible
delight that whatever it is life promises us, this
must be it; and that a universe containing this
experience must have something grandly important going
for it. That is, finally, when all the subtractions are
made, what the love poems in this book are all about. `Don't let the title fool you; this is not a book of romantic
bric-a-brac, a Valentine's Day gift to be lightly given and lightly
forgotten. Irving Layton's career was based on an unflinching attention
to everything he could discover about the human character, including its
less savoury aspects. In the poems of Dance with Desire chosen from
across the span of his long career, Layton styles himself as a
20th-century Catullus, loving and hating with equal glee, given to
passionate excesses and epigrammatic precision, utterly unconcerned with
sweet nothings or political correctness. Layton is often charged with
being too verbose, with having published far too many substandard poems,
and having let his verse grow slack as he grew older. These are all
valid criticisms, but they don't really apply to Dance with Desire
since its very existence depends upon the excesses, embarrassments, and
foolishness of the unstifled love that Layton celebrates.' `Reading through these poems took me back to the spirit of the 50s
and the 60s. As a young artist on the scene, I heard Layton giving readings
at the Bohemian Embassy and other coffeehouses in Toronto and Montreal.
Reading some of the poems was like a reunion with old friends, although
I had no trouble connecting with those I had never read before.
I produced close to a hundred drawings, some of which were used
as working drawings for the six prints accompanying the deluxe edition
(of Dance With Desire). Themes range from the personal to the
universal. Appropriately, they read like a beautiful poem.'
- Irving Layton
- amazon.ca
Richard Gorman
Photo by Sam Tata