Whom I Write For

By: Irving Layton

“If you are wondering what happened to us all, you might consult the poems of Irving Layton.”

–Leonard Cohen

When reading me, I want you to feel
   as if I had ripped your skin off;
Or gouged out your eyes with my fingers;
Or scalped you, and afterwards burnt your hair
   in the staring sockets; having first filled them
with fluid from your son’s lighter.
I want you to feel as if I had slammed
   your child’s head against a spike;
And cut off your member and stuck it in your
   wife’s mouth to smoke like a cigar.

For I do not write to improve your soul;
   or to make you feel better, or more humane;
Nor do I write to give you any new emotions;
Or to make you proud to be able to experience them
   or to recognize them in others.
I leave that to the fraternity of lying poets
   –no prophets, but toadies and trained seals!
How much evil there is in the best of them
   as their envy and impotence flower into poems
And their anality into love of man, into virtue:
Especially when they tell you, sensitively,
   what it feels like to be a potato.

I write for the young man, demented,
   who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima;
I write for Nasser and Ben Gurion;
For Krushchev and President Kennedy;
   for the Defence Secretary
voted forty-six billions for the extirpation
   of humans everywhere.
I write for the Polish officers machine-gunned
   in the Katyn forest;
I write for the gassed, burnt, tortured,
   and humiliated everywhere;
I write for Castro and tse-Tung, the only poets
   I ever learned anything from;
I write for Adolph Eichmann, compliant clerk
   to that madman, the human race;
For his devoted wife and loyal son.

Give me words fierce and jagged enough
   to tear your skin like shrapnel;
Hot and searing enough to fuse
   the flesh off your blackened skeleton;
Words with the sound of crunching bones or bursting
      eyeballs;
   or a nose being smashed with a gun butt;
Words with the soft plash of intestines
   falling out of your belly;
Or cruel and sad as the thought which tells you
      “This is the end”
And you feel Time oozing out of your veins
   and yourself becoming one with the weightless dark.

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Irving Layton (1912-2006) was a renowned Canadian poet and teacher known for his bold and provocative writing style. Layton’s famous pupil, Leonard Cohen, once said this about the great poet: “I taught him how to dress, he taught me how to live forever.”

Layton's literary legacy continues to resonate in Canadian poetry. His writing, characterized by its raw emotion, social critique, and sensual language, has inspired subsequent generations of poets. Irving Layton passed away on January 4, 2006, leaving behind a rich body of work that continues to be celebrated and debated in the realm of Canadian literature.

You can find his collection of poetry in A Wild Peculiar Joy: The Selected Poems