On the death of Irving Layton

I was saddened to learn that Irving Layton passed away a few hours ago. I was working on some poetry of my own when my mom informed me of his death.

He was a certainly a force to be reckoned with in Canadian poetry and whether you liked him or not there is no doubt that he had a significant impact on CanLit.

Layton was living at the Maimonides Geriatric Centre not too far from Josh and we had been planning on visiting him to pay our respects.

I wrote a poem for Layton called Flamplatz (Yiddish for exploding flame and also his childhood nickname) while he was still alive. It celebrated the creative spark within the man and in his work. While we may no longer be able to visit him, we are all lucky that we can still revisit his poetry. Thank you Mr. Layton, we'll miss you.