Vol 1 No 2 2007
Introduction by Priscila Uppal
Several years ago, I urged my Introduction to Creative Writing students to think carefully about the power of words, both sacred and profane, I brought up an anecdote about Irving Layton, Canada’s first bombastic in-your-face anti-bourgeois bad boy of poetry (with the technical elegance to match), and how, although he used all manner of shocking words, phrases (and assumptions) in his verse, he very rarely used swear words at home. “Those words are too powerful to misuse them. It’s disrespectful to use them irresponsibly,” he apparently would say to his son, or something like that—it’s hard to tell when you’re dealing with a legend, and with hearsay. After class, my strongest student, a paradoxical mix of earnest passion and almost sluggish disaffection, approached me with a businessman-like efficiency even though her long brown curls were tumbling about her shoulders over a dull, baggy knit sweater and faded low-rider blue jeans. “I’m Irving Layton’s daughter,” she said. My gaze shifted over her freckles as if they would connect to form a birth certificate signature to justify her claim. “Irving Layton, he’s my father.” “Who’s daughter are you?” I meant, of course, which of Irving’s wives; but it hit me before she needed to answer. “You’re Samantha! You’re the one David’s never met.” I explained that David Layton (Irving’s son with Aviva Canter), had been my landlord, that I’d lived in his basement throughout my undergraduate years and we’d remained very close friends. “Would you like to meet him?” “Maybe,” she said. But really, at least for the moment, she was through talking about family (which disappointed me); she wanted to talk about poetry (which exhausted me after I had already been talking about poetry for three hours). But we (and this we now, happily, includes her brother David) have continued to talk about both family and poetry, and also politics and generational clashes, travel and ideological disillusionments, rock and samba music, Western and Eastern mythologies, neighbourhoods, cooking, and cats; much of which, I think, is evident in her studious yet conversational style of verse. Sam Bernstein is a young writer seeking roots and seeking the spade to cut those roots; she’s a flower and a weed, a self-indulgent Generation Next-er and a politically aware apathy-fighter. Which side of this personality will win? I guess we’ll wait and see whose daughter she grows into in a few decades’ time.
Samantha Bernstein