TORONTO -- Eric Layman was cranky, expansively intelligent, argumentative, affable, eccentric, possessed of an open mind that was balanced by a solid conviction that he was right, and perennially hovering near penury.
In other words, the perfect poet.
Few on Toronto's artistic scene fit the bill as well as Mr. Layman, down to the beret worn at a rakish angle over flowing hair or the squashed hat and scarf combo. Fewer still had the audacity to stand on a street corner in Yorkville in the mid-sixties and sell their verse to passersby.
A lover of language and science fiction (and notably of anything to do with Star Trek), he spoke a passable Klingon, learned to read Hebrew, and could hold forth on the links between Hungarian, Finnish and Basque, followed by a flourish of politics or current events. His poetry had its sensitive moments, but it was marked mainly by a moodiness fleshed out with vivid images and spare, accessible language. Like the beginning of this 1986 offering, The Technician:
This hand, because decay is
slow but pitiless,
applies the oilcan to the
grudging wheel;
force-feeds the flame that lamps
the midnight cities;
defends from rust and wear the
sentient steel.
Mr. Layman authored one full-length book of poetry, To a Stark and Clean Place (1987), containing 39 poems, and two chapbooks, Satires and Sunbursts (1976) and The Brightest Fire (2005). Another chapbook, Secular Hymns, is due out later this year. He also wrote short stories and book reviews for the science fiction-fantasy fan club U.S.S. Hudson Bay's newsletter, The Voyageur, and penned The Smoke Police for The Intended, a country rock band.
"He lived and breathed poetry," said his friend and fellow poet, Julie McNeill. "He was always thinking. He was more involved in the creative process than anyone I knew."
But there was a living to be made, and he did it by selling real-estate ads, writing the odd article and proofreading for the Toronto-based weekly, The Canadian Jewish News for more than 30 years. Mr. Layman had his physical limitations - deeply damaged smoker's lungs and miserable eyesight, a congenital problem - but those never got in the way. A lanky man with an erect bearing, there was an unmistakable air of dignity and healthy self-esteem about him. He bicycled everywhere, even in the foulest weather. Newspaper proofs were read with his nose touching the page.
Despite the half-inch thick glasses, or maybe because of them, few errors got past him. CJN staffers knew when Mr. Layman was at work. Anguished cries of "Oh, who the hell wrote this?" often punctuated the quiet, sometimes followed by a rhubarb with an editor.
The job, which took about three-quarters of his time, was crucial. For too many years he had been underemployed and the job meant "I actually have enough to eat and can afford the exorbitant postage to mail manuscripts to publishers too backward-thinking to accept submissions by e-mail," he once told listeners of radio station CIUT's Sunday afternoon poetry program, Howl.
Even though he made barely earned enough to get by, "he wasn't one to bemoan the fact that he wasn't wealthy," said his brother Rod. "He had dreams like we all do, but making money was not a big part of his life."
He was the eldest of five children born to a stay-at-home mother and a career air-force pilot who had seen action during the Second World War. He spent his early years in Western Canada and in London, Ont., before his family finally settled in Toronto in 1957. The peripatetic existence, a troubled relationship with his father and Mr. Layman's failing eyesight probably contributed to his turning inward and assuming a scholarly bent, noted his brother.
He was already a fixture on Toronto's coffee house scene when he earned a BA in modern languages in 1967 from the University of Toronto, where he'd belonged to a club called Radicals for Capitalism. For a while, he sold advertising for The Globe and Mail before landing at The Canadian Jewish News in 1974.
He returned to U of T in 1977 and completed a master's degree in comparative literature with an emphasis on German writers, including his personal favourite, Goethe. Other influences were author Ayn Rand, Appalachian folk ballads, philosopher Baruch Spinoza, Beethoven and Joan of Arc.
During the seventies and eighties, he participated in workshops held by the poetry groups Phoenix and Squid Inc., and was published in their anthologies. His work also appeared in Seraphim Editions' well-regarded 1999 anthology, The Edges of Time, alongside that of Leonard Cohen.
