Brian Trehearne is a professor of English at McGill University. His teaching and research areas focus on Canadian literature to 1970, chiefly poetry.  Awards and Fellowships include SSHRC Standard Research Grants, the Louis Dudek Award for Excellence in Teaching (three times) and the Arts Undergraduate Society Award for Excellence in Teaching. Publications include Canadian Poetry 1920 to 1960; Editor  (2010);  The Complete Poems of A.J.M. Smith,  Editor, (2007); The Montreal Forties: Modernist Poetry in Transition (1999) and Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists: Aspects of a Poetic Influence (1989). He is currently working on a critical edition of The Complete Poems of John Glassco.

We met in Montreal to talk about the position of Irving Layton in the Canadian poetical canon, the influence of Montreal and parents on Layton’s  poetry and persona; about masculinity, the sun, freedom, attention-seeking, Nietzsche, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, misogyny, aging, the Holocaust, vulnerability, and the best dozen poems.

Photo Credit: Irving Layton.ca