A.M. Klein Was Quite A Guy - A Poem by Dave Jaffe

    A.M. Klein Was Quite A Guy.



A.M. Klein .
Alas, he was no friend of mine.
His high school was Baron Byng.
Soon he learned to sing,
'The Internationale'
And 'The Maple Leaf Forever'.


Before he turned old
He took Bronfman gold.
Yet he wrote as his life unscrolled
For the first time
Many fine poems.


In Montreal he practiced law.
And then he heard or saw
Six million Jews
Who died with their shoes
Sometimes put in neat deadly piles,
By S.S. guards who sometimes smiled,
And then gassed all the Jews
In Hitler's death camps.


Klein wrote a book on Hitler.
He compared mythologies with Leonard Cohen
Jew to Jew.
 And he knew Irving Layton,
And maybe Irving's daughter.


He gave no apprenticeship to Mordecai Richler
Who put him in a novel,
That made him no model
For any young artist.

He was another cursed poet.
"Un maudit poet," as the French say.
He descended into madness
Starting in 1952 or maybe 56.
 In any case there was no fix
Coming from doctors for him.



He emerged from a Jewish womb
And was buried in the tomb
Of poetry anthologies.
So many English language poets
Who were born or lived
In Montreal
Are forgotten there.
Alongside many others who weren't.


Now they all may be forgotten
As an avalanche of French language laws
Could sweep them away once more
Into fading memory.

Yet even now
I say with a sigh
"A.M. Klein, Abraham Moses Klein,
Was quite a guy."