Leonard Cohen

I’ve always had a soft spot for this lover-poet. The beauty of blogs is that you can pump for the lesser known but every now and then you might as well praise the famous too. What I like about Mr. Cohen is that he started as a poet and then a novelist and then a songwriter and it shows. There is a remarkable discipline at work in his every line. There is a story that one day in a bar (possibly in Paris) Cohen met with Bob Dylan. Cohen tells the story and he says that he told Bob that he felt in awe of him because it took him weeks to come up with a song whereas Bob could manage it in a few hours. All I can say is that it shows.

Dylan’s centrality to modern music has always escaped me. He seems to be one of the most inconsistent of artists. He has some good material but some of the worst stuff ever put to vinyl or recorded live as been in his name. I’ll admit that I have been moved by a few of his songs but on the whole, he’s a mess of a musician and though his lyrics have depth they lack style and tip the hat just slightly in the direction of structure. Cohen, on the other hand, apart from perhaps the last few albums, has maintained an enviable standard of quality.

Careening among the labels of prophet and poet and priest and lover, Cohen weaves together politics and the erotic, the personal and the mythological, the religious and the pragmatic in ways that are never academic and always passionate. And even though I get bored of his music for months at a time, I never get bored of his message. He is one of the few poets whose lines I keep close at hand. Wonderful lines like “the bed is kind of narrow but my arms are open wide”. Or “your body like a search light, my poverty revealed”. Or one of the first poems I remember noticing:

As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.

And so a few years ago, this man, who also brought us the wonderful Closing Time (she’s rolling half the world against her thigh), one of the few who intelligently write about sex in a genre that is supposed to be all about it, this man who also spent most of the last few decades in a Buddhist monastary was left essentially bankrupt by his manager.