Cohen, Leonard

Leonard Cohen, poet, novelist, songwriter (b at Montréal, Qué 21 Sept 1934). Cohen was one of the most influential and popular 1960s Canadian writers and his songs gained him an international reputation. He came from a wealthy WESTMOUNT family, and Montréal's atmosphere is pervasive in his writings, though he has also lived for extended periods in Greece and California, where he is associated with a Zen Buddhist community in Los Angeles. He attended McGill and Columbia universities but has spent most of his life as a full-time writer and performer. His first book of poetry, Let us Compare Mythologies, appeared in 1956.

Keywords

Born in 1934

Poets

Cohen's first major creative period was the early to mid-1960s, the highlights being, in poetry, The Spice-Box of Earth (1961) and Flowers for Hitler (1964), and in fiction, The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966). His first record, The Songs of Leonard Cohen, was issued in 1968. He won a Governor General's Award for his Selected Poems (1968) but declined it. His literary work in the 1970s was sporadic and hesitant: The Energy of Slaves (1972) is made up of "anti-poems," rejecting his own stance and stature as a poet, while Death of a Lady's Man (1978) was divided between original poems and a set of commentaries, often bitter and ironical, supplementing them. Book of Mercy (1984) reaffirmed the richness of his language, and reintroduced a tone of religious awe and veneration.

Cohen's recordings continued to be of a high quality, especially New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974) and Recent Songs (1979). In the mid-1980s, his career revived spectacularly, with a series of major albums: Various Positions (1985), I'm Your Man (1988), and The Future (1992). He conducted extensive concert tours of Europe and North America in 1988 and 1993 which resulted in a new album, Cohen Live (1994). Renewed interest in his work was further shown by other artists covering his work, notably Jennifer Warnes's Famous Blue Raincoat (1986) and the tribute albums I'm Your Fan (1991) and Tower of Song (1995).

A major volume of collected writing, Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs appeared in 1993. In the same year, Cohen was given the Governor General's Performing Arts Award, and the first academic conference devoted completely to his work took place in Red Deer, Alta. In 1994, his 60th birthday was marked by the publication of a Festschrift, Take This Waltz: A Celebration of Leonard Cohen. Cohen's work has been widely translated; he is especially popular in France, Germany, Scandinavia and the Netherlands.

Although the popular conception is of Cohen as a romantic love poet - author of the lovely lyrics of The Spice-Box of Earth - his imaginative vision can also be dark and despairing. As a Jew, Cohen has always been acutely aware of the Holocaust, and images of the Nazi genocide permeate and condition his work. Poetry, religion, sex, death, beauty and power form an interlocked pattern, heightened by the sensuousness of his language, and also emphasized by a wild, outrageous and black sense of humour. Cohen celebrates the destruction of the self and the abnegation of power.

The harshness of this vision reaches its peak in Beautiful Losers, itself an extraordinary novel which is by turns historical and surreal, religious and obscene, comic and ecstatic; it remains the most radical (and beautiful) experimental novel ever published in Canada. The songs tend to be gentler, less absolute in their vision. Even in such bleakly apocalyptical statements as "The Future," the pessimism of Cohen's vision is mitigated by his delight in making music. If Beautiful Losers is Cohen's masterpiece, perhaps the most concise statement he has ever made of his central vision occurs in the last verse of his song "The Window," from Recent Songs:

Then lay your rose on the fire

The fire give up to the sun

The sun give over to splendour

In the arms of the High Holy One

For the Holy One dreams of a letter

Dreams of a letter's death

Oh bless the continuous stutter

Of the word being made into flesh

Only Leonard Cohen could conceive of the process of the Word being made Flesh as a stutter - and only Cohen could bless that insight.

Cohen, Leonard, Video
Singing "Who by Fire" with back-up singers Jennifer Warnes and Sharon Robinson and violinist Rafik Akopian, on "The Songs of Leonard Cohen", 1980, produced by Harry Rasky on CBC-TV's "Spectrum" (courtesy CBC-TV).

Cohen, Leonard
Cohen was already one of the most influential and popular Canadian writers when his songs gained him an international reputation (photo by Alexander W. Thomas).

Author STEPHEN SCOBIE

Links to Other Sites

Leonard Cohen
The Yahoo website for legendary Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. Features a biography, audio samples, and music videos.

Canadian Music Hall of Fame
This site features profiles of Canadian artists inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. Check the list of past inductees and then click on the appropriate year in the "Virtual Hall of Fame." A Canadian Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (CARAS) website.

Leonard Cohen: Canada's Melancholy Bard
A collection of vintage television and radio clips featuring interviews with Leonard Norman Cohen, one of Canada's most influential cultural icons. From CBC Digital Archives.

Leonard Cohen
The website for legendary Canadian singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen. Features a biography, discography, tour dates, video clips, and more. Click on the song titles in the discography to view the lyrics for each song.