Come, my brothers,
let us govern Canada,
let us find our serious heads,
let us dump asbestos on the
White House,

let us make the French talk English,
not only here but everywhere,
let us torture the Senate individually
until they confess,
let us purge the New Party,

The Only Tourist
in Havana
Turns His
Thoughts Homeward

let us encourage the dark races
 so they'll be lenient
when they take over,
let us make the CBC talk English,
let us all lean in one direction
and float down
to the coast of Florida,...

Flowers for Hitler
Selected Poems 1956-1968

Songs Sacred and Profane

by Ira Mothner

There was a time when poets sang with lute and lyre, before they got precious and dispensable and entombed poetry on thick linen pages, held down by heavy type. They would earn their bread at a patron's table, giving pleasure for their keep. And many went supperless through the lean, songless centuries. Yet the poet's traditional poverty was not hard on Leonard Cohen, for he eats little, dresses with distaste and holes up in cheap hotels, "comfortable, anonymous and subtly hostile places."

Cohen now gets modestly plump checks from his publishers--foreign and domestic, hard- and softback--royalties for novels, poetry (his Selected Poems 1956-1968 has sold 92,000 copies), songs and records (nearly 300,000 albums). The poetry won him this year's Governor General's Prize from his Canadian countrymen. (He turned it down.) Songs sold books and brought him an audience grabbed more handily by the ear than by the eye. At 34, Cohen is barely eligible for membership in the generation that chucked spun-sugar, ever-after ballads for the realistic rock lyrics of the Beatles, Paul Simon and Bob Dylan. They are turned in more than turned on, with a Socratic faith in the wisdom beneath the skin. Cohen packs along humor and a poet's eye for detail and discord as he roams his own internal landscape, giving out songs of piety and genital pleasure, filling with here-and-now imagery the more barren interiors of listeners who seize his mysteries as theirs.

Cohen comes from Montreal's moneyed Westmount and old family factories. His father died when he was nine, but he doesn't say much about that. Instead, he talks of the parks and the girls and the city. "The beautiful thing about Montreal then was nobody owned the city," not the French or the English, certainly not the Jews. "Everyone was an honored guest." At McGill University, Cohen was a big man, but can't remember learning much. His education happened in town. "I had a beautiful room with a fireplace and sherry, and we lived the life of Chinese mandarins, courting ladies and keeping warm. I felt life would go on like that. I'd drink wine and eat cheese and write poems." But he wanted more than poetry to fill his days. "Poetry is just the evidence of a life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash. I thought, like ever man, I would have some important work to do." Business tempted him. "I liked the way business was conducted in our family. There is a great sense of honor, forthrightness and economy." At McGill, he switched from arts to commerce and back again, tried law at Columbia University in New York and took a job in the family's clothing factory. By then, his first book of poems had been published. He won a Canada Council grant and went to Europe.

England was cold, and Italy was too. Greece was warm, and Cohen bought a house on the island of Hydra for $1,500. He lived cheaply on publishers' advances and the income from a small inheritance. That simple house, without running water or electricity, is still home base for Cohen and the golden Norwegian girl with whom he has shared most of the past nine years. From there, he returns to Canada to "renew my neurotic affiliations," or takes off on quixotic enterprises like a visit to Havana in time for the Bay of Pigs invasion.

He both loved and hated Castro's revolution--loved the energy, hated the blaring anthems and menacing posters. The Cuban press was then censuring bourgeois intellectuals. "I found myself aptly described." By the end of his visit, Cohen had fallen among Marxist misfits; he was mysteriously detained at the airport and put in the care of a 14-year-old sentry armed with a submachine gun. While his guard was distracted, Cohen scuttled on board a Miami-bound plane.

On Hydra, Cohen wrote two novels:The Favorite Game, the phallic progress of a young man much like the author, and Beautiful Losers, a mystical comedy, intensely spiritual and explicitly sexual. While writing the last book to the twang of country and Western music from a U.S. Armed Forces radio station, he hit on his next career, a country-Western singer.

In college, Cohen had played guitar with a group called the Buckskin Boys. Later, he chanted poetry to music. With some songs in his pocket, he set out from Hydra for the country-music capital of Nashville, Tenn. On the way, he first heard Bob Dylan. "I listened to him, and I thought, he has already done it. What I waned to do was write the best I could in a simple way and lay it out for people."

His songs didn't lay it out all that simply, but were taken up by singers like Judy Collins. With Suzanne, Sisters of Mercy and others closer to art songs than rock or country, Cohen found an audience. "I've got three things going for me," he told a friend about his chances as a singer. "I have a terrible voice, can't even carry a tune. Also, I'm very small, emaciated, with the residue of acne. And I'm demonstrably Jewish (Dylan is not). The only thing going against me is that I play the guitar too well." These odds sounded good enough for Columbia Records to put out Songs of Leonard Cohen, an album that started selling slowly but keeps going. This year's album, Songs From a Room, got off to a better start.

What amazes the Columbia statisticians is that Cohen sells so well without making personal appearances or having had a big single hit. Nor is he played on top pop programs or easy listening stations. "He doesn't turn on the teeny-boppers," says the company's president, Clive Davis, who pegs Cohen's audience as above 18 and intellectual.

Cohen doesn't make the really big money because he is afraid to sing in front of people. "If I could do it, I'd do it." And he has done it. Sometimes it went well, sometimes not. Once, it hardly went at all. "My fingers wouldn't move, my voice wouldn't open up." Recording his current album in Nashville, he lit the studio with colored candles, burned incense and went over the songs again and again, stopping when they went bad, changing them until he was content. "I'm an amateur performer," he allows.

Sidemen admire his guitar work, but there is still his voice. "What legend has a voice? Does Chevalier or Johnny Cash or Dylan?" asks Bob Johnston, who produces records for Cash and Dylan as well as Cohen. What voice he has serves Cohen's songs well.

Lacking the big money, he doesn't miss it. He has enough to travel and write, living his strange and Spartan way, often alone. He is part priest, part put-on. "My intentions run all the way from making a living to the highest and most arrogant aspirations of spirit seeking." He runs from this mystic venturing to women, who find him warm and gentle, love him and bed him: "The world I live in, we sleep with each other." Yet he is no arrogant huntsman, and delights in young people and those past 30 "whose eyes are still alive." He listens with a shy smile, wanting to be charmed, wanting to love, to touch. He thumb wrestles with men. "It's a way to establish physical contact, holding somebody's hand for a while."

Drugs are a part of his world too: pot, acid, pills. Yet he is no apologist for them: "There have been casualties." But drugs are one way Cohen has tried to get in touch with whatever spirit is at the well-spring of his talent. He has fasted, forsaken meat and considered most means of mortifying the flesh.

Hassidism fascinates him--the mystical Jewish orthodoxy that began in Poland, with its wise men, the prayers that go to support heaven and the concern for numerology (like I Ching he also consults). This is part of a long God search that we talked of one night in a Nashville motel, after he'd laid down part of a record. It was well toward dawn ("The first rebellious act of man is to stay up late") when the tape recorder ran down, and what he said was lost in garble. I claimed machines just didn't like me, but Leonard insisted, "It is wrong for a man to talk about his gods publicly" and that we had been justly served.

The joy of Leonard Cohen is the essential modesty of a man who distrust his own opinions. He acknowledged the damage of ambition--"I've gone after fame, and it hasn't done my nature any good"--and once included in a documentary film the warning, "This is not entirely devoid of the con."

That long night, he talked much, recanted some, and argued, "You know what a wreck my life is? I don't do anything day upon day, and I lie around in despair and kvetch a lot, and I can't put anything together. So how am I going to talk about these heavy mysteries?" But the mysteries are in the songs and in the poems. And that's what a poet is for.