...A kite is a contract of glory that must be made with the sun, so you make friends with the field the river and the wind, then you pray the whole cold night before, under the travelling cordless moon, to make you worthy and lyric and pure.                                    A Kite Is a Victim                                             The Spice-Box of Earth,                                                  Selected Poems 1956-1968                                  & Stranger Music

The following article and advertisement appeared in the magazine The Beat, March 9, 1968

	Unique Interpreters of Pop: Leonard Cohen by Jacoba Atlas Into a totally different sound is poet Leonard Cohen. Well known in Canada for his love poetry and for his movie scoring, the writer is gaining importance in this country with the release of his first album and a novel entitled Beautiful Losers. One criticism of Cohen's album rests with the poets voice: it is really non-existant. What carries the record along is the meaning of the words and not his ability to sing them. Judy Collins is able to give much more musical tone to "Sisters Of Mercy" of "Suzanne," but hearing a composer perform his own words always gives an added dimension that cannot be subverted by a weak voice. Cohen is a modern day Homer. Maintaining a house on the Greek Island of Hydra without benefit of electricity or running water, holding up at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, dropping into his home town of Montreal, Cohen is a man who rarely stays put. US college campuses have been demanding his services in concert appearances to read his own poetry and at 33 he has become a spokesman for a whole generation of people newly vocal in their aspirations. His music and his poetry is liberally sprinkled with religious images. Allegorical tales of God and salvation run throughout his work. Once Cohen volunteered the battle cry "God is alive. Magic is afoot!" "Everybody I meet wipes me out. Here are all these people plugging away at their roles. Being producers and policemen and bishops. It knocks me out, and all I can do is get down on my knees. I don't even think of myself as a writer, singer or whatever. The occupation of being a man is so much more. In spite of all the philosophical encouragement about hanging loose and all that Sunday School stuff, I admit I'm confused. I can't begin to locate my head. It has a life of its own." Concerned with salvation, with finding a "state of grace" (harmony with the rest of the world) or a deeper meaning to life, Cohen has gone through many devices that were to help bring him closer to his goals, he tried astrology, "I Ching," a phase where he only ate meat (radishes screamed when they were pulled from the earth) a phase where he only ate vegetables (animals are alive), his quest for finding a way not to harm the universe in its complexity has only brought him more problems. Cohen considers himself a rebel, but like Camus he is an anarchist unable "to throw the bomb." He is the personification of the person who sees both sides in trying to see the world, both sides of any political endeavor are evil, both are holy. He himself seems to write from a constant state of pain, and his work reflects that feeling. "The best products of our time are in agony. The finest sensibilities of the age are convulsed with pain. That means a change is at hand. People keep saying India, India, India. But the Indian vocabulary is much too precise for us. Our natural vocabulary is Judeo-Christian. That is ours. We have to rediscover law from our own heritage."

The following article and photograph appeared in the magazine Playboy, November 1968

	Leonard Cohen:  Renaissance Mensch "I had something in common with the beatniks and more with the hippies," says Leonard Cohen. "The next thing may be even closer to where I am" -- a prediction unlikely of fulfillment, unless the post-hippie era finds us in a full-blown renaissance, the only climate in which the 34-year-old Canadian poet-novelist-composer-singer would be at home. Scion of a Montreal clothing family, Cohen briefly tried his hand at the family business after graduation from McGill University, but soon decided that poetry would have to take precedence over haberdashery. He wrote three volumes of tough-tender verse before turning 30, and his first novel, The Favorite Game, a staccato reconsideration of his childhood, his Jewishness and his girls. Especially his girls. In the last chapter, Cohen's hero praises "all the bodies in and out of bathing suits...growing in mirrors, felt like treasure, slobbered over, cheated for, all of them, the great ballet line..." Beautiful Losers, a second novel, followed in 1966, the year Cohen started setting his poems to music -- and singing them. By the end of that year, the haunting "Suzanne" was an underground sensation in the repertory of Judy Collins; it is now the featured number of Columbia's Songs of Leonard Cohen, the writer's own first album. His second album, as well as a series of concerts and readings and several appearances on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour are all scheduled for the next few months, in the wake of one of Cohen's periodic forays from the Greek island of Hydra, where he lives with his wife and son. "A kite is a victim you are sure of," one of his poems begins. "You love it because it pulls / gentle enough to call you master / strong enough to call you fool." Though kite-flyer Cohen seems to regard himself more as a fool than as master of his many gifts, it's clear that the gentleness and strength of those gifts have established him as both poet laureate and minstrel to a new generation.

Many thanks to Dick Straub for diligently scouring
Playboy to find this gem.

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