Course:Leonard Cohen
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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| Important Course Pages |
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As children, my parents sang us to sleep with Leonard Cohen's ‘Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye’. On the second verse, Dad would stay with the melody and mom would branch off and sing the 'bum da da da da da' s. It was beautiful and sad, and one of my first lessons in metaphor: But let’s not talk of love or chains and things we can’t untie
My parents loved music. Dad had been a DJ at his college campus radio station, but he was more into prog rock, spinning Yes, Genesis and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Mom was the folkie: Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Carol King, James Taylor, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell and, yes, Leonard Cohen, Canada’s man. She liked his low growl. On rainy days, she'd play Songs of Leonard Cohen on vinyl and I'd lay on the floor, reading the lyrics on the back cover. Now Suzanne takes your hand/And she leads you to the river/She is wearing rags and feathers/From salvation army counters/And the sun pours down like honey/On our lady of the harbor/And she shows you where to look/Among the garbage and the flowers (From 'Suzanne')
When Mom was sick, I would hide in the secret inner courtyard of my high-school, skipping class with Leonard on my discman, finding new meaning in his words: the sex, the mythology, the politics, the mingling of sacred and profane, reverence and irreverence.
When Mom died, we played ‘Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye' at her funeral. It was beautiful and sad and I felt that this was the inevitable destination of the song in my life.
At our wedding, my husband and I danced to ‘True love leaves no traces’: Through windows in the dark/The children come, the children go/Like arrows with no target/Like shackles made of snow/True love leaves no traces/When you and I are one/It’s lost in our embraces/Like stars against the sun
I’ve walked with Leonard a while. I’ve covered his songs, I’ve sung them to my baby as lullabies. He has scored my life and been one of my greatest teachers, "a hundred floors above me in the tower of song". He was a master of irony, aphorism, the reversal that illuminates. He taught me to keep honing my work to a fine point. I mourned him. Now I don’t know how I feel. There was a time in my twenties when I thought of myself the way Leonard wrote about women: Whore, Saint, Broken, Savior, Martyred, Violated, Stolen and Lost. It didn't help my writing. I'm tired of his grandeur, his lust, his abuse of women (fictional and otherwise), his spiritual positioning. But man, could he turn a line.
I love to speak with Leonard/He’s a sportsman and a shepherd/He’s a lazy bastard/Living in a suit (From 'Going Home')
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