Songs of Love and Hate (back) by svennevenn under a Creative Commons license

Today marks the release of Old Ideas, Leonard Cohen’s twelfth studio album and his first in eight years. Fans have grown used to long waits between collections of new songs, although those gaps are as nothing compared to the periods of time separating new books of verse. Book of Longing appeared in shops in 2006, 22 years after its predecessor, Book of Mercy. Given the success of his songwriting, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that Cohen began as – and occasionally returns to being – a poet.

Cohen emerged onto Montreal’s small poetry scene in the early 1950s. 'Each time we met, we felt it was a landmark in the history of thinking, let alone poetry,' Cohen remembered wryly. 'I think I was more interested in the poetic life and everything around it than the thing itself.'

As a Jew writing in English in a predominantly French-speaking city, he saw himself as a minority within a minority. His tutor at McGill University and fellow poet Irving Layton proved a vital influence. 'I taught him how to dress,' Cohen commented many years later. 'He taught me how to live forever.' Layton was instrumental in the publication of Cohen’s first collection, Let Us Now Compare Mythologies, which appeared in 1956, when Cohen was 22-years-old. As a tribute, Cohen wrote ‘Layton’s Question’:

     Always after I tell him what I intend to do next,
     Layton solemnly inquires:
     Leonard, are you sure you’re doing
     the wrong thing?

Cohen waited another five years before publishing his next collection, The Spice-Box of Earth. Whereas his debut won modest praise, his sophomore effort was more enthusiastically embraced. Several of the poems taken from The Spice-Box of Earth feature in Canadian school textbooks. There is a delightful documentary, Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Leonard Cohen, made by CBC, around this time, which captures Leonard during these giddy days.

What is Cohen’s poetry like, then? Those who appreciate his lyrics will already have some insight into the character of his verse. He was influenced by Yeats, Walt Whitman, and the American Beats, as well as his fellow Canadians Layton and A M Klein. A particular influence was Lorca; Cohen even called his daughter after the Spanish poet.

The poetry is lusty, violent, often at the same time ('How you murdered your family / means nothing to me / as your mouth moves across my body'). The poems are highly allusive. Cohen refers to fairy tales, Zen, Greek mythology, Jewish lore and custom, and the Bible. He has a particular concern with Jesus and the messianic, his parents having told him at a tender age that, as a Cohen (Hebrew for ‘priest’), he was a descendant of Aaron.

Like many a young writer, Cohen soon discovered that poetry is not the road to riches. After the relative success of his first two volumes, Cohen abandoned what he called his 'neo-romantic lyric sensibility' for the more provocative style of 1964’s Flowers for Hitler, which dwelt, amongst other subjects, upon the Holocaust. 'This book,' Cohen said, sounding a combative note, 'moves me from the world of the golden boy poet into the dung pile of the front-line poet.' The controversy did not convert into sales.

Cohen tried his hand at two novels, a bildungsroman, The Favourite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1966), but again, the sales weren’t what he hoped for. Cohen took himself off to the Greek island of Hydra to write and consider his options. When he returned to North America in 1967, he decided to turn to music instead. Featuring songs like ‘Suzanne’ and ‘So Long Marianne’, his first album The Songs of Leonard Cohen has sold more than 10 million copies. Poetry’s loss was to be music’s gain.

Category: Canada, Leonard Cohen