Andrew on Leonard Cohen

For my blog post and, probably, my lesson, I chose Leonard Cohen. Initially, I only knew him as a songwriter and musician, and was first directly exposed to his work in The Watchmen soundtrack’s with the song "First We Take Manhattan." This project led to my first knowledge of his involvement in poetry and writing.

Cohen was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada on a September day in 1934. He grew up in a Lithuanian-Polish family of Jewish ancestry, and as he described, “had a very messianic childhood.” In his early childhood (some sources say at 9, others - 10), his father died, leaving a permanent mark on Cohen’s personal and literary lives. By the time he turned 16, Cohen began playing the guitar, and became a dedicated reader of García Lorca.

Cohen has been active in the literary community for a little over half of a century, singing, songwriting, and writing novels and poems. He started writing poetry in an undergraduate program at McGill university, with his first book being published in the McGill Poetry Series, and continued to write well in to the 2000s, though he’s too busy recording his newest studio album to push it into the 2010s.

I’m not entirely positive exactly where I want to take the lesson, though I do have some particular ideas that I want to explore further. A possibility would be to explore the mid- and post-WWII world that Cohen matured into, as well as the way that war and politics tie into his work. A possible poem that could accompany that route might be "S.O.S."

[Note from Ms. Schamess: another angle could be Cohen's study of Buddhism, for which you seem to have already found a link.]

Finally, after scouring the Internet for interview, I found a little gem of a quote from Cohen describing his writing process: “the process is really more like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I'm stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it's delicious and it's horrible and I'm in it and it's not very graceful and it's very awkward and it's very painful and yet there's something inevitable about it."