Words Are Enough: Leonard Cohen

The correlation between poetry and music is as old as either form itself. Homer's poems were made to be sung, Shakespeare's theater included exquisite show tunes and Shelley (for one) was known to have written musical notes in place of words in his notebooks. Leonard Cohen has made a living testament out of molding his vision in these eternal modes. What other popular songwriter can you think of who has written acclaimed novels and poetry? His career, now in its fourth decade, leaves a long hieroglyphic river of words, sounds and images that collect at the end of his work and weave around the listener's ears, sparkling with wisdom and accomplishment.

His peripatetic travels have brought him everywhere — his native Canada, Greece, Israel and New York. There is nothing provincial about his sense of place and time. His recurring themes are endless, as well. Eroticism (the giving and the losing), spiritual loss and renewal and visionary political turmoil are his stock in trade. In some ways, what one critic remarked about Cohen falling under the category of "music to slit your wrists to" is true enough. Cohen's vocal register goes from sad to ruminative to really, really, sad. But what works is that it's hypnotic. I have seen many people slowly spellbound when a song of his enters a room, all talking ceases and a hush starts to trickle in between the empty spaces.

Listen to the way Cohen descibes the ethereal erotic healing he found in "Sisters of Mercy":

They lay down beside me / I made my confessions to them / they touched both my eyes / and I touched the dew on their hem ... and it won't make me jealous if I hear that they've sweetened your night / we weren't lovers like that and besides it would still be all right

Or in "Suzanne":

And you want to travel with her / and you want to travel blind / And you know that she will trust you / For you've touched her perfect body with your mind

Cohen's erotics are metaphysical — platonic but never flighty, like his sense of spirit. He keeps both feet firmly on the earth, even as he writes secular hymns filled with beauty and dread.  This may have influenced Cohen's cult following among other artists. Making other people poets is a gift all its own. Cohen's songs have appeared in films by Robert Altman and Oliver Stone and they have been praised or covered by REM, Nirvana, Rufus Wainright, John Cale, Madeline Peyroux and Tori Amos.  The most powerful of these is definately Jeff Buckley's solo version of "Hallelujah." The late, great Buckley took a fine poem with a lame-ass rythmn section and made it a moving, glowing prayer of supernatural acceptance. Cohen is religious in the best sense — skeptical, sublime, but never moralizing, as in "Who by Fire":

And who by brave assent, who by accident / who in solitude, who in this mirror ... who in mortal chains, who in power / and who shall I say is calling?

He once wrote a sparse, devastating retelling of the story of Abraham and Issac — from Isaac's perspective — connecting it to the baleful balance of death and salvation, especially when sung against the backdrop of Vietnam:

A scheme is not a vision ... mercy on our uniform / man of peace or man of war / the peacock spreads his fan.

He has never shed his sense of political drama, even 20 years later, after the upheavals and general disillusionment. Again, he resists moralization and goes farther, deeper into the boil. As in "Democracy":

It's coming through a crack in the wall / on a visionary flood of alcohol / from the staggering account / of the Sermon on the Mount / which I don't pretend to understand at all ... from the homicidal bitchin' / going down in every kitchen / that determines who will serve and who will eat ... Democracy is coming / to the USA

Or his ode to the triumphalist, zealous Reagan '80s, "First We Take Manhattan":

I'm guided by a signal in the heavens / I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin / I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons / First we take Manhattan / Then we take Berlin

Leonard Cohen has never been prolific. It often takes him years to come out with a new album. The reason for this might be that he is working in a totally different sphere. He is a writer who sings, and no one would expect Lorca or Yeats to put out new work with the regularity of, say, Kiss reissues. He deserves to be ranked with the finest of soothsayers, a mystic culling out sacred and profane imagery with the regularity of diamonds.

— Matt Hanson (junglegroove@gmail.com)