The Dying Light

The Flame: Poems, Notebooks, Lyric Poems by Leonard Cohen
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28.00.

Leonard Cohen’s death in November 2016, at the age of eighty-two, prompted the usual media outpouring that greets the passing of any influential artist. 
Many obituaries were fawning, a few were perceptive. Cohen’s songs, pointed out one critic, seemed polished and pared down, unlike those of Dylan—recently anointed a Nobel laureate—which seemed to “pour out” of him. If this is a poetic effect rather than a measure of the craft, it remains a compelling interpretation. Dylan himself said Cohen’s songs were “like prayers.” Suzanne Vega expanded this to “like prayers or spells.”

Writing about death, Cohen was less delicate than his obituarists. His 1956 debut book of poetry, Let Us Compare Mythologies, published when he was twenty-two years old, confronts the subject with a young man’s 
rapturous sensuality:

And do not examine the angry rivers
For shreds of his soft body
Or turn the shore stones for his blood;
But in the warm salt ocean
He is descending through cliffs
Of slow green water.
—From Elegy

Over the years, he peppered his oeuvre with many songs about mortality. From early reworkings of biblical texts in “Story of Isaac” and “Who by Fire” to the looming crescendo of “Avalanche”—based on an earlier poem—to 1984’s graveside hymn “Night Comes On,” he evolved a conversational style of delivery and avoided the typical emotional excesses of threnody. The lyrics of “You Want It Darker,” the title track from his final album, indicate this attitude lasted till the end.

If you are the dealer
I’m out of the game
If you are the healer
I’m broken and lame
If thine is the glory
Then mine must be the shame
You want it darker
We kill the flame

With his last book, The Flame, Cohen blows out the candle on a career that has been long, wavering, intermittently brilliant. Despite publishing around a dozen poetry collections and two novels, he was never able to commit to words without music. In the foreword, his son, Adam, writes, “My father, before he was anything else, was a poet. He regarded this vocation, as he records in his notebooks, as some ‘mission from G-d.’” (The dash echoes the Jewish use of the vowelless YHWH.) Adam quotes Cohen’s confession that “nothing gets me high and offers relief from the suffering like blackening pages, writing,” and believes his father regretted sacrificing so much of his time to folk song and the fame it brought him.

The sixty-three poems that open the book are combined with lyrics from the four last Cohen albums (three as performer, one as producer and writer), scraps and unfinished verses from his notebooks, and Cohen’s drawings and doodles. Themes and motifs recur across the verses and occasional prose pieces: fire and flame imagery; bad love, desperate love; war; exile; America’s reckless power and coming apocalypse; booze; Cohen’s malign influence over others; the poverty of his poems (“I, a second-rater/by any estimation”); biblical and Jewish allusions; death. Tonally, there’s a somberness that might be called deadbeat, down-at-heel, gloom-laden, but it’s usually 
bone-dry. Cohen, often caricatured as a dirge-writer and wrist-slitter, was too sardonic to be mawkish.

I’m slowing down the tune
I never liked it fast
You want to get there soon
I want to get there last
—From Slow

Cohen’s work displays an attitude toward love and desire that is of its time—he was, after all, born in 1934—yet unashamedly personal.

So I can love your beauty now
Though seeming from afar
Until my neutral world allow
How intimate you are
—From I Didn’t Know

Cohen satirized his “ladies’ man” status on several songs and in the title of a 1977 album; nonetheless, you sense he delights in using poetry as a means to charm his readers. Nothing is as seductive as self-deprecation. He also knew, penning these late poems, that he had the seniority to get away with what might otherwise be viewed as a dated male gaze; to be old fashioned is, carefully managed, to be romantic.

There are other qualities that are more like tonal keynotes. In poems and songs alike, Cohen typically opts for the simplest words and shortest lines, driven along on anapests or iambs toward a clinching rhyme:

In the prison of the gifted
I was friendly with the guard
So I never had to witness
What happens to the heart
—From Happens to the Heart

You tore your knees apart
The loneliness revealed
That drew this unborn heart
From chains that would not yield
—From I Didn’t Know

Easy rhythms, a handy prop for songwriting, can feel clumsy and repetitive on the page. It’s as if Cohen is leaving space for a horn or a trumpet, or one of his angelic choruses. But it’s also as if the brevity is a cage, or a tiredness of spirit.

Or is it that I’m hearing things? When we read Cohen we can’t but listen for that famous bass vocal, inimitably deep, as gravelly as that of any legendary smoker (aged eighty, Cohen boasted of returning to “the little Parthenon” of tobacco), and supremely, if self-mockingly, ponderous. Poets who practice the more lucrative arts of singing and songwriting can’t be blamed for giving their readers accidental music. Even those who are genuine wordsmiths—Cohen and Dylan, for sure, but also Joni Mitchell, Jarvis Cocker, Kate Bush, Morrissey—have such familiar and distinctive timbres that their most casual utterance or chance scribble seems to come vinyl-ready.

On the upside it makes the reader feel they are being talked to by a person rather than a poem or abstract “writer.” On the down, it overlays the experience with lingering memories of great songs and of the man and the legend, arguably giving the verses a patina of immortality they might not deserve. Only the very famous can print their doodles and unfinished scraps, and The Flame has something of the sacred text about it—as if every word the great guru penned is worthy of chanting.

If The Flame is uneven and unfinished, that is partly to do with the 
circumstances of its production. The author was in considerable pain and discomfort as he compiled and tidied up his last offerings. It is when he becomes prayerful—in verses about old friends, loved and lost women, facing sickness and death, his father and mother—that Cohen-poet achieves some of the grandeur of Cohen-singer-songwriter.

“Homage to Morente,” one of the longest pieces, in free verse, finds him overwhelmed by admiration for the flamenco singer Enrique Morente: “When I listen to Morente/I know what I must do/When I listen to Morente/I don’t know what to do.” It’s a paradox he returns to time and again: to find in art the impossibility of realizing one’s art. “I dig but I can’t go down.” But through the “mud of hope” and the “blood of the throat”—that is, through the roots music of flamenco and the strains of Morente’s cante jondo—Cohen is reaching out to one of his primal poetic influences: Federico García Lorca. We see Lorca’s ghost in Cohen’s idiolects—his juxtapositions of law and love, flags and feelings—and in the way his poems work through refrains and repetitions, as if we’re being invited to watch the writing process. The very notion of using art to realize one will always fail as an artist is quintessentially Lorcan.

Cohen requested that The Flame include a speech given in October 2011 in Spain, when he received the Prince of Asturias Award. He thanks Spain and recalls his first tentative touches of the guitar, guided by a flamenco virtuoso, and expresses his deepest gratitude to Lorca, who “gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice; that is, to locate a self, a self that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.”

It is, then, perhaps pointless to revisit the songs-versus-poems debate. Cohen’s songs have appeared in his poetry books since “Suzanne” featured in 1966’s Parasites of Heaven (probably as filler). What burns in The Flame is an elderly man’s last efforts not to contain or summarize the self but to declare the right to keep on searching. The self, like every life, is always an unfinished business, and it’s one of poetry’s great deceptions to present itself in books, with stiff dustproof covers and self-important colophons. Cohen, for all the fame and fortune—much of which, anyway, was stolen from him by an unscrupulous manager—evinces more humility than a thousand lesser scribes, and all his love songs have the aching sorrow of failure and truth. He will go down as a romantic of the twentieth century, a troubled troubadour, a truth-seeker who fell back on love, and then got that wrong, too. As he puts it himself, in an untitled, unsung, dateless, unfinished “poem” toward the end of this final collection:

I’m standing here
          in the blinding light
& I don’t know what to do
the blinding light
     of what I lost

when I walked away from you.

This piece originally appeared in The Poetry Review. You can read the other essays in this exchange in the April 2019 issue.